For more than two decades, I’ve been collecting and retelling stories from around the world, and one of my great passions has always been for short stories that dwell in magical realities and the far reaches of imagination.

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Much of my inspiration comes from traditional folk and fairy tales. In gathering them, I have built a collection of many thousands of stories from every corner of the world. It has long been my ambition to bring these together, to create a library of tales that celebrate the voices, places, and peoples who first gave them life.

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One of the main reasons behind this project is the wish to preserve stories that might otherwise be lost or forgotten. In preparing these retellings, I have made every effort to adapt each story for the modern reader with sensitivity and care, while remaining true to the original spirit and rhythm of the tale. I do not seek to comment upon or appropriate the cultures from which these stories arise. Instead, I hope readers will see my work as part of an ongoing effort to preserve and share them, always with respect for their origins. Each story includes attribution information together with historical notes.

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Folktales, legends, and myths are among the oldest and most intricate storytelling traditions in the world, shaped across centuries by oral memory, bardic recitation, and the pulse of languages whose cadences still echo through our world today. Long before such tales were written down, they were sung in courts, whispered by firesides, and carried from valley to valley by travellers and shepherds. The bards and storytellers wove local history and myth into one continuous fabric, ensuring that every valley, lake, and village might hold a fragment of the sacred or the uncanny.

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These tales form a bridge between the everyday and the otherworldly, where farmers, saints, princes, and shapeshifters tread the same small roads. The supernatural is rarely distant; it lies just beneath the soil, behind the mist, or within the fold of a mountain. Stories the world over, with their dreamlike transformations and tangled destinies, sit alongside rustic parables of wit and luck as ghostly encounters on lonely paths, and playful trickster tales from the hearth.

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What makes storytelling remarkable is its clarity of voice and unshakable sense of place. Every tale feels anchored in real earth and weather, in the smell of peat smoke and the sound of rain on slate. Even when the stories wander into dream or enchantment, they never lose sight of the human heart at their centre. 

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In this balance of the magical and the human lies the true genius of storytelling. The miraculous and the mundane coexist without strain, each illuminating the other. A ploughman may dine with fairies and return before dawn to milk his cows. A king may lose his crown to a trickster’s riddle, or a ghost may appear not to frighten but to forgive. In their luminous clarity and emotional honesty, folktales remind us that magic is never far away. It lives quietly in courage, in compassion, and in the steadfast telling of the story itself.

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Together, these stories form a cultural treasure trove, layered, expressive, and timeless. They are the memory of a nation spoken aloud, and shaped by countless voices across generations. To read or hear them is to enter a living conversation that stretches from the firesides of the past to the page or screen before you now. In that conversation, the peoples of the world, its poets, farmers, wanderers, and dreamers, speak as one, each voice adding a note to a song that never quite ends.

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These stories were first told by the glow of the hearth, as lessons and as legacies, as warnings and as wonders. They are part of who we are, witches, warts, fantastic beasts, and all. They can be dark or tender, fierce or joyful, but always they remind us that to be human is to tell stories.

I have loved gathering and shaping these tales for you. I hope, as you read them, that you feel some of that same joy and connection.

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Clive
Bath, UK