Classic Folklore Tales: Twenty Traditional Tales from Village, Hearth and Hillside

E. B. Kinloch is the editorial voice behind Kinloch House Classics, an independent press dedicated to preserving the magic of public-domain literature. Specializing in thoughtfully themed anthologies—from ghostly tales and early science fiction to classic mystery and folklore—Kinloch House Classics pairs original, uncompromised texts with clean, contemporary design for today's readers.

Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916) was an Australian-born folklorist, historian, literary critic, and editor who became one of the foremost English-language popularisers of traditional tales. Educated at Sydney and at St John’s College, Cambridge, he served as editor of the journal Folk-Lore before settling in the United States as revising editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia. His celebrated collections—including English Fairy Tales, More English Fairy Tales, Celtic Fairy Tales, More Celtic Fairy Tales, and Indian Fairy Tales—combined rigorous comparative notes with a brisk, colloquial prose style shaped for reading aloud, establishing the standard English versions of tales such as “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “The Three Little Pigs.”

Thomas Crofton Croker (1798–1854) was an Irish antiquary and folklorist whose work helped inaugurate the modern field-collection of oral legends in the British Isles. Born in Cork and long employed as a clerk at the Admiralty in London, he spent years walking the south of Ireland to record local traditions, songs, and customs. His landmark collection Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, first published in 1825, was admired by Sir Walter Scott and translated into German by the Brothers Grimm. Croker’s other works include Researches in the South of Ireland and Legends of the Lakes, which preserved Munster folk belief with humour and local colour.

Sir George Webbe Dasent (1817–1896) was an English scholar, translator, and civil servant whose translations brought Scandinavian folklore and Icelandic saga literature into the mainstream of Victorian reading. Born on the Caribbean island of St Vincent and educated at King’s College London and Oxford, he formed a decisive friendship in Stockholm with the philologist Jacob Grimm, who encouraged him to study Old Norse and Norwegian popular tradition. His major translations include The Prose or Younger Edda, Popular Tales from the Norse (from the Norwegian collections of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe), The Story of Burnt Njal, and Tales from the Fjeld.

Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929) was an English novelist and folklorist who lived for more than two decades in British India, chiefly in the Punjab, where she worked as an inspectress of schools and gathered oral traditions from village tellers. With the folklorist Richard Carnac Temple she published Wide-Awake Stories, later reissued as Tales of the Punjab: Told by the People, one of the richest nineteenth-century English collections of North Indian folk tales. Her other books include the historical novel On the Face of the Waters, set during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, From the Five Rivers, and the widely used household manual The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook.

Wilhelm H. I. Bleek (1827–1875), born Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek in Berlin, was a German linguist and folklorist whose pioneering research in southern Africa laid the foundations for the modern study of Bantu and Khoisan languages. After arriving in Natal in 1855, he served in Cape Town as curator of Sir George Grey’s library. His comparative grammar of South African languages introduced the term “Bantu” to philology, while Reynard the Fox in South Africa; or, Hottentot Fables and Tales (1864) brought Khoekhoe animal fables to European readers. With his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd he later created the celebrated Bleek and Lloyd archive of ǀXam language and folklore.

Elizabeth W. Grierson (1870–1943), born Elizabeth Wilson Grierson on a sheep farm in the Scottish Borders, was a Scottish author and collector of traditional tales and ballads for younger and family readers. Drawing on the Border lore of her childhood in Teviotdale and her years as a parish and Sunday-school worker in Edinburgh, she published a series of widely read volumes on Scottish history, legend, and hagiography. Her best-known books include The Scottish Fairy Book, The Book of Celtic Stories, Tales from Scottish Ballads, and Children’s Tales from Scottish Ballads, valued for their clear narrative pacing and fidelity to northern tradition.

Lal Behari Day (1824–1892) was a Bengali journalist, Christian minister, educator, and folklorist whose English-language writings offered vivid portraits of rural life and oral storytelling in nineteenth-century Bengal. Born in the Burdwan district and educated under Alexander Duff at the General Assembly’s Institution in Calcutta, he later served as Professor of English at Berhampore and Hooghly Mohsin College. His prize-winning novel Govinda Samanta (later reissued as Bengal Peasant Life) documented the daily routines of a Bengali farming family, while Folk-Tales of Bengal (1883), gathered from village elders and women storytellers, preserved traditional Bengali wonder and comic tales for an international readership.

W. R. S. Ralston (1828–1889), born William Ralston Shedden-Ralston in London, was an English scholar, translator, and folklorist who played a central role in introducing Russian literature and oral tradition to nineteenth-century Britain. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he served for more than twenty years in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum and became a close correspondent of Ivan Turgenev, whose novel Liza he translated into English. Ralston’s major works include Krilof and His Fables, The Songs of the Russian People, Russian Folk-Tales (also issued as Russian Fairy Tales), and Early Russian History, and he served as a founding vice-president of the Folklore Society.

Charles F. Lummis (1859–1928), born Charles Fletcher Lummis in Massachusetts, was an American journalist, ethnographer, photographer, librarian, and preservationist closely associated with the American Southwest and southern California. In 1884–1885 he walked from Cincinnati to Los Angeles, later recounting the journey in A Tramp Across the Continent. After living for several years at Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico, he published The Land of Poco Tiempo and The Man Who Married the Moon, and Other Pueblo Indian Folk-Stories (1894). Lummis also edited Land of Sunshine (later Out West), served as City Librarian of Los Angeles, and founded the Southwest Museum.

Wirt Sikes (1836–1883), born William Wirt Sikes in Watertown, New York, was an American journalist, folklorist, and diplomat. After working as a newspaper reporter and storyteller in Chicago and New York, he moved to London and in 1876 was appointed United States Consul at Cardiff by President Ulysses S. Grant, a post he held until his death. Travelling widely through South and North Wales, he studied Welsh customs, superstitions, and oral traditions first-hand. His principal books, British Goblins: Welsh Folk-Lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions (1880) and Rambles and Studies in Old South Wales (1881), remain standard Victorian accounts of Cambrian lore.

Robert H. Nassau (1835–1921), born Robert Hamill Nassau in Pennsylvania, was an American physician, Presbyterian missionary, and ethnographer who spent forty-five years in Equatorial West Africa, chiefly in Gabon and the Ogowe region. Educated at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, he learned the Benga, Mpongwe, and Fang languages and recorded extensive observations of Central and West African religious practice, custom, and oral narrative. After returning to the United States in 1906, he published Fetichism in West Africa (1904), Where Animals Talk: West African Folk Lore Tales (1912), and In an Elephant Corral, preserving dozens of traditional animal and household tales.

Francis Hindes Groome (1851–1902) was an English folklorist, Romani scholar, and reference editor. The son of the Archdeacon of Suffolk, whom he commemorated in Two Suffolk Friends, Groome studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before travelling among Romani communities in Britain and on the Continent and settling in Edinburgh as a sub-editor for W. and R. Chambers, contributing to Chambers’s Encyclopædia, the Dictionary of National Biography, and the Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland. A co-founder of the Gypsy Lore Society, he published In Gipsy Tents (1880), the novel Kriegspiel, and Gypsy Folk-Tales (1899), a landmark comparative study and collection of Romani oral narratives.

Rev. John Gregorson Campbell (1836–1891) was a Scottish Gaelic folklorist and Church of Scotland minister whose fieldwork ranks among the most faithful records of nineteenth-century Hebridean oral tradition. Born at Kingairloch in Argyll and educated at the University of Glasgow, he served for thirty years as parish minister of Tiree and Coll in the Inner Hebrides, taking down stories, ballads, charms, and beliefs directly from Gaelic-speaking crofters and fishermen. Much of his collection was published in the volumes The Fians (1891), Clan Traditions and Popular Tales of the Western Highlands and Islands (1895), Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900), and Witchcraft and Second Sight (1902).

Thomas Frederick Crane (1844–1927) was an American folklorist, medievalist, and scholar of Romance languages. Educated at Princeton, he joined the founding faculty of Cornell University in 1868, where he served for decades as Professor of the Romance Languages and Literatures and later as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. A co-founder of the American Folklore Society, Crane brought comparative scholarship to both medieval Latin exempla and European oral narrative. His major books include Italian Popular Tales (1885), which introduced English readers to regional Italian folk tales, The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry, and Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century.

Marjory Wardrop (1869–1909), born Marjory Scott Wardrop in London, was an English scholar and translator whose work opened Georgian literature and folklore to the English-speaking world. Encouraged by her brother, the diplomat and scholar Sir Oliver Wardrop, she mastered the Georgian language and travelled through the Caucasus in the 1890s. At twenty-four she published Georgian Folk Tales (1894), the first English translation of Georgian oral stories, followed by a verse translation of Ilia Chavchavadze’s poem The Hermit (1895) and her lifelong work on Shot’ha Rust’haveli’s twelfth-century national epic The Man in the Panther’s Skin, published posthumously in 1912; the Wardrop foundation at Oxford honours her memory.

Mary Frere (1845–1911), born Mary Eliza Isabella Frere in Gloucestershire, was an English author and folklorist whose work inaugurated the field collection of Indian oral tales in English. In 1865–1866, while accompanying her father, Sir Bartle Frere, then Governor of Bombay, on an official tour across the Deccan, she recorded stories told by her Goan ayah, Anna Liberata de Souza. Published in 1868 with illustrations by her sister Catherine as Old Deccan Days; or, Hindoo Fairy Legends Current in Southern India, the volume went through multiple editions and was translated into several languages, inspiring later collectors across South Asia.