Main Page

Welcome to Wikisource the free library that anyone can improve. Index of Works Index of Authors

Wikisource is an online library of free content publications, collected and maintained by our community. We now have 787,967 texts in the English language library. See our inclusion policy and help pages for information on getting started, and the community portal for ways you can contribute. Feel free to ask questions on the community discussion page, and to experiment in the sandbox.

Featured text "Celtic Fairy Tales" Celtic folk-tales are also the oldest of the tales of modern European races; some of them occurring in the oldest Irish vellums. They include (1) fairy tales properly so-called—i.e., tales or anecdotes about fairies, hobgoblins, &c., told as natural occurrences; (2) hero-tales, stories of adventure told of national or mythical heroes; (3) folk-tales proper, describing marvellous adventures of otherwise unknown heroes, in which there is a defined plot and supernatural characters (speaking animals, giants, dwarfs, &c.); and finally (4) drolls, comic anecdotes of feats of stupidity or cunning:— Notes edited by Joseph Jacobs. HAT Irish man, woman, or child has not heard of our renowned Hibernian Hercules, the great and glorious Fin M'Coul? Not one, from Cape Clear to the Giant's Causeway, nor from that back again to Cape Clear. And, by-the-way, speaking of the Giant's Causeway brings me at once to the beginning of my story. Well, it so happened that Fin and his men were all working at the Causeway, in order to make a bridge across to Scotland; Read on... or see all featured texts.

Main categories Authors By alphabetical order By era By nationality Works By country By genre By subject By type Index of audio recordings

New texts San Tzu Ching (Wang Yinglin, tr. Herbert Allen Giles, 1900) The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë (Emily Brontë, 1908) Matthew Arnold (Leslie Stephen, 1898) The Poets' Chantry (Katherine Brégy, 1912) The Cambridge Natural History, Vol. X.—Mammalia (Frank Evers Beddard, 1902) The Southern Literary Messenger, 1834-1864 (Benjamin Blake Minor, 1905) Indicator Tells Pursuing Police Speed of Automobile (Popular Science Monthly, 1916) A partial listing of some new texts (add)

Collaboration The current Community collaboration is collecting texts related to … WikiProject NARA Recent collaborations: Disney, Domesday survey, Niccolò Machiavelli The current Proofread of the Month is Twilight  (1916) by Julia Frankau. Recent collaborations:Life of Octavia Hill as told in her letters.djvu, Homes of the London Poor, Our Common Land (and other short essays), The Corsair, The Merry Muses of Caledonia, Sawdust and Spangles, Natural History, Mollusca, A Desk-Book of Errors in English, Yule Logs, English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century, Ninety-three, The World's Famous Orations, vol. 6.

Wikisource’s sister projects Wikisource is run by the non-profit Wikimedia, which operates several other multilingual and free-content projects: Wiktionary Dictionary and thesaurus Wikinews Free-content news Wikiquote Collection of quotations Wikibooks Free textbooks and manuals Wikispecies Directory of species Wikipedia The free encyclopedia Wikiversity Free learning materials and activities Commons Shared media repository Meta-Wiki Wikimedia project coordination

Wikisource languages This is the English language Wikisource, which began to collect texts in 2003 and moved to this separate domain in 2005. Wikisource libraries are also being built in many other languages. For information on them, please consult the following resources: Wikisource’s Multilingual Portal • List of Wikisources • News & Announcements • Wikisource – The Free Library