Russian Fairy Tales

The forests of old Russia hide stories that Western fairy tales forgot. Here, Baba Yaga flies in a mortar, Koschei the Deathless cannot die, and the Firebird glows with a light that drives men to madness and glory. These are not the polished morals of Grimm or Andersen. They are older, stranger, wilder: tales from a world where wolves speak, where Tsarina swan-maidens trap unlucky princes, where a foolish youngest son can outwit demons through sheer innocence. William Ralston Shedden-Ralston gathered fifty-one stories from the oral traditions of the Russian peasantry, arranging them to show how this ancient folklore echoes the myths of India, Persia, and the Norse North. The result is a portal into a luminous darkness, where love defeats death, where greed destroys, and where the simple always triumph over the mighty. This is folklore before it was sanitized, raw and startling and alive.