What's your favourite fairy tales?
 

Are.


Hansel And Gretel





Little Red Riding Hood

A Midsummer Night's Dream

seconded, add alice in wonderland if it counts.

This book is so beautiful

little red riding hood, three billy goats gruff and goldilocks and the three bears where my favourites.

I'd like to add "anything with a witch".

Predictably wanky answer from a predictable wanker: I used to knob a girl whose mother had an encyclopaedic knowledge of fairy tales. She was a professional story-teller. She gave me a book of the Russian ones, which are mostly variants on the ones we know except there's oodles more blood and death. In a similar vein, I had a period of reading Latvian myth, which has a very fairy tale aspect... in fact, scratch that, I generally think any myth is pretty much synonymous with a fairy tale. People get myth confused with some intellectual feat of wankestry when, in fact, nearly all myth is as ridiculous and as poignant as fairy tales.

The Tinder Box.

not fairy tales i guess, but i really like Aesop's fables like The Tortoise and the Hare, The Boy who Cried Wolf among others,

and not really a story at all, but a folk hero of the 19th century, John Henry the Steel Drivin' Man,

What is the difference between a folk story, a fable, a myth or a fairy story? Surely they're all allegorical/ instructional in a mode that's fantastical? This might seem like a rhetorical quesiton, but does anyone want to contradict it?

Mythology is allegorical wisdom told in story form, from which many many layers of wisdom can be gathered through symbolism, historical reference, etc.
Fables are a story intended to portray one specific lesson, ussually a morality lesson. fables are not exactly allegorical.

they really are all similar in fundamental ways but in their details they differ.

fairy tales and folk stories are more in the vein of fables than mythology, although there is crossover.

The difference is that myths are unchangeable and fairy tales can be altered.

the bible is full of both myth and fable..

fairy tales are teutonic in origin.

The Emperor's new clothes.
Snow-White too. Reading it was good after having been fed with images from the Disney team. The pace is so different. And she's much much much younger.

Three little pigs.

maybe peter and the wolf, although i'm not sure if that's considered a fairy tale. i used to have a cassette of that with the music too.

generally speaking just pretty much everything that has dragons, caves, wolves or knights in it. i think i prefered non-fairytales (folk stories, myths) like ali baba, treasure island (pirates, yeah!), william tell (i even made my own crossbow at the time) and tom sawyer, etc when i was a kid.
edit: still do.

Interesting fact: Sting once did the narration for Peter and the Wolf, and it is the only redeeming element to his entire discography.

I confuse fairy tales and fables. I used to confuse Pacino and DiNiro too. I'm confused right now come to think of it.

me too! and i always side with the witch. why is that?!

The Bible.

There's a fairy tale about Daevid Allen?

Didn't you know that he was a baby snatcher?

And he seems so harmless.