Andrew Lang's Fairy Books

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Rumpelstiltskin from The Blue Fairy Book, by Henry J. Ford
Rumpelstiltskin from The Blue Fairy Book, by Henry J. Ford

Andrew Lang's Fairy Books or Andrew Lang's "Coloured" Fairy Books are 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), 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.

Many of them were illustrated by Henry J. Ford. Lancelot Speed also did some illustrations.

Contents

[edit] Sources

Some of the stories are listed without any attribution at all (such as The Blue Mountains), and the rest are listed with brief notes. When this is "Grimm" or "Madame d'Aulnoy", the stories can be tracked down, but other notes are less helpful. For instance, The Wonderful Birch is listed only as "From the Russo-Karelian".

He repeatedly explained in the prefaces that the tales he told were all old, and not his, and that he found new fairy tales no match for them:

But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed. Real fairies never preach or talk slang. At the end, the little boy or girl wakes up and finds that he has been dreaming.
Such are the new fairy stories. May we be preserved from all the sort of them!

The collections were specifically intended for children, and consequently edited for that end. He spoke in the prefaces about why. J.R.R. Tolkien, in his "On Fairy-Stories", appreciated the collections, but objected to the slanting to children.

Tolkien also complained that several of the tales involve no magical elements at all; he cited The Heart of a Monkey, in which (unlike The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body or other tales) the monkey merely claimed that his heart was outside his body, as opposed to its actually (and magically) being so. But in this, Lang followed the practice of his sources; many fairy tale collectors include tales with no strictly marvelous elements.

[edit] The Books

[edit] Blue Fairy Book (1889)

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[edit] Red Fairy Book (1890)

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[edit] Green Fairy Book (1892)

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[edit] Yellow Fairy Book (1894)

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[edit] Pink Fairy Book (1897)

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[edit] Grey Fairy Book (1900)

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[edit] Violet Fairy Book(1901)

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[edit] Crimson Fairy Book (1903)

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[edit] Brown Fairy Book (1904)

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[edit] Orange Fairy Book (1906)

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[edit] Olive Fairy Book (1907)

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[edit] Lilac Fairy Book (1910)

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[edit] External links

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