Start Extensive Reading with English Fairy Tales: Grimm, Andersen, Aesop

Aesop’s “The Fox and the Grapes” is about 80 words in the V. S. Vernon Jones translation on Project Gutenberg. Grimm’s “Little Red-Cap” is about 1,400 words, and Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” about 1,000. These counts leave out Gutenberg’s notes at the start and end.

Finishing a whole English book is hard. A story of this length can be finished the same day, and most people already know how it goes. 30 free classics for learners describes books one at a time. This post sticks to Aesop, Grimm and Andersen, and says which stories to start with and in which version.

A story you know gives you the plot to lean on

The Vernon Jones “Fox and the Grapes” opens with this sentence.

A hungry Fox saw some fine bunches of Grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high trellis, and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air.

You don’t need to know “trellis”. You knew before you started that the grapes are high up and the fox can’t reach them. Extensive reading means guessing unknown words from what’s around them, and a familiar story gives you the material for those guesses from the first line.

Some of these stories also live on in English phrases. “Sour grapes” comes from this fable.

How long each story is, and what it’s called

A collection may be huge, but you only read one story at a time. Counted story by story, it looks like this.

Story	Title in this book	Book	Words
The fox and the grapes	The Fox and the Grapes	The Aesop for Children	about 140
The tortoise and the hare	The Hare and the Tortoise	The Aesop for Children	about 200
The princess and the pea	The Real Princess	Andersen’s Fairy Tales	about 400
The little match girl	The Little Match Girl	Andersen’s Fairy Tales	about 1,000
Little Red Riding Hood	Little Red-Cap	Grimms’ Fairy Tales	about 1,400
The emperor’s new clothes	The Emperor’s New Clothes	Andersen’s Fairy Tales	about 1,900
Snow White	Snowdrop	Grimms’ Fairy Tales	about 2,400
Cinderella	Ashputtel	Grimms’ Fairy Tales	about 2,600
Hansel and Gretel	Hansel and Gretel	Grimms’ Fairy Tales	about 3,000
The snow queen	The Snow Queen	Andersen’s Fairy Tales	about 12,000

Watch the titles. In Gutenberg’s Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Snow White is “Snowdrop” and Cinderella is “Ashputtel”. The “Snow-White and Rose-Red” in that book is a different story, and it isn’t Snow White.

Andersen’s Fairy Tales has only 18 stories. “The Little Mermaid”, “The Ugly Duckling” and “Thumbelina” aren’t among them. For those, open the much larger Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen. At about 370,000 words, it’s a book to pick single stories from.

Where to start

Here are the average words per sentence in four books.

Book	Stories	Total words	Words per sentence
The Aesop for Children	147	about 27,000	about 17
Aesop’s Fables (Vernon Jones, without the introduction)	about 280	about 37,000	about 25
Andersen’s Fairy Tales	18	about 55,000	about 19
Grimms’ Fairy Tales	a little over 60	about 103,000	about 23

The Aesop for Children has the shortest sentences. Its median fable is about 170 words, longer than the 120 or so in Vernon Jones. “The Fox and the Grapes” is about 140 words against about 80. The children’s version doesn’t pack everything into one long sentence. It explains with several short ones. A shorter story is not always an easier one.

Grimm has shorter stories too. Besides “Little Red-Cap”, there are “Rumpelstiltskin” and “The Frog-Prince”, both about 1,200 words. Some of them repeat their lines. In “Ashputtel”, a dove in the tree sings the same song again.

Andersen’s sentences are shorter on average than Grimm’s, and his stories range from about 400 words to about 12,000. “The Real Princess” and “The Little Match Girl” are at the short end, and “The Snow Queen” is at the long end.

The same story, different English

None of these three began in English. Grimm is German, Andersen is Danish, and Aesop is ancient Greek. How easy the English is depends on the translator or editor.

Here is how the fox’s final line reads in three versions.

• Townsend (about 60 words): “The Grapes are sour, and not ripe as I thought.”
• Vernon Jones (about 80 words): “I thought those Grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”
• The Aesop for Children (about 140 words): “Here I am wearing myself out to get a bunch of sour grapes that are not worth gaping for.”

Grimm is the same. Margaret Hunt’s translation (1884) has all 200 stories in about 285,000 words, and the old forms thou, thee and thy come up about 9 times per 1,000 words. The Grimms’ Fairy Tales above is a text based on the versions by Edgar Taylor, whose first English translation came out in 1823, and Marian Edwardes, and those forms come up about once per 1,000 words. The queen in Snow White says ‘Tell me, glass, tell me true!’ in this one and “Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall,” in Hunt. With far fewer old forms, Taylor and Edwardes is the easier text of the two.

In Andersen, the child’s line in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” changes like this.

• Andersen’s Fairy Tales: “But the Emperor has nothing at all on!”
• Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen: “But he has nothing on at all,”
• Jean Hersholt (1949): “But he hasn’t got anything on,”

Hersholt can be read at andersen.sdu.dk, so a story that stops you in an old translation can be opened there.

The old words in fairy tales

Grimm and Andersen use words you won’t meet in English textbooks. These are some of the frequent ones.

• Thou and thee mean you, thy means your, and whither means “to where”. Whither appears 13 times in Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
• Dwelt is the past tense of dwell, and it means lived. “Hansel and Gretel” opens with “Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter”, where “hard by” means right next to.
• Maiden (a young woman) appears 32 times in Grimms’ Fairy Tales, alas 38 times, huntsman 39 times, miller 38 times, and tailor more than 70 times.

The trades are the cast of these stories. What to look up and what to skip is covered in which words to look up while reading.

Where the story differs from the one you know

The English book doesn’t always tell the story you know from picture books. “Ashputtel” has no fairy godmother, no pumpkin coach and no stroke of midnight. A bird in a hazel tree gives her the dress. To fit the shoe, one sister cuts off her big toe, and blood streams from the other’s heel. In “Little Red-Cap”, a huntsman cuts the wolf open and saves the two inside.

Some of Andersen’s endings are sad. “The Little Match Girl” ends the next morning with the girl frozen to death, and in “The Red Shoes” a girl who can’t stop dancing has an executioner cut off her feet.

One way to read these is to look for where they differ from the picture book you remember.

Reading with children

The Aesop for Children is made for this, and Milo Winter’s pictures are in Gutenberg’s browser version. Half the fables are 170 words or shorter, so reading one aloud at bedtime takes a few minutes. Most end with a lesson.

Grimm and Andersen have the blood and sad endings described above. In “The Juniper-Tree”, a stepmother takes off a boy’s head with the lid of a chest. A parent who reads the story first can choose more easily.

Reading them in ABC George

I make ABC George, a free iPhone and iPad app for reading Project Gutenberg books with a built-in dictionary. It has no ads and no in-app purchases.

The Aesop for Children, the Vernon Jones Aesop, Grimms’ Fairy Tales and Andersen’s Fairy Tales are all on the “Start here” shelf. Hunt’s Grimm and Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen can be found by title with the search in “Discover”, which works without a connection. Your place is saved for each book, so you can read one story, close it, and pick up there the next day.

Press and hold a word and tap “Look up”, and the built-in dictionary answers. A past tense like dwelt takes you to dwell. “Cambridge” in the selection menu opens the Cambridge Dictionary.

In “Chat” view, a story arrives one sentence at a time in speech bubbles, with dialogue on the right. Switching views and getting to your first book are covered in Getting Started with ABC George.