Once upon a time there lived a very good King, whose name was Godfrey. Of course, when a man is King, everybody is ready to call him good; but this King really was good. He used to hold courts of justice for people to co…
Folklore, as it is actually told
Every entry is one telling — a story as one person heard it, from someone, somewhere, in some language. The same tale from two villages is the point.
249Tellings
1Languages
6States
1Translations
Ways in
By place
Where the story was heard, not where it is set.
By language
The language it was told in, before anyone wrote it down.
Newest tellings
There was once a Gardener who had no nose, and he had a very nice garden full of beautiful flowers: roses, and pinks, and lilies, and violets, and all the prettiest flowers you can imagine. Three little boys thought the…
Long, long ago, in the island of Ceylon, there was a large city full of nothing but Goblins. They were all She-goblins, too; and if they wanted husbands, they used to get hold of travellers and force them to marry; and a…
Once upon a time there was a Lion who lived in the mountains, and he used to drink water out of a beautiful lake. It so happened that, as he was drinking there one day, he saw a Boar feeding over on the opposite bank. No…
Once upon a time there was a family of Lions that lived in the Himalaya Mountains in a Golden Cave. They were three brothers and one sister. Near by was a silver mountain with a Crystal Cave, and in this Crystal Cave liv…
There was once a King who was so fond of good eating and drinking that they called him King Dainty. He often spent as much as a thousand pounds on a single dish; which is great wastefulness, when you can dine heartily fo…
Once upon a time there was a beautiful wild Goose that lived in the mountains; he was King of the Geese, and he had a mate and two or three fine young ones. But it had happened once that this Goose, in his travels about…
There once was a young Quail that lived on a farm. When the farmer ploughed up the land, Quailie used to hop about over the clods and pick up seeds, or weeds, or worms, or anything that the plough turned up, and he ate t…
Languages with the fewest tellings
Hindi and English crowding out everything else is the default outcome unless the site actively works against it. These need contributions most — and the ones marked none yet have no telling in them at all, which is usually a gap in what was written down a century ago rather than a gap in what people know.