We’ve all heard hundreds of fairy tales in our lives: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Sleeping Beauty. These stories are classics, handed down word of mouth for hundreds of years, but recently it was revealed that in a vault in Regensburg, Germany, there are over 500 fairytales that no one has heard of.

Collected by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth around the same time the Grimm brothers were chronicling the tales we know so well, the wide variety of stories found in the vault include a maiden who escapes the clutches of a witch by transforming into a pond. After the witch lies down and drinks up the pond, the maiden uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch’s stomach. One such story can be read at The Turnip Princess. This incredible discovery also includes local versions of fairy tales we all know and love: Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin.

What makes these fairy tales completely unique is the fact that von Schönwerth was primarily a historian, portraying the tales accurately as opposed to putting a literary gloss on them. The older Grimm Brother, Jacob, once said, “Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [stories] so accurately, thoroughly with a sensitive ear.”

A a professor of language, literature and cultural sciences at the University of Regensburg said about the fairy tales, “”Schönwerth’s legacy counts as the most significant collection in the German-speaking world in the 19th century.”