Coming soon to a castle near you! Or a tavern.

Or a dung heap.

Angels. Devils. Shapeshifters. Wizards. Heroes. Monsters. Princes.
Paupers. Death.

And a turnip.

Fourteenth century pop culture fans, look out! Storyteller Tim Ereneta is counting down the hottest tales that blazed up the European charts seven centuries ago*. Come hear the mischievous and macabre stories that lit up the Middle Ages.

With the Black Plague outside your door, let's party like its 1349!

* Okay, they didn't really have pop charts in the 14th century, but for the sake of artistic cohesion, I'm pretending that someone, a storyteller, or storytelling aficionado, is keeping tabs of the stories most popular in Europe. Stories from Italy, from France, from Macedonia, from the Holy Roman Empire. Oral stories, of course, since in 1349 there's no such thing as a moveable type printing press in Europe.

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Where you can find the stories:

"The Owl," "The Turnip," "The Ungrateful Son" (that's the one with the toad) can be found in The Brothers Grimm's collection of Household Tales.(Links are to the SurLaLaune Fairy Tales site, which features Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation.

"The Rooster Who Wanted to Be Pope" and "Salpedda (Isabella) and Her Brother" can be found in The Robber with a Witch's Head: More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach, edited by Jack Zipes.

"The Woman Who Married a Snake" can be found at D. L. Ashliman's site of Folktales as "The Water Snake," here.

"Long, Broad, and Sharpsight," can be found at Wikipedia. The 1890 version of A.H. Wratislaw from Sixty Folk Tales from Slavonic Sources can be found online at the Sacred-Texts.com site. It's also available in Andrew Lang's The Grey Fairy Book, and in Ruth Manning-Sanders A Book of Wizards, and translated as "Longshanks, Girth, and Keen" here.

I've put a version of "Aunt Misery" online at Everything2 -- the entry has references for more versions available.