Once before the world was as it is now, an old man and an old woman tended their sheep and worked at their looms to make a poor living as weavers. The couple was childless and often sighed in regret of an evening when the old man filled his pipe for a smoke and the […]
Far ago and long away a grandmother struggled to raise her granddaughter in a tidy cottage next to the windmill by the canal. One night, after a long day’s sweeping and scrubbing, the grandmother sat by the fire resting while Elsa, the granddaughter, prepared the gruel. A knock on the door sounding as if from […]
Once in a town not far from the palace there lived a baker’s apprentice. She toiled from well before dawn to far after dusk every day. She milked the cow, drew water from the well, chopped wood for the oven fire, gathered berries for pies and tarts, mixed the batters, kneaded and shaped the dough, […]
In the meadow at the edge of a great pine forest a tiny mushroom poked its head out of the ground. ‘I’m a mushroom,’ it said, surprising itself. ‘Why, I can talk. What a marvel! Say, green shoots, have you ever met a talking mushroom?’ The green shoots all around said not a thing. A […]
Ragwen, a California mountain elf maiden, lived comfortably in a set of spacious rooms under three boulders in the meadow. Unfortunately she was just the ornament the giant witch from the land of giants was looking for to display in a cage on the window sill close by the giant witch’s favorite cauldron. I say […]
