Fairy Tales & Folklore Posters & Prints
for classrooms, homeschoolers, and room decor.

Marie-Catherine, Countess d'Aulnoy no commerically available image

Marie-Catherine, Countess d'Aulnoy
b. 1650/51; Barneville-la-Bertran, Calvados, France
d. 1-4-1705

Madame d'Aulnoy, remembered today as the originator of the term “fairy tale” (contes de fées), recorded stories she may have heard in travels to Spain and England, and retold in her famous Paris literary salon.

• The Fairy Tales of Madame D'Aulnoy

Andrew Lang
b. 3-31-1844; Scotland
d. 7-20-1912

Novelist, poet, and literary critic Andrew Lang is best remembered as a historian and anthropologist collecting folk and fairy tales. He did not collect from the oral traditions but rather translated and published others collections.

• Andrew Lang at Amazon

Charles Perrault
b. 1-6-1628; France
d. 5-16-1703

Charles Perrault, by adapting early folk tales, laid the foundations for the fairy tale genre in a book subtitled “Tales of Mother Goose”. His works include Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, and Bluebeard.

• The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

Ali Baba and the story of the Forty Thieves, from the Book of One Thousand and One Nights, tells how a poor man discovers the loot of a band of thieves and takes just enough (“Open Sesame”), the greed of his brother who takes more, and the cleverness of his slave who saves himself by saving the people who stole from thieves.

The Arabian Nights, the story of Scheherazade telling one unfinished story a night for three years, is the frame a collection of stories whose roots can be found in ancient Arabic, Indian, Persian, and Egyptian sources.

Scheherazade is also the inspiration for a symphonic suite by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and a ballet.

Beauty and the Beast captures our longing for good to triumph over evil, for enduring love and virtue to be valued more than gold.

Bluebeard is in the tradition of the one forbidden thing: “Eve, don't eat the apple.”, “Psyche, don't look on his face.”, “Pandora, don't open the box.”

The mythological folklore figure Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox Babe were born in the bitter winter cold (hence blue with cold) logging camps of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Cinderella

There are hundreds of versions of unjust oppression overcome by an attendant spirit and love. The earliest known version is Chinese from c. 860 AD.

• Cinderella ballet
• Cinderella opera poster

In Irish mythology Culann was a smith who was protected by a fierce dog. An unexpected friendly visitor killed the attack dog to save himself and then offered to become Cú Chulainn (“Culann's hound”), to replace the loss.

• Celtic Myths and Legends

The bedtime story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, has been told so often that it lost attachment to its author, Robert Southey, one of the “Lake Poets” and Poet Laureate of England.

Rapunzel was one of the first tales published by the Grimm Brothers in 1812.

A woman, long childless, finds herself pregnant and craving the greens “rapunzel” growing in the walled garden next door. The husband, caught by the old woman gardener as he steals some of the rapunzel (also called rampion), promises her the newborn child, if she will only let him go.

The old woman keeps the girl child “safe” in a doorless, stairless tower. When the old woman wants to visit Rapunzel she would command the girl to “let down her hair”, and the old woman would climb up.

Eventually a wandering prince sees the old woman climbing the long hair and uses the same access to meet and fall in love with the Rapunzel. When the pair are discovered, the enraged old woman pushes the prince out the high window into a bed of thornes that scratch his eyes and blinds him; she also casts Rapunzel out.

The homeless girl, and the now blind, wandering prince, find one another and Rapunzel's tears to joy cure the Prince's blindness. The End.

Rampion is a gourmet salad green - seeds here.

Rumplestiltskin

Rumplestiltskin is a dwarf or goblin who seeks an advantage by playing on the need for feeling important and greed - first the father brags his daughter can spin straw into gold, then the king wants lots of gold, so the girl bargains with a strange little man to fulfill the wishes of both men. What she has to do is give up her first born - but when the time comes the dwarf gives her a reprieve, if she can guess his name.

Rumplestiltskin is first mentioned in an adaption of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Sleeping Beauty, a fairytale classic, has several versions.

The basic theme is a much desired child is cursed because of an oversight by the parents in the invitations to the christening. The slighted fairy dooms the princess to prick her finger on a spindle and die. The good godmothers can only alter the spell so the Princess will fall asleep for a hundred years until a prince awakens her with a kiss. The King decides to eliminate the problem by banning all spinning from the land (this would be a huge hardship in those days - if no one was spinning eventually the kingdom would be without clothing.) Despite the prohibition on spindles, the day arrives when the princess sees an old woman spinning.

Curious about this strange activity, she reaches for the spindle, pricks her finger and falls asleep - as does everyone else in the kingdom. In one hundred years the prince show up, kisses the Sleeping Beauty, awakens everyone, and they all live happily ever after.

• Sleeping Beauty ballet

Snow White

The Snow White story is another common theme in fairy tales: young child loses mother (primary protector), step mother devises a way to remove child from home, child survives and is stronger for the adventure (hero's journey).

In other versions the mirror is the moon, and the seven dwarfs are seven robbers.

The Witch Baba Yaga, the Story of ‘Vassilissa the Beautiful’

Baba Yaga is the wild old woman (Baba means grandmother), mistress of magic and a forest spirit. She flies about in a mortar, steering with a pestle - the imagary of putting together magic potions, and her house is built on chicken legs.

Compare the Baba Yaga with the witch of Hansel and Gretel, or the wicked stepmother of Cinderella.

Bilibin was an influential 20th-century Russian illustrator who was strongly inspired by Slavic folklore. He died during the siege of Leningrad in WWII.