Episode
The Wonderful Birch and Jack and the Beanstalk
- Podcast
- The Three Ravens Podcast
- Published
- May 7, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3921
- Processing state
processed- Canonical source
- https://www.threeravenspodcast.com/
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-three-ravens-podcast-6092563/episodes/the-wonderful-birch-and-jack-and-the-beanstalk/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-three-ravens-podcast-6092563/the-wonderful-birch-and-jack-and-the-beanstalk.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Today's Lang Fairy Tale episode features another pair from the Red Fairy Book: The Wonderful Birch and Jack and the Beanstalk. The Wonderful Birch is a lesser known Cinderella story with some truly bizarre details, a messy timeline, and some fairly eyebrow-raising logic. It's a Russian tale which may not score very highly in our brand new fairy tale ratings... Still, if The Wonderful Birch left us slightly bewildered, we're surely on safer ground with Jack and the Beanstalk? Although it's an English classic fairy tale, the version the Langs chose to include in this collection features a moralising justification for castle-robbing Jack's actions... We discuss the stories and their history and tale types too - and listen out for Martin's Giantess voice, because you might just hear Eleanor dying of laughter in the background! If you are unfamiliar with the Lang Fairy Tales, these seminal collections were assembled between 1889 and 1913 by a married couple, folklorists and translators Nora and Andrew Lang, with most of the work done to compile them completed by Nora, also known as Leonora Blanche Alleyne. Assembled and published in 12 colour-coded "Fairy Books," the corpus the Langs put together included 798 fairy tales from across cultures, many of which had never before been translated into English. They were amongst the most influential books of their time, changing the course of children's literature - although they're hardly just for children, and often deal with quite challenging concepts. Today, purchasing a complete set of the Lang Fairy Books in good condition costs over £4,000 ($5,000+). Thankfully, the collections are all out of copyright, meaning that we can now tell these stories, in podcast form, many for the first time, and share them with a global audience,…