I stumbled on this thread as I was wasting ti . . er, researching ballad lyrics and had just come across a collection of Danish ballads "Ancient Danish Ballads" By Richard Chandler Alexander Prior (full text can be found online), and it has songs with fairy-tale creatures such as elf-maid and giants and dwarf-kings.

btw, it's hard to resist a song with a character named "Fair Hermeline," especially when she's being impregnated seven time by a dwarf-king.

Seeing this I realised that I have not come across many fairy-tale stories or critters in English ballads. So, I did a search on Mudcat to see what lyrics I could find of that sort, and found nothing (aside from what look to be a bunch of LOTR-inspired parodies) except this thread about how there aren't many fairy-tale stories or critters in English ballads.

So, I guess we'll have to swipe them from the Scandinavians if we want any.

As for the other issues this thread has spawned:

Read "Wordy Shipmates" by Sarah Vowell, a very entertaining book about the American pilgrims.

A book that every folkie should be required to read is "The Battle For Christmas" by Nissenbaum (I hope I spelled that right), which deals with Puritans AND Unitarians (in many senses the original yuppies) and how the former tried to suppress Christmas and how the latter successfully transformed it. Though what they did to give us our modern Christmas is in many ways appalling, the book also drives a stake through the heart of sentimental notions about the older traditions. Extremely well written, too - a regular page-turner.

A book on New England ballads, actually ONE ballad but it mentions others in passing, "The Meetinghouse Tragedy" by Charles Clark.
http://www.amazon.com/Meetinghouse-Tragedy-Episode-Life-England/dp/0874518725

The author uses a song about the collapse of a village meetinghouse as it was being constructed (killing and maiming a number of local men) as a starting-off place for a description of pre-Revolutionary rural New Hampshire life.

Fortunately, he includes a chapter discussing what TUNE it might have been sung to, vital information usually missing from old song books such as the previously mentioned "Ancient Danish Ballads" book.

Frustrating to have a great lyric with a Dwarf-king or Mountain elf-maid in it and no idea what the tune is.

--Bill Brown