African

  • A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller

Egyptian

  • Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor
  • Westcar Papyrus

Antartica is quite unique. It has no indigenous peoples. That doesn’t stop it from having traditions, however, because people do come and go. On the other hand, written works? Anyone know of any?

Here are a couple articles of interest:

Chinese

   Four Great Classical Novels

  • Water Margin by Shi Nai’an
  • Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
  • Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en
  • Dream of the Red Chamber Cao Xueqin

   Other

  • Fengshen Yanyi
  • The Plum in the Golden Vase (or The Golden Lotus)

Indian

  • Mahabharata
  • Ramayana
  • Rigveda
  • Panchatantra by Vishnu Sharma
  • Hitopadesha
  • Baital Pachisi
  • Kathasaritsagara
  • Jataka Tales

Japanese

  • Kojiki
  • Nihon Shoki (The Nihongi or The Chronicles of Japan)
  • The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
  • The Tale of the Heike

Malay

  • Hikayat Hang Tuah

British

  • The Nowell Codex (or The Beowulf Manuscript)
  • The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
  • Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth
  • Matter of Britain (this isn’t more a collection of works than one specific)

Finnish

  • The Kalevala

French

   Matter of France (or Carolingian Cycle)

  • The Song of Roland
  • The Song of William
  • The Doon de Mayence cycle
  • Gormond and Isembart

   Other

  • The Song of the Cid (or The Poem of the Cid)

German

  • The Nibelungenlied
  • Muspilli
  • The Hildebrandslied
  • The Legend of William Tell
  • Urner Tellspiel
  • White Book of Sarnen by Hans Schriber
  • The Tellenlied
  • Kudrun (or Gudrunlied)
  • Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Greek/Roman (Is Greece really European?)

  • Theogony by Hesiod
  • Works and Days by Hesiod
  • The Iliad by Homer
  • The Odyssey by Homer
  • The Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius
  • The Aeneid
  • Matter of Rome (this isn’t more a collection of works than one specific)
  • The Republic by Plato

Icelandic

  • The Volsunga Saga
  • Codex Regius

Irish

Italian

  • The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
  • The Facetious Nights of Straparola by Givoanni Francesco Straparola
  • Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile
  • Divine Comedy

Norse

  • The Poetic Edda
  • The Prose Edda possibly by Snorri Sturlson
  • The Karlamagnus Saga
  • Norwegian Folktales by Peter Christen Asbjornsen
  • The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek
  • Heimskringla by Snorri Sturlson

Portugal

  • The Lusiads

Russian (This has an explanation of why I’m including it as European)

  • Russian Fairy Tales by Alexander Afanasyev

Spanish

  • Don Quixote
  • The Poem of the Cid [Note to self: I have this under Spanish and French – why?]

Welsh

  • Mabinogion (from the Red Book of Hergest)
  • The Welsh Triads (Peniarth)

Ancient Mesopotamia (I’ve begun splitting this one down)

  • The Epic of Gilgamesh
  • Atra-Hasis [Originally listed as Akkadian – still true but just as vague]

Babylonia

  • The Enuma Elish

Persian

  • Shahnameh or The Book of Kings by Ferdowsi

Sumer

Turkish

  • Dede Korkut

Ugaritic

  • The Baal Cycle
  • Legend of Keret

American Indian (aka “Native American”)

Of Unknown/Uncertain Origins

  • The Bible [numerous versions; include the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha]
  • The Seven Wise Masters

General

These are some of the websites and less-specific sources I have found very useful in studying the different types of tales that exist throughout the world. As time goes on I will add more that I either discover or first forgot. If you know of any good ones, let me know!

Mythology

Fairy Tales

Legends
Tall Tales
Folklore
Fables
Religious
Smorgasbord of everything

Other/Unknown (i.e. I don’t know how to categorize these…yet)

Everywhere

  • The Mythology of All Races
  • Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
  • The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer
  • One Thousand and One Arabian Night

The Sources

“We are now buried under an avalanche of manuscripts. We don’t even pretend to read them anymore. We have given up trying. We have reached the saturation point and don’t even know what’s in the books. They could be full of great surprises…What can we do with all these?…Simply to describe them, when they were found, and under what circumstances, would take many hours. You would then know the books were there, but you wouldn’t know what was in them. We can make some generalizations about them. They’re not found as separated documents but in batches – whole libraries turn up. You don’t just find a document here and a document there. There’s a great flood of them, found in great collections, and their value and significance can be gradually appreciated only because what they contain is quite radically different from what we have thought about certain things before…There are not one or two but hundreds of these documents, and they match each other. So what do we do?”

– Hugh Nibley –