The Violet Fairy Book

The Violet Fairy Book

Andrew Lang

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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 The Violet Fairy Book Andrew Lang Fantasy
“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."”
1

Preface

17/11/2017

2

A Tale of the Tontlawald

17/11/2017

3

The Finest Liar in the World

17/11/2017

4

The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars

17/11/2017

5

Schippeitaro

17/11/2017

6

The Three Princes and Their Beasts

17/11/2017

7

The Goat's Ears of the Emperor Trojan

17/11/2017

8

The Nine Pea-Hens and the Golden Apples

17/11/2017

9

The Lute Player

17/11/2017

10

The Grateful Prince

17/11/2017

11

The Child who Came from an Egg

17/11/2017

12

Stan Bolovan

17/11/2017

13

The Two Frogs

17/11/2017

14

The Story of a Gazelle

17/11/2017

15

How a Fish Swam in the Air and a Hare in the Water

17/11/2017

16

Two in a Sack

17/11/2017

17

The Envious Neighbour

17/11/2017

18

The Fairy of the Dawn

17/11/2017

19

The Enchanted Knife

17/11/2017

20

Jesper who Herded the Hares

17/11/2017

21

The Underground Workers

17/11/2017

22

The History of Dwarf Long Nose

17/11/2017

23

The Nunda, Eater of People

17/11/2017

24

The Story of Hassebu

17/11/2017

25

The Maiden with the Wooden Helmet

17/11/2017

26

The Monkey and the Jelly-Fish

17/11/2017

27

The Headless Dwarfs

17/11/2017

28

The Young Man who Would have His Eyes Opened

17/11/2017

29

The Boys with the Golden Stars

17/11/2017

30

The Frog

17/11/2017

31

The Princess who was Hidden Underground

17/11/2017

32

The Girl who Pretended to Be a Boy

17/11/2017

33

The Story of Halfman

17/11/2017

34

The Prince who Wanted to See the World

17/11/2017

35

Virgilius the Sorcerer

17/11/2017

36

Mogarzea and His Son

17/11/2017