Stories

Classic stories to read on any screen: folk tales from India — Jataka birth-stories of the Buddha, fables from the Panchatantra and tales told in Kashmir, the Deccan and the Punjab — English nursery tales such as Jack and the Beanstalk, the Three Little Pigs, Tom Tit Tot and Tattercoats, Irish, Scottish and Welsh tales such as Guleesh and The Field of Boliauns, and the best-known fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Each is the complete printed text of a public-domain edition, with a reading time and the editor’s own note on where it came from. Search and filter the library by kind of tale and length, keep stories on your shelf, and pick up where you left off. The reader lets you choose the page colour, typeface, size and spacing, turn pages full screen, bookmark, highlight and add notes, find words, look a word up and keep it in your own word list for Flashcards, and have the story read aloud — all kept on your device.

The Indian tales are from Indian Fairy Tales, selected and edited by the folklorist Joseph Jacobs and published in London by David Nutt in 1892, with pictures by John D. Batten. Jacobs gathered them from the Jatakas, the Panchatantra, the Katha-Sarit-Sagara of Somadeva, and from collectors of his day such as Flora Annie Steel, Richard Temple, Mary Frere and J. Hinton Knowles. His note on each story’s source is printed beneath it.

The English tales are from English Fairy Tales, collected by Joseph Jacobs and published by David Nutt in 1890 — tales he gathered from chapbooks, nursery-rhyme collections, folklore journals and people who told them to him; his note on each is printed beneath it. The pictures of that book are not reproduced here.

The Celtic tales are from Celtic Fairy Tales, selected and edited by Joseph Jacobs (David Nutt, 1892), from Irish manuscripts and from collectors such as Douglas Hyde, Lady Wilde and J. F. Campbell; his note on each is printed beneath it. They keep the Irish country speech of their tellers.

Jacobs followed each book with another: More English Fairy Tales (1894), with The Pied Piper, The Buried Moon and The Wise Men of Gotham, much of it written down by the folklorists Marie Balfour and Alice Gomme from people who told the tales to them; and More Celtic Fairy Tales (here in its 1895 printing), with tales from Douglas Hyde, J. F. Campbell and Thomas Crofton Croker. A tale is left out when its rights cannot be confirmed everywhere, as with one in More Celtic whose writer’s dates are not recorded.

The Grimm tales are the English translation of the Brothers Grimm’s Household Tales by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes — the version that first made these stories known in English.

These are the texts as printed: nothing is shortened, modernised, retold or written by us. That keeps them honest to their sources, and it means some words and attitudes are those of the 1800s. The Indian tales keep the spellings of their time, such as Brahman and Raja, and the English tales keep their country speech (“Darter,” says she).

Jacobs’ five books are in the public domain: he died in 1916 and John D. Batten in 1932, and every writer whose version he printed in the two More books had died by 1949 (Douglas Hyde, the last). The Grimm tales are Edgar Taylor’s translation (he died in 1839) as revised by Marian Edwardes and published by 1912, which is in the public domain in the United States; her dates are not recorded, so we have not confirmed its status in every country.

These are folk tales, not modern picture books: a wolf may eat a lamb and a trickster may be punished. Each page shows how long it takes to read, so you can choose a short fable for bedtime and save a longer tale for another day. Children’s reading, under Text and page, sets larger, clearer text and bigger pictures, and Listen reads the story aloud with each word marked as it is spoken.

Yes — each is the complete text of the story as printed in its edition, with only the line breaks changed.

Not for the classic tales: they are part of the site, and once it has been opened, pages you have visited stay available if your connection drops. Stories written for ToolsDev come from our server; one you have opened is kept on this device.

Yes. The texts and Batten’s pictures are in the public domain. Use the page’s address to share it.

Only in this browser on this device: they are never sent anywhere and there is no account to sync them. They are included in Export my data and removed by Delete everything on the Your data page.

Select a word, choose Define, then Add to your words. Your words are listed on this page with their meaning and the sentence you met them in; Download for Flashcards saves them as a CSV that the Flashcards tool (Add and import), Anki or Quizlet open as cards — word on the front, meaning and sentence on the back.

Listen uses your browser’s own speech voices. Most work on the device; voices marked “online” are spoken by the browser maker’s service, which receives the text being read. Nothing autoplays — reading starts only when you press it.

Stories written for ToolsDev, Hindi ones included, appear at the top of this page as they are published, each credited to its writer. We will not machine-translate a classic tale and present it as the original.