Canadian Fairy Tales

A collection of wonder-filled tales from the Canadian landscape, gathered in the early 1920s from Indigenous storytelling traditions. These are stories where Glooskap the creator speaks birds into being from fallen leaves, where Rabbit outwits giants, and where the land itself seems alive with magic and moral weight. The tales move through forests and lakes of the north, carrying lessons about kindness, courage, and the consequences of cruelty, all rendered with the peculiar beauty of old-fashioned folklore. The opening story sets the tone perfectly: the wicked Wolf-Wind strips the trees bare, and Glooskap transforms the bare branches into birdsong, restoring joy to children and beauty to the world. This is Canadian folklore in its rawest form, steeped in the rhythms of the natural world and the elemental struggle between good and darkness. Readers drawn to myth, to the strange and numinous in everyday places, will find something ancient and alive here. That said, this is a 1922 collection, and modern readers should approach it as a historical document of early folkloric collecting, with all the complexities that entails.