These Are the Most Popular Fairytales Ever

HANSEL AND GRETEL

Our next tale has little to do with hungers of the heart; it’s all about the stomach. In a time of famine, Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in a great forest by their wicked stepmother. Unable to resist eating pieces of a real gingerbread cottage, the hungry children are captured by the cannibal witch who lives there; in the end, they must shove her into her own fiery oven to escape.

This narrative about the dangers of unwholesome appetite and children’s drive for survival is as morbidly fascinating as a true crime story. Maybe that’s why it’s one of the most frequently visited fairy tales on Sur La Lune Fairy Tales even without any publicity from Disney.

Some scholars believe that the Great Famine of 14th-century Europe inspired the familiar German version of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ recorded by the famous Brothers Grimm some 500 years later. Regardless, this gruesome story is one of the most widely told around the world; variants include ‘The Story of the Bird That Made Milk’ in southern Africa (in which the father is the villain of the piece), the southern Indian tale, ‘Kadar and the Cannibals,’ and our absolute favorite, the Russian folk tales of Baba Yaga, a witch with steel teeth who lives in a house on chicken legs and flies around in a mortar and pestle.