A commentary on the King of Colchester’s daughters ‘The King of Colchester’s Daughters’, also known by the title ‘The Three Heads in the Well’, is one of England’s oldest native fairy tales. Sharing some plot similarities with more famous tales such as Cinderella and Charles Perrault’s ‘Diamonds and Toads’, it […]
The meaning of one of the oldest fairy tales in the world Iona and Peter Opie, in their The Classic Fairy Tales, call ‘Beauty and the Beast’ the most symbolic fairy tale after Cinderella, and ‘the most intellectually satisfying’. It’s also one of the oldest: we can trace the archetypal […]
‘The Little Match Girl’ is one of Hans Christian Andersen’s most famous fairy tales for children. It is also one of his shortest, running to just a few pages. In any case, below we’ve offered a brief summary of the tale that highlights some of its salient points, before moving […]