The World’s Greatest and Most Famous Tales of The Western World

Among all Americans and Europeans who are not literature nerds, there are four masterpiece tales that have influenced American and European way of life, even Walt Disney films, Disney World, and Disney Land. Famous films and stories like Snow White and the seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, Cindarella, Aladdin, The Tortoise and the Hare, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Grettel, JAck and the BEanstalk, Fantasia, and Sinbad all come from one of these four tales.

Aesop’s Fables

Fodder for the Warner Brothers Company!

This collection of short stories came from Greece. A Greek slave named named Aesop (Aesopis in Greek) wrote these moral stories for common Greek people back in 500 BC (yes, 2,509 years ago!). The tales are all about animals that can talk and have human personalities. The most famous tale is The Tortoise and the Hare. I remember when the Warner Brothers Company, creator of the “Bugs Bunny” and “Tom and Jerry” cartoon franchises of the 1940s to 1960s to compete with the Walt Disney Company,  made a cartoon skit based on this tale back in the 1950s.

Aesop’s Fables inspired the Warner Brothers Company to create the Bugs Bunny, Mighty Mouse, Under Dog, and Scooby Doe cartoon franchises. These iconic animal cartoon characters, like the animals in Aesop’s Fables, took on human qualities.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Fodder for Walt Disney Company! Yes, the man Walt Disney loved Grimm’s Fary Tales. All those famous tales written by two German brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in Germany back in 1812. Mainly famous European tales, all those legendary Walt Disney films were derived from one of the tales in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

1001 Arabian Nights

Written by a group of Indian, Arab, and Iranian writers, these tales are legend stories familiar to any Indian, Pakistani, Iranian, Bangladeshi, Egyptian, or other Arabs in the world! The setting of the story is in Iran. Of course, Americans know two of the most famous characters from 1001 Arabian Nights: Aladdin and Sinbad. Those Sinbad films from the 1960s to 1970s are classic! And of course Walt Disney’s Aladdin is classic to many young adults and children in America today.

The Metamorphoses

Fodder for European writers of the medieval times and of the Renaissance period. Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Dante Aligheiri, Giovanni Bocaccio, and of course me Shakespeare all wrote our masterpieces based on this collection of Greek and Roman stories written by a Roman man named Ovid (Roman name, Publius Ovidius Naso). The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, The Decameron, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained are all long epic poems that are inspired spin-offs of The Metamorphoses. This collection of Greek and Roman fantasy legends were published in the year 8 (2,001 years ago!) in Italy. But the tales were offensive to the Emperor of the Roman Empire, and Ovid was banished. But the tales were a blessing in disguise.  I save this tale for last as the most famous of the four. 

These four are the most famous short story collections of fantasy in the world, and have been translated to every major language. These four works of literature are the timeless short story collections of the human imagination! Western culture’s imagination of fantasy cannot thrive without these four books.