Fairy Tales by Mother Goose
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A seventeenth-century writer named Charles Perrault was sometimes called Mother Goose, an imaginary author of fairy tales. His early material was inspired and derived from earlier folk tales that he greatly embellished and improved. The Mother Goose creation was actually based on European popular tradition. She was never identified as an actual person but instead was merely a way of calling attention to popular and rural storytelling. The tales most often ended with a moral, such as: “Good manners are not easy/ They need a little care,/ But when we least expect it/ Bring rewards both rich and rare.”
One of the most popular versions of the long-ago tales was “Cinderella,” and Perrault made several modifications to the original, these including the pumpkin carriage, fairy godmother, and the initial mention of the “glass slippers.”
This collection includes that story, along with other such known favorites as “Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Blue Beard,” and “Puss in Boots,” along with such lesser known fairy tales as “The Ridiculous Wishes,” “Little Thumb,” “Ricky of the Tuft,” “Griselda,” and “Donkey Skin.”
Some of the stories were told similar to the style in which they had been written well more than three hundred years ago, with revisions in the telling over the years.
Listen now and enjoy.
Kuhusu mwandishi
Charles Perrault was born in Paris on January 1628. Son of an upper-class burgeois family, he attended the best schools and became a lawyer in 1651. He wrote Parallels Between the Ancients and the Moderns, which compared the authors of antiquity unfavorably to modern writers, and became a member of the Academie Francaise in 1671. His Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose, published in 1697, gave him great popularity and opened up a new literary genre: fairy tales. Among his most famous versions of fairy tales are "Blue Beard," "Sleeping Beauty on the Woods," "Little Red Riding Hood," "The Master Cat or Puss in Boots," "Cinderella," "Little Thumb," and "Donkey Skin." He died in Paris on May 1703.
John Rayburn, veteran of sixty-two years in broadcasting, served as a news and sports anchor and show host, and his television newscast achieved the largest share-of-audience figures of any major-market television newscast in the nation. He is a member of the Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame.
