Review: Favorite Folktales from Around the World

Reading mythology was what really got me into fantasy. It was fun reading all these different and unique stories. I don't read much mythology any more, but recently I picked this book off my bookshelf, edited by fantasy author and folklorist Jane Yolen. This collects a wide variety of stories from around the world, organized in 13 sections based on subject matter, for instance Death, Telling Tales, Shapshifters, and others. Yolen did her best to avoid the most well-known folktales and instead going for more obscure variants. Instead of the Frog Prince, we have the story of the Toad Bridegroom from Korea, which has a similar structure but is a very different story. Several of the stories are also similar to each other. For instance, the Italian story of Catherine the Sly Country Lass and the Russian tale of the Clever Little Girl involve several similar situations, but each manages to give a unique twist to what happens. Yolen has also tried her best to capture the unique flow of various storytellers who tell their story. In some cases this makes the stories a bit hard to understand, but generally it makes each story seem real, like something someone would tell their kids or friends or to entertain the patrons of some inn on a rainy and windy night. I also liked that the stories come from a diverse background (although there are a lot of European folktales, and I wish there was at least one Maori story included), although with some stories (particularly the Yakuts story "The Little Old Woman with Five Cows") where the cultural gap is too wide for me to really understand it.

I particularly like the short, punchy stories, the ones little more than clever riddles or jokes. They were often funny or wise or just plain fun to read. The longer more heroic stories were also cool though, and they really captured my interest and attention.

All in all, I really liked this collection. It makes me want to read more collections of folktales and mythology. I'm definitely going to keep it so I can eventually read it to my children.

Next post: Firebirds, a short story collection for "young adults"