Brothers Grimm fairy tales began as German folk tales, passed by word of mouth long before anyone wrote them down. Jacob Grimm was a linguist, his brother Wilhelm an editor, and together they worked as folklorists collecting what people across Germany still remembered.
Their collection, Children's and Household Tales, appeared in 1812 with 86 stories and grew past 200. Here you will find 43 of those tales as free PDFs, along with two complete volumes.
Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin. Pick any one and download it free, with no signup and no limit on how many you take.
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The complete Kinder- und Hausmarchen in one volume, in the classic 1884 Margaret Hunt translation, with the brothers' own notes on where each story came from. Over 200 tales, from the famous ones to the strange short pieces nobody reprints.
A selection of 53 tales in Lucy Crane's translation, with the woodcut illustrations Walter Crane drew for the 1882 edition. The pictures are the reason to pick this one over a plain text collection.
A donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster, all too old to be useful, set off for Bremen to become musicians. They never arrive, and what they find on the way is better than the plan.
A cat and a mouse set up house together and buy a pot of fat to keep for winter. The cat invents three excuses to slip out, and the winter arrives anyway.
The Grimm version, which is not the one the films tell. A hazel tree and a flock of birds do the work of the fairy godmother, and the stepsisters pay for the slipper in blood.
A sparrow finds food for a starving dog, and a wagoner runs the dog down for it. What the bird does next is one of the coldest revenges in the collection.
Three short pieces about elves, including the shoemaker who wakes to find his leather already cut and stitched. This is the source of every version of The Elves and the Shoemaker.
A fisherman lets an enchanted flounder go, and his wife starts sending him back with requests. Each one is larger than the last, and the sea turns a different colour every time.
Also known as The Brave Little Tailor. A tailor swats seven flies at once, embroiders a belt about it, and bluffs his way past two giants, a unicorn and a king.
A poor man with thirteen children asks Death to be godfather to the last one. Death gives the boy the power to see who will live, and the boy uses it twice against orders.
A king's youngest son takes advice from a fox that his two brothers ignored. The advice carries him through a golden bird, a golden horse and a princess, and he ignores it once.
A simpleton shares his lunch with an old man and is given a goose with golden feathers. Everyone who grabs at it sticks fast, and the procession that results makes a princess laugh.
A princess riding to her wedding is forced to swap places with her waiting maid. She ends up herding geese, while her horse's head, nailed above a gateway, keeps telling the truth.
Hans takes seven years of wages in gold and trades it for a horse, then a cow, then less and less. A short comedy about a man who is delighted by every bad deal.
Two children are taken into the forest and left there, and the birds eat the trail of crumbs. The house of bread and sugar is a trap, and the witch is not the worst part.
A wild man is dragged out of a forest pool and locked in a cage, and a boy sets him free and follows him into the woods. Also known as Iron Hans, the tale behind a century of writing on mentors.
An old enchantress turns every girl who comes near her castle into a bird and keeps her caged. Joringel has to find one blood red flower to undo seven thousand cages.
A stepmother murders her stepson and his sister buries the bones under a juniper tree, from which a bird rises singing. The darkest story the brothers ever wrote down, and one of the finest.
A princess mocks every suitor her father presents, so he marries her to the first beggar at the gate. Her new life teaches her the lesson, and the beggar is not who he seems.
A girl falls down a well into another world and works for Mother Hulda, who pays in gold. Her lazy stepsister makes the same trip and is paid in something else.
A farmer plans to shoot his old dog, so the dog and a wolf stage a kidnapping to make him look indispensable again. The partnership does not survive the follow up.
A king sets a peasant girl an impossible riddle, marries her when she solves it, and then throws her out. She is allowed to take one thing with her, and she chooses well.
A queen's son is born able to make any wish come true, and a cook steals him away. The boy grows up in the forest with a carnation that can turn a person into anything at all.
The youngest of three brothers keeps stopping the other two from destroying an anthill, a duck pond and a beehive. When the three of them face three impossible tasks, the animals remember.
An enchantress takes a newborn in payment for stolen greens and shuts her in a tower with no door. The Grimm text is harder than the retellings, and the prince pays for the climb.
A miller promises his daughter to a suitor who keeps insisting she visit his house in the forest. She goes, hides, and sees exactly what he does there.
A miller's boast leaves his daughter locked in a room full of straw she must spin into gold. The little man who does it for her wants her firstborn, and the whole story turns on his name.
A father curses his seven sons in a moment of temper and turns them into ravens. Their sister walks to the sun, the moon and the morning star to find where they were taken.
Twelve princesses wear their shoes to shreds every night behind a locked bedroom door. A discharged soldier with a cloak of invisibility follows them underground.
A witch turns six brothers into swans, and only their sister can change them back. The price is six years without speaking or laughing while she sews six shirts of starwort.
The Grimm version, where the princess is called Rosamond and a hedge of thorns closes over the castle. A hundred years pass, and every suitor before the last one dies in the briars.
Two sisters take in a talking bear for the winter and keep rescuing a dwarf who is rude about it every time. The bear is not a bear, and the dwarf knows why.
The Grimm original, with the mirror, the laced bodice, the poisoned comb and three attempts before the apple. The queen's punishment at the wedding is nothing like the cartoon.
A witch sets out to kill her stepdaughter in the night and kills her own daughter instead. What follows is a chase in which everyone keeps turning into something else.
A poor soldier turns farmer and grows a turnip so enormous he carts it to the king as a gift. His rich brother cannot stand it, and the plan he makes rebounds on him.
Three sons ride out to find the water that will cure their dying father. The two eldest are rude to a dwarf on the road, and that single detail decides the whole story.
A servant tastes the dish his king keeps covered and finds he can understand every animal. He helps three creatures on the road, and all three come back when he needs them.
Two brothers spent their lives writing down what ordinary people told them. Those folk tales outlived the empires around them and became part of world literature.
Looking for more writers like them? Browse the full list of classic authors on the site.
