Original Fairy Tales

Disney is extremely proud to tell everyone that The Lion King was their first original story (althoug this is not completely true). This means that all their previous stories depended on existing stories, tales or books. Here are some of the original tales, read and compare them to the Disney version!

There are also some links to Project Gutenberg, an electronic Library for everyone. If you have other texts in some kind of electronic form, please tell me about it, I'd love to include them here.

The following tales are available:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in plain text from Project Gutenberg.
Cinderella
Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland from Project Gutenberg.
James M. Barrie's Peter Pan in plain text from Project Gutenberg.
Sleeping Beauty
The Little Mermaid
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin

Most fairy tales are quite old, and have been passed by word of mouth by centuries. Therefore, many fairy tales exist in many different versions, depending on where and when they have been written down. The "best" source for them are the German Grimm brothers, who collected a lot of fairty tales and were the first to publish them in a book. This book can be thought of the "canonical" version, because these versions are the ones with the largest print volume.

Still, other versions continue to circulate as everybody can tell who has seen the recent live-action movie of Snow White starring Sigourney Weaver, which is much more cruel than the one above.

Exceptions of this are stories with a definitive source, such as Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland, James Barrie's Peter Pan, or Hans-Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid.

Frank Pilhofer <fp -AT- fpx.de> Back to the Homepage

Last modified: Sun Apr 14 16:09:06 2002