Courtesy of swt.edu Brothers Grimm In the early 1800s brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm set out to preserve Germanic folktales, collecting stories from friends, neighbors, and the ordinary working people who surrounded them. In doing so, they were among the earliest collectors of folktales, and particularly notable as they were among the first collectors to record who told the story to them. First published for adults, the tales in their original form were often dark and capricious, with streaks of cruelty. Once they saw how the tales bewitched young readers, the Grimms, and editors aplenty after them, edited the stories, which gradually got softer, sweeter, and primly moral. The Grimms are now read and loved in more than 160 languages. Hans Christian Anderson Unlike the Grimms, who recorded stories collected from friends, neighbors, and other ordinary people, Anderson invented tales himself, though he used traditional themes and wrote them not in a grand literary style, but in a casual story-telling one. His stories were so popular that many became part of the oral tradition soon after they were published. He produced about one volume a year and was recognized as Denmark’s greatest author and as a storyteller without peer. His tales are often tragic or gruesome in plot. His sense of fantasy, power of description, and acute sensitivity contributed to his mastery of the genre. Among his many widely beloved stories are “The Fir-Tree,” “The Little Match Girl,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “The Red Shoes.” Aesop Aesop is a legendary Greek fabulist. According to Herodotus, he was a slave who lived in Samos in the 6th century B.C. and eventually was freed by his master. Other accounts associate him with many wild adventures and connect him with such rulers as Solon and Croesus. Aesop’s fables were preserved principally through Babrius, Phaedrus, Planudes Maximus, and La Fontaine’s verse translations. The most famous of these fables include “The Fox and the Grapes” and “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Charles Perrault A 17th century retired French civil servant, Perrault was one of the first to record French fairy stories. His book, Histoires ou Contes du temps passé was published in 1697. He recorded such classic fairy tales as “Beauty and the Beast,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Ridinghood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Cinderella.” C.S. Lewis An academic as well as a writer of stories, C. S. Lewis was noted equally for his literary scholarship and for his intellectual and witty expositions of Christian tenets. He is best known for the “Chronicles of Narnia,” a series of allegorical fantasies set in the mythical kingdom of Narnia, including The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and The Silver Chair (1953). He is also the author of The Screwtape Letters (1942, rev. ed. 1961), an ironic treatment of the theme of salvation; Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and That Hideous Strength (1945), outer-planetary fantasies with deep Catholic and moral overtones and many works of literary criticism.