English Fairy Tales

This volume contains forty-three English folk stories and tales. But why call them FAIRY STORIES? One cannot imagine a child saying, 'Tell me a folk-tale', or 'Another nursery tale, please, grandma'. Fairy tales are stories in which occurs something 'fairy', something extraordinary--fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals, or the remarkable stupidity of some of the characters. Many of the tales in this volume are what folklorists call Drolls (a humorous story in which there is a jester or a wag) . They justify the title of