The following books have been instrumental in shaping my (K. C.’s) understanding of fairy tales and why they matter:
“Folk and Fairy Tales” in A Time to Read: Good Books for Growing Readers by Mary Ruth K. Wilkinson and Heidi Wilkinson Teel
Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian
“The Ethics of Elfland” in Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
“The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture” in A Dish of Orts by George MacDonald
“On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, by C.S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper
On Fairy Stories by J. R. R. Tolkien
Our retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” came from Fairy Tales by Berlie Doherty (one of our very favorite fairy tale collections for children—the illustrations by Jane Ray are gorgeous!)
On Reading Fairy Tales