Fairy Tale Map

The map places every tale in the home country of the person behind it: the author who wrote it or, for a folk tale, the collector who wrote it down. Stories we know only from later retellings sit where they come from, which is why Robin Hood is in the United Kingdom and Momotaro, the Peach Boy, is in Japan.

Germany has the most. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm gathered tales in and around Kassel and published them from 1812, Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin among them. Hans Christian Andersen wrote his in Copenhagen from 1835, and Charles Perrault published Puss in Boots in Paris in 1697.

Where a book was written does not decide its place. Washington Irving wrote Rip Van Winkle in Birmingham and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont published Beauty and the Beast in London, yet the map puts them in the United States and France. Oscar Wilde’s tales, also first published in London, sit in his native Ireland.

Countries across the sea, like the United States and Japan, are on the map too. Aesop’s fables sit in Greece, where ancient tradition places him. Every tale is free to read, with no account and no ads, and is retold from an old public-domain text whose title is shown on the tale’s page.