Folk Myths

A clever giant's wife helps him scare away a bully of a giant in this old Irish tale. When the meanest, toughest giant of them all comes to bully her husband, his wife needs to get creative and fast. Will they work together to trick the other giant into leaving them alone for good?

Mi Pa is a frog. All she could ever want is to meet and marry the prince. But what happens when her wish comes true? When her new husband must fight for the crown, she must find a way to help him. Will she be able to help her prince become the king’s heir?

Join a cat who loves to wear boots as he tries to buy a new pair of shoes at the Sixpence Shoe. When he accidentally tries on a pair of magic boots, he is transported far away! Now he must find his way back with the help of all your favorite fairy tale characters. Will he ever be able to buy a new pair of boots?

When your fairy godmother is the most proper person in the entire kingdom you had better be on your best behavior, especially if you want dessert! What’s a girl with an itchy nose to do? Until she learns proper sneezing manners, she can’t have any cake. Of course, this isn’t just any cake—it’s the best chocolate cake in the entire kingdom. Perhaps there’s a spell book around that can help.

The humans are freezing during a cold winter and have no fire to warm themselves. They ask Coyote for help! Under the leadership of a Coyote, all the animals of the forest band together to steal fire from three wicked sisters and deliver it to humans in this tale from the Pacific Northwest. Can he defeat the skookums or will they continue to keep the fire all to themselves?

Long ago a trickster rabbit cheated other animals in order to become more elegant. What happened when the other animals caught on? Find out in this tale from Uganda. The rabbit wants the fox’s tail, the fish’s scales, the bird’s feathers, and the leopard’s spots and greedily tosses away one feature for the next.

What do soldiers, spirits, singing, and winged horses have in common? They all played a role in how the Mongolian horsehead fiddle, or morin khuur, came to be! Follow along with a Mongolian soldier named Khökhöö Namjil as he finds a way to balance his duties with his desire to see his wife.

In this Indian tale, a wise mathematician named Sessa invents the game of chess to amuse the king and requests a single grain of wheat as his reward for the first square of the chessboard, double that the following day for the second, and so on. In the end, Sessa gets the real reward he wanted all along – a wiser and more mathematical king.

For months, there's been no sign of Alex's sister, whom she fought so desperately to rescue. She's disappeared without a trace. A werewolf is stalking Alex's once sleepy Southern town. People are dying, and Alex thinks she knows the reason: her refusal to give in to Valkos. The growing body count is a warning. He is trying to break her, and now neighboring packs - once allies - are convinced that she is a risk that needs to be eliminated before she's broken.

Prince Liam. Prince Frederic. Prince Duncan. Prince Gustav. You remember them, don't you? They're the Princes Charming, who finally got some credit after they stepped out of the shadows of their princesses Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, and Briar Rose to defeat an evil witch bent on destroying all their kingdoms. But alas, such fame and recognition only last so long.

Four Jack Tales from the Appalachian oral tradition, recorded by a nationally accalimed storyteller. In this collection, Jack has a little trouble adjusting to the workaday world and to personal financial management. Eventually he works hard enough, but his fortunes do not seem to parallel his productivity. Jack finally has to go a bit out of his way to prove himself, meanwhile dealing with a prospective father-in-law who plays hard to get.

When people die, do they leave part of themselves behind? Throughout history, people have heard and seen ghostly evidence of a world beyond the grave. Learn about a doomed English queen, a creepy talking doll, and a shape-shifting wolf. Then whistle past the graveyard if you dare.

Kaya, raised in the undersea, high-tech world of Atlantis, has always been fascinated by the legends about life above the water. Despite the government’s insistence that they’re only stories, she can’t help but dream about the Sun People - and when a group of officials known as Erasers move to bury those legends for good, Kaya sets out to the surface to uncover the truth once and for all.

A classic fable from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, read by Johnny Morris. Have you ever wondered how and why the animals came to be as they are? In these magical tales, drawn from stories he heard as a child in India as well as on folk traditions he later collected all over the world, Rudyard Kipling gives some wonderfully imaginative explanations.

This live recording could not be more fun! A seasoned storyteller who loves rhythm and song joins with a traditional musician playing instruments ranging from mountain dulcimer to a cardboard box drum to create multicultural magic. The stories come from Siberia, the Makah tradition of Alaska, Cajun Louisiana, Palestine, the British Isles, and the American South.

World Tales of Wisdom and Wonder is a collection of folktales told in a weave of poetry, prose, original melody, and guitar. Drawn from cultures around the globe, these colorful tales offer a leap into fantasy and some homespun wisdom passed down through the oral tradition.

When the animals all get together in the jungle, they discover that the noise that they have been making is indeed music. Dylan Pritchett weaves a tale that helps us disover that we all have music inside just waiting to come out. Illustrated by Erin Bennett Banks.

The children who populate these classic stories are heroes and heroines of timeless tales. Their unpredictable antics confound evil and treachery at every turn and leave listeners of generation after generation transfixed and uplifted. A forced marriage. A dangerous job. A horrible assignment. "Character-building experiences," we quip. And that's the truth. Painful as the truth may be, we cannot achieve our potential without facing force, danger, and horror head-on.

You know the tale of poor Little Red Riding-hood, that the Wolf deceived and devoured, with her cake, her little butter can, and her grandmother? Well, the true story happened quite differently, as we now know. First of all, the little girl was called and is still called Little Golden-hood; secondly, it was not she, nor the good grand-dame, but the wicked Wolf who was, in the end, caught and devoured.

In this story from Peru, we meet a baker who is so stingy that he wants to charge people just for smelling his baked goods. When the baker takes his case to court, the wise judge decides to teach the greedy man a well-deserved lesson. Illustrated by Tom Wrenn.