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."
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.
Preface
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A Tale of the Tontlawald
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The Finest Liar in the World
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The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars
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Schippeitaro
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The Three Princes and Their Beasts
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The Goat's Ears of the Emperor Trojan
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The Nine Pea-Hens and the Golden Apples
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The Lute Player
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The Grateful Prince
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The Child who Came from an Egg
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Stan Bolovan
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The Two Frogs
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The Story of a Gazelle
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How a Fish Swam in the Air and a Hare in the Water
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Two in a Sack
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The Envious Neighbour
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The Fairy of the Dawn
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The Enchanted Knife
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Jesper who Herded the Hares
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The Underground Workers
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The History of Dwarf Long Nose
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The Nunda, Eater of People
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The Story of Hassebu
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The Maiden with the Wooden Helmet
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The Monkey and the Jelly-Fish
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The Headless Dwarfs
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The Young Man who Would have His Eyes Opened
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The Boys with the Golden Stars
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The Frog
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The Princess who was Hidden Underground
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The Girl who Pretended to Be a Boy
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The Story of Halfman
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The Prince who Wanted to See the World
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Virgilius the Sorcerer
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Mogarzea and His Son
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Other books by Andrew Lang
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