Well, it seemed bad not to feature anything from the classic folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, so here it is. It’s another classic and, as a matter of fact, something that will sound familiar: “The Elves and the Shoemaker”. In truth, Die Wichtelmänner is a set of fairy-tales with one recurring theme: a […]
Thanks to this blog post, I found you a couple more tales to go for this winter. The first one features in Alexander Afanasyef’s collected Russian tales and is called Morozko, or Father Frost. It’s a classic trope, also found in tales about Frau Holle: a personified winter meets two characters and either punishes them […]
Ursula Moray Williams is the author of over 70 children’s novels. Among them, one called Gobbolino, The Witch’s Cat is particularly well known and was published in 1942 with a charming set of illustrations drawn by Williams herself. There have been other editions, including a 70th-anniversary edition, with illustrations by Catherine Rayner. Gobbolino is a […]
This story is a brand new one for the Story Teller magazine project, written by Wendy Eyton, illustrated by Lyn Duncombe, and originally read by Eve Karpf. It’s the story of a mouse falling from the claws of an owl unto a bag of seeds, and then from the branch to the snow when he […]
You enjoyed the issue about the Snow Bear, so I thought I could bring you a couple more tales from the Story Teller magazine project. As it happens for the previous one, I don’t know where this one is taken from: it’s called Yushkin the Watchmaker and the illustrations are by Francis Phillips. In Italian […]
For Christmas Day, I have picked a Norse tale I didn’t get around to doing when I did my East of the Sun West of the Moon series: it’s called “The Cat on the Dovrefjell” and it takes place on Christmas eve. And it has a bear. What more do you need? You can read […]
Yeah, I had to. As you know from my abusing poor Hans Christian Andersen, I’m not very fond of moralistic authors and this applies to Dickens as well, but A Christmas Carol is a delightful Victorian ghost story and there are some beautiful illustrations by Arthur Rackham I haven’t yet been able to show you, […]
It’s not much of a stand-alone tale, more like a Winter Chapter in Michael Ende‘s Neverending Story, a book lot of people talk about and very few people have actually read. The Chapter in question is Chapter XII, The Old Man of Wandering Mountain, and follows Atreyu’s encounter with the Child-Like Empress. Illuminations for the […]
Italo Calvino is one of the most beloved Italian writers of the XX Century. He is mostly famous for a group of three fantastic novels (featuring a Viscount who was cut in half and the two halves kept on living, a Baron who decided he was going to live up on trees, and an invisible […]
Do you remember the Italian illustrator and author who went by Tony Wolf? I already showed you some pictures and told you the story of when the Woodland folks, particularly a couple of mice-ladies, came together in order to weave a winter coat for a couple of deers. The next book in the series follows […]