Once safely past the harvest season, winter begins, bringing with it a storytelling season that begins in November and runs through the end of the year. The Victorians especially delighted in the tradition of telling spooky tales during the darkest nights of the year, a custom that reaches back hundreds of years.
Storytellers today are indebted to early scholars who wrote down local stories and preserved them for future audiences. Without these records, many of our most loved stories would have been lost and forgotten.
Folktales are traditional stories, told by anonymous folk, about ordinary people having extraordinary adventures. Fairy tales are a subset that includes major characters with magical powers such as fairy godmothers, the wee folk, and genies.
Folklore, which includes folk and fairy tales, legends, myths, fables, ballads, rhymes, riddles, jokes, and proverbs, offers a rich menu of ideas to use in your writing. You can retell a traditional tale or include a character from a tale in your own story.
