Summaries and Index
I loved these stories as a kid, and came back to them when my daughter was five years old. I was struggling with some overly competitive colleagues at work, and would come home to read to my daughter the inane children's books we had somehow acquired. I wanted to find some way to innoculate both of us against the difficulties I was having, and so I became a bit of a fanatic about exposing her to all the folktales I could find. Of course, after a couple of years of this, she got pretty tired of my campaign and eventually revolted. But for a while at least, we both enjoyed the experience. Folk tales deal with adult issues, but do so in a way to which both children and adults can relate. My daughter is now nearly an adult, and while we don't always agree on how to live our lives, we approach the problem from the same moral framework. I credit this and her general love of reading, to these early experiences.
I compiled this set of folk tale summaries and indexes during the time period in which we were reading the stories. My original goal was to write a book that would make it easier for parents and teachers to find folk tales relevant to a particular theme, such as greed, or to a given geographic area. The basic idea is that if you expose children to multiple views of each theme or area, they will be better prepared to handle the ambiguities associated with adult life. I kept this basic goal, but ultimately, decided it would be better to make the summaries and indexes available via the web. To locate particular stories or the works of particular authors, I've also included author and title indexes.
A couple of caveats... The lengths of the summaries differ. I started out writing very short ones, or using the Library of Congress summaries, and as the project went on, I got more wordy. I also want to make it clear that I can't guarantee that all of the stories are valid folk tales. Most of them presumably are, given the author's descriptions, but a few seem to be more like folk tales in the making.