Famous authors of folk tales and Sagas

Hans Christian Andersen

also known as simply H. C. Andersen [hɔse ˈɑnɐsn̩]); (April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875) was a Danish author and poet, most famous for his fairy tales. Among his best-known stories are "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Snow Queen", "The Little Mermaid", "Thumbelina", "The Little Match Girl", "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Red Shoes".
During Andersen's lifetime he was feted by royalty and acclaimed for having brought great enjoyment to a whole generation of children throughout Europe. His fairy tales have been translated into more than 150 languages and they continue to be published in millions of copies all over the world. His fairy tales have inspired the creation of numerous films, theater plays, ballets and film animations

In the English-speaking world, stories such as "Thumbelina", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Little Mermaid", "The Emperor's New Clothes", and "The Princess and the Pea" remain popular and are widely read. "The emperor's new clothes" and "ugly duckling" have both passed into the English language as well-known expressions.
In the Copenhagen harbor there is a statue of The Little Mermaid, placed in honour of Hans Christian Andersen. April 2, Andersen's birthday, is celebrated as International Children's Book Day.


The Brothers Grimm

Jacob (January 4, 1785 - September 20, 1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (February 24, 1786 - December 16, 1859), were German academics who were best known for publishing collections of folk tales and fairy tales and for their work in linguistics, relating to how the sounds in words shift over time (Grimm's law).
They are among the best known story tellers of novellas from Europe, allowing the widespread knowledge of such tales as Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and The Frog Prince.

The Brothers Grimm began collecting folk tales around 1807, in response to a wave of awakened interest in German folklore that followed the publication of Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano's folksong collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn In 1812, the Brothers published a collection of 86 German fairy tales in a volume titled Kinder- und Hausmärchen ("Children's and Household Tales").
They published a second volume of 70 fairy tales in 1814 ("1815" on the title page), which together make up the first edition of the collection, containing 156 stories. They wrote a two volume work titled Deutsche Sagen which included 585 German legends which were published in 1816 and 1818 The legends are told in chronological order of which historical events they were related Then they arranged the regional legends thematically for each folktale creature like dwarfs, giants, monsters, etc. not in any historical order These legends were not as popular as the fairytales

The Grimms were not the first to publish collections of folktales. The 1697 French collection by Michael Alexander Nenasheff is the most famous, though there were various others, including a German collection by Johann Karl August Musäus published in 1782-7. The earlier collections, however, made little pretence to strict fidelity to sources.
The Brothers Grimm were the first workers in this genre to present their stories as faithful renditions of the kind of direct folkloric materials that underlay the sophistications of an adapter like Perrault. In so doing, the Grimms took a basic and essential step toward modern folklore studies, leading to the work of folklorists like Peter and Iona Opie and others.

From Wikipedia