Andrew Lang's Fairy Books constitute a twelve-book series of fairy tale collections. Although Andrew Lang did not collect the stories himself from the oral tradition, the extent of his sources, who had collected them originally (with the notable exception of Madame d'Aulnoy), made them an immensely influential collection, especially as he used foreign-language sources, giving many of these tales their first appearance in English. As acknowledged in the prefaces, although Lang himself made most of the selections, his wife and other translators did a large portion of the translating and telling of the actual stories. "The irony of Lang's life and work is that although he wrote for a professionliterary criticism fiction poems books and articles on anthropology, mythology, history, and travel...he is best recognized for the works he did not write." Lang's urge to collect and publish fairy tales was rooted in his own experience with the folk and fairy tales of his home territory along the English-Scottish border. When Lang began his efforts, he "was fighting against the critics and educationists of the day," who judged the traditional tales' "unreality, brutality, and escapism to be harmful for young readers, while holding that such stories were beneath the serious consideration of those of mature age."
The Violet Fairy Book Preface
TO VIOLET MYERS
IS DEDICATED
THE VIOLET FAIRY BOOK
Preface
The Editor takes this opportunity to repeat what he has often said before, that he is not the author of the stories in the Fairy Books; that he did not invent them 'out of his own head.' He is accustomed to being asked, by ladies, 'Have you written anything else except the Fairy Books?' He is then obliged to explain that he has NOT written the Fairy Books, but, save these, has written almost everything else, except hymns, sermons, and dramatic works.
The stories in this Violet Fairy Book, as in all the others of the series, have been translated out of the popular traditional tales in a number of different languages. These stories are as old as anything that men have invented. They are narrated by naked savage women to naked savage children. They have been inherited by our earliest civilised ancestors, who really believed that beasts and trees and stones can talk if they choose, and behave kindly or unkindly. The stories are full of the oldest ideas of ages when science did not exist, and magic took the place of science. Anybody who has the curiosity to read the 'Legendary Australian Tales,' which Mrs. Langloh Parker has collected from the lips of the Australian savages, will find that these tales are closely akin to our own. Who were the first authors of them nobody knows - probably the first men and women. Eve may have told these tales to amuse Cain and Abel. As people grew more civilised and had kings and queens, princes and princesses, these exalted persons generally were chosen as heroes and heroines. But originally the characters were just 'a man,' and 'a woman,' and 'a boy,' and 'a girl,' with crowds of beasts, birds, and fishes, all behaving like human beings. When the nobles and other people became rich and educated, they forgot the old stories, but the country people did not, and handed them down, with changes at pleasure, from generation to generation. Then learned men collected and printed the country people's stories, and these we have translated, to amuse children. Their tastes remain like the tastes of their naked ancestors, thousands of years ago, and they seem to like fairy tales better than history, poetry, geography, or arithmetic, just as grown-up people like novels better than anything else.
This is the whole truth of the matter. I have said so before, and I say so again. But nothing will prevent children from thinking that I invented the stories, or some ladies from being of the same opinion. But who really invented the stories nobody knows; it is all so long ago, long before reading and writing were invented. The first of the stories actually written down, were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, or on Babylonian cakes of clay, three or four thousand years before our time.
Of the stories in this book, Miss Blackley translated 'Dwarf Long Nose,' 'The Wonderful Beggars,' 'The Lute Player,' 'Two in a Sack,' and 'The Fish that swam in the Air.' Mr. W. A. Craigie translated from the Scandinavian, 'Jasper who herded the Hares.' Mrs. Lang did the rest.
Some of the most interesting are from the Roumanion, and three were previously published in the late Dr. Steere's 'Swahili Tales.' By the permission of his representatives these three African stories have here been abridged and simplified for children.
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The Violet Fairy Book
Andrew Lang
Fantasy
Preface
17/11/2017
A Tale of the Tontlawald
17/11/2017
The Finest Liar in the World
17/11/2017
The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars
17/11/2017
Schippeitaro
17/11/2017
The Three Princes and Their Beasts
17/11/2017
The Goat's Ears of the Emperor Trojan
17/11/2017
The Nine Pea-Hens and the Golden Apples
17/11/2017
The Lute Player
17/11/2017
The Grateful Prince
17/11/2017
The Child who Came from an Egg
17/11/2017
Stan Bolovan
17/11/2017
The Two Frogs
17/11/2017
The Story of a Gazelle
17/11/2017
How a Fish Swam in the Air and a Hare in the Water
17/11/2017
Two in a Sack
17/11/2017
The Envious Neighbour
17/11/2017
The Fairy of the Dawn
17/11/2017
The Enchanted Knife
17/11/2017
Jesper who Herded the Hares
17/11/2017
The Underground Workers
17/11/2017
The History of Dwarf Long Nose
17/11/2017
The Nunda, Eater of People
17/11/2017
The Story of Hassebu
17/11/2017
The Maiden with the Wooden Helmet
17/11/2017
The Monkey and the Jelly-Fish
17/11/2017
The Headless Dwarfs
17/11/2017
The Young Man who Would have His Eyes Opened
17/11/2017
The Boys with the Golden Stars
17/11/2017
The Frog
17/11/2017
The Princess who was Hidden Underground
17/11/2017
The Girl who Pretended to Be a Boy
17/11/2017
The Story of Halfman
17/11/2017
The Prince who Wanted to See the World
17/11/2017
Virgilius the Sorcerer
17/11/2017
Mogarzea and His Son
17/11/2017
Other books by Andrew Lang
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