Andrew Lang
1844-1912

INTRODUCTION
PRINCIPAL WORKS
GENERAL COMMENTARY
TITLE COMMENTARY
FURTHER READING

(Has also written under the pseudonym A. Hugh Longway) Scottish folklorist, novelist, poet, critic, essayist, biographer, translator, editor, compiler, and author of fairy tales.

The following entry presents an overview of Lang's career through 2003.

INTRODUCTION

Lang is best known as the editor of the twelve-volume Color Fairy Books, a collection of traditional folktales from throughout the world, translated into English, and adapted to suit the sensibilities of the Victorian era. Beginning with The Blue Fairy Book (1889) and ending with The Lilac Fairy Book (1910), the Color Fairy Book series, which totals over four hundred stories, includes such well-known tales as "The Three Little Pigs," "Cinderella," and "Hansel and Gretel." At the time of the publication of The Blue Fairy Book, children's literature in England had become dominated by realistic, sentimental memoirs of childhood, and the traditional folktale had all but disappeared. However, with the instant popularity of The Blue Fairy Book and the continued success of subsequent editions of the series, Lang brought the fairy tale back onto the bookshelves of children throughout the English-speaking world. In addition to editing several collections of legends and mythology, Lang wrote five of his own original fairy tales, including The Princess Nobody: A Tale of Fairyland after the Drawings by Richard Doyle (1884), The Gold of Fairnilee (1888), and Prince Prigio (1889).

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Lang was born on March 31, 1844, in Selkirk, a region of Scotland that borders northern England. Lang's experiences as a boy in the Scottish countryside, coupled with his exposure to the ballads and legends of the Scottish tradition, had a profound effect on his imagination and became the inspiration for his story The Gold of Fairnilee. Lang graduated from St. Andrews University and went on to attend
the University of Glasgow. After receiving a scholarship, he transferred to Balliol College at Oxford University, from which he graduated with a B.A. in Classics in 1866. Lang was later granted an open-ended fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, which he held for seven years. However, Lang suffered from delicate health throughout his life, which eventually led him to end his academic career. During the early 1870s, he spent time recuperating on the French Riviera. In 1875 Lang married Lenora Blanche Alleyne, and the couple moved to London where Lang worked as a writer and journalist. Lang established himself as a prominent essayist and critic, publishing articles in the London Daily News, the Saturday Review, the Spectator, and other popular British and American periodicals. For twenty-three years, he wrote a regular column entitled "At the Sign of the Ship" for Longman's Magazine. The author of some five thousand essays, reviews, and articles by the time of his death, Lang was admired by friends for his ability to compose a publishable piece in half an hour, often while simultaneously conducting a conversation. Best remembered for his prolific output of fairy tale collections, Lang also authored, edited, and translated dozens of works of poetry, essays, and biographies, as well as scholarly studies of history, literature, and anthropology. His nonfiction books include analyses of folklore and mythology, such as Custom and Myth (1884) and Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1887). A great admirer of the works of Homer, Lang co-translated Homer's The Odyssey in 1879 and The Iliad in 1883. Lang was among the original members of London's Folk-Lore Society and served as the group's president. As an authority on folk literature, he contributed the entries on "tales" and "mythology" to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. While Lang's name was attached to the Color Fairy Book stories as collector, compiler, editor, and author of the prefaces for each new edition, his wife Lenora was the primary translator and adaptor of the individual stories. Thus, while Lang combed the world's literature to find these tales, he was neither the translator nor the adaptor of these works as they appear in his published volumes. The role of Lenora Lang in this ongoing project cannot be underestimated, as Lang made increasingly clear in his prefaces to each new edition of the Color Fairy Books. Indeed, after Lang's death, Lenora continued the project of translating and adapting traditional folktales, which were published in editions crediting Lang as the editor. Lang was not concerned with adhering to the original text through literal translations. Rather, he and Lenora took the approach of altering traditional fairy tales to facilitate readability for young children. Although Lang's accomplishment in the Color Fairy Books was that of a folklorist or anthropologist, his name became so closely associated with the fairy tales published in the series that the public generally regarded him as the original author of these stories. By the time of his final Color Fairy Book preface—for The Lilac Fairy Book—Lang expressed outright exasperation at the public's misconception of his role in the creation of these tales. Lang died on July 20, 1912, in Banchory, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Before his death, he informed his wife that he did not wish to be the object of biographical scrutiny, a request which Lenora honored by destroying all of his letters and other personal papers.

MAJOR WORKS

In The Princess Nobody, Lang's first original fairy tale, a childless King consults a dwarf prophet, who promises him a child on the condition that he give "nobody" to the dwarf. Disregarding this request as a ridiculous whim, the King agrees. But when the King returns to his castle, he finds that the Queen has given birth to a baby girl, whom she decided to call Niente ("Nobody") until the King could return to give the child a name. When the Princess "Nobody" grows up, the dwarf comes to claim her, and the King has no choice but to honor his promise. The King then offers his daughter's hand in marriage to any prince who can find the Princess and bring her back. While many princes try, only the ugly Prince Comical succeeds. As a reward for his bravery and kindness, Comical is transformed into the handsome Prince Charming and marries the Princess. The construction of The Princess Nobody represents an unusual process in storybook writing. While children's books are generally written first as a story, with illustrations built around the text, The Princess Nobody is a unique exception. The pictures in The Princess Nobody, illustrated by Richard Doyle, were originally published under the title In Fairyland: A Series of Pictures from the Elf-World (1870) and accompanied a poem by William Allingham. In the early 1880s, Lang was asked by his publisher to write an original story around these illustrations. The Gold of Fairnilee, set in sixteenth-century Scotland, stands out among Lang's original fairy tales for its melancholy mood, its setting in Lang's childhood homeland, and its strong ties to the traditions of the Scottish ballad and Scottish folklore. The story's hero, Randal Ker, journeys to Fairy Land and returns home after seven years when Jean, a childhood friend, plucks a magical rose at the wishing well. Randal brings with him from Fairy Land a vial of water, which, when rubbed on the eyes, reveals the location of an ancient Roman treasure known as the Gold of Fairnilee. Randal and Jean find the gold and use it to feed their community in a time of famine. The story concludes with the marriage of Randal and Jean.

Lang's narrative tone in his next tales, Prince Prigio and Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia (1893), in contrast to that of The Gold of Fairnilee, is lightly satirical and has been described as a burlesque of the traditional fairy tale. Prince Prigio and Prince Ricardo were both strongly influenced by William Makepeace Thackeray's similarly burlesque The Rose and the Ring. In these original tales, Lang follows the adventures of the clever, but obnoxious Prince Prigio and his dim-witted son, Prince Ricardo. In Tales of a Fairy Court (1907), Lang chronicles further episodes in the life of Prince Prigio. In one of the stories, Prince Prigio travels in time, first into the future of the twentieth century, then back in time to the court of King James VI of Scotland. Lang's Tales of Troyand Greece (1907) comprises a retelling of Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey as a boy's adventure story for children. Drawing on his own translations of Homer's works and his accomplishments as a Homeric scholar, Lang's Tales of Troy and Greece is highly regarded as one of his strongest volumes of stories for children.

The Blue Fairy Book contains folktales drawn primarily from Germany, France, Norway, and Great Britain, while the later Color Fairy Books encompass a greater range of tales from cultures throughout the world. The Blue Fairy Book retells many of the classic fairy tales that are widely familiar to contemporary audiences, such as "Hansel and Gretel," "Beauty and the Beast," "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," among others. Lang also included in The Blue Fairy Book three adaptations from The Arabian Nights and an adaptation of sections from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Over thirty of the stories in the Color Fairy Book series were drawn from German folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm in the mid-nineteenth century. In subsequent installments of the Color Fairy Book series, Lang widened his scope, gathering traditional tales from throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas and making them available to his English-language readership. The Red Fairy Book (1890) includes Russian, Norwegian, Finnish, and Romanian tales. The Green Fairy Book (1892) is comprised primarily of French and English tales, including such familiar stories as "The Three Little Pigs" and "The Story of the Three Bears." Subsequent Color Fairy Books include tales from Africa, China, Iceland, Japan, and Sweden, as well as stories drawn from Native American culture. Many revised, re-edited, and re-illustrated editions of Lang's Color Fairy Book series have been published since his death. Several of the Color Fairy Books were republished in the 1940s, under the editorship of Mary Gould Davis, with new illustrations by various artists. In the 1970s and 1980s, many of the early Color Fairy Books were again reissued, with extensive revisions by Brian Alderson, who retranslated some of the tales and excluded others. The Alderson editions include Lang's prefaces to the original volumes, as well as an introduction by Alderson detailing his alterations. Alderson's scholarly approach is indicated by his numerous explanatory footnotes to each story.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Of Lang's original fairy tales, The Gold of Fairnilee has been generally regarded as his most impressive work. Children's literature scholar Roger Lancelyn Green has echoed the opinion of many critics in asserting that The Gold of Fairnilee demonstrates Lang's storytelling skills "at his best, and at his most original and genuine." Green continued his praise of The Gold of Fairnilee by arguing that the tale "breaks away from every literary tradition from Shakespeare downwards, away even from the genuine folk-tale of Grimm and Dasent, and returns to the gloomy horrors of the Scottish Fairyland." While lacking the deep emotional undertones and melancholy atmosphere Lang so skillfully created in The Gold of Fairnilee, Prince Prigio has been praised for its humor and skillfully narrated plot, as well as the inherent charm of Prince Prigio himself. Prince Ricardo, however, has been characterized as a less-than-successful follow-up to Prigio. As Green has commented in his biography on Lang, "Prince Ricardo is not altogether as successful as Prince Prigio, largely on account of its lack of plot, and the episodic nature of its incidents, which occasionally seem a trifle forced and unwieldy. . . ." Positive reviews of the numerous posthumous editions of Lang's Color Fairy Books, as well as his original works, have served as testaments to the enduring appeal of the fairy tales and legends that Lang took such pains to collect. As a Times Literary Supplement reviewer of the 1967 volume of The Gold of Fairnilee and Other Stories asserted, "There is nothing soft or sentimental about Lang's stories. They are the real thing, with no synthetic overlay to make them 'suitable for children.' But whereas Grimm or Perrault can be frightening or grotesque, everything that Lang ever wrote is imbued with the same feeling of sanity and good sense."

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Original Fiction

Much Darker Days [as A. Hugh Longway] (prose) 1884

The Princess Nobody: A Tale of Fairyland after theDrawings by Richard Doyle (fairy tales) 1884

That Very Mab [with May Kendall] (prose) 1885

In the Wrong Paradise and Other Stories (short stories) 1886

The Mark of Cain (novel) 1886

The Gold of Fairnilee (fairy tales) 1888

Prince Prigio (fairy tales) 1889

Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody (essays) 1890

The World's Desire [with H. Rider Haggard] (novel) 1890

Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia (fairy tales) 1893

A Monk of the Fife: A Romance of the Days of Jeanne d'Arc (novel) 1895

My Own Fairy Book (fairy tales) 1895

Parson Kelly [with Alfred Edward Woodley Mason] (novel) 1899

The Disentanglers (prose) 1901

Tales of a Fairy Court (fairy tales) 1906

Tales of Troy and Greece (mythology) 1907

The Chronicles of Pantouflia: Prince Prigio andPrince Ricardo of Pantouflia (fairy tales) 1943; revised edition, 1981

The Gold of Fairnilee and Other Stories (fairy tales) 1967

Editor and Compiler

Perrault's Popular Tales [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1888

The Blue Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1889; revised and re-edited by Brian Alderson, 1975

The Red Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1890; revised and re-edited by Brian Alderson, 1976

The Green Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1892; revised and re-edited by Brian Alderson, 1978

The True Story Book [preface by Lang] (juvenile short stories) 1893; revised as The Blue True Story Book, 1896

The Yellow Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1894; revised and re-edited by Brian Alderson, 1980

The Red True Story Book (juvenile short stories) 1895

The Animal Story Book [preface by Lang] (juvenile short stories) 1896; revised edition, 1901

The Nursery Rhyme Book [preface by Lang] (nursery rhymes) 1897

The Pink Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1897; revised and re-edited by Brian Alderson, 1982

Arabian Nights Entertainments [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1898

The Red Book of Animal Stories [preface by Lang] (juvenile short stories) 1899

The Grey Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1900

The Violet Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1901

The Book of Romance [preface by Lang] (folklore) 1902; revised as Tales of Romance, 1907, and as Tales of King Arthur and the Round Table, 1909

The Crimson Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1903

The Brown Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1904

The Red Romance Book [preface by Lang] (folklore) 1905

The Orange Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1906

The Olive Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1907

The Lilac Fairy Book [preface by Lang] (fairy tales) 1910

Fifty Favourite Fairy Tales: Chosen from the ColourFairy Books of Andrew Lang [edited by Kathleen Lines; illustrations by Margery Gill] (fairy tales) 1963

The Twelve Dancing Princesses [illustrations by Adrienne Adams] (fairy tales) 1966

Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp [illustrations by Errol Le Cain] (fairy tales) 1981

The Rainbow Fairy Book [illustrated by Michael Hague] (fairy tales) 1993

A World of Fairy Tales [edited by Neil Philip; illustrations by Henry Justice Ford] (fairy tales) 1994

*The Flying Ship [illustrations by Dennis McDermott] (fairy tales) 1995

*This work was originally published in The Yellow Fairy Book.

GENERAL COMMENTARY

Edmund Gosse (essay date 1912)

SOURCE: Gosse, Edmund. "Andrew Lang." In Portraits and Sketches, pp. 199-211. London: William Heinemann, 1912.

[In the following essay, Gosse offers his personal recollections of Lang and his intellectual achievements during the 1880s, characterizing Lang as "a man of letters who laboured without cessation from boyhood to the grave."]

Invited to note down some of my recollections of Andrew Lang, I find myself suspended between the sudden blow of his death and the slow development of memory, now extending in unbroken friendship over thirty-five years. The magnitude and multitude of Lang's performances, public and private, during that considerable length of time almost paralyse expression; it is difficult to know where to begin or where to stop. Just as his written works are so extremely numerous as to make a pathway through them a formidable task in bibliography, no one book standing out predominant, so his character, intellectual and moral, was full of so many apparent inconsistencies, so many pitfalls for rash assertion, so many queer caprices of impulse, that in a whole volume of analysis, which would be tedious, one could scarcely do justice to them all. I will venture to put down, almost at haphazard, what I remember that seems to me to have been overlooked, or inexactly stated, by those who wrote, often very sympathetically, at the moment of his death, always premising that I speak rather of a Lang of from 1877 to 1890, when I saw him very frequently, than of a Lang whom younger people met chiefly in Scotland.

When he died, all the newspapers were loud in proclaiming his "versatility." But I am not sure that he was not the very opposite of versatile. I take "versatile" to mean changeable, fickle, constantly ready to alter direction with the weather-cock. The great instance of versatility in literature is Ruskin, who adopted diametrically different views of the same subject at different times of his life, and defended them with equal ardour. To be versatile seems to be unsteady, variable. But Lang was through his long career singularly unaltered; he never changed his point of view; what he liked and admired as a youth he liked and admired as an elderly man. It is true that his interests and knowledge were vividly drawn along a surprisingly large number of channels, but while there was abundance there does not seem to me to have been versatility. If a huge body of water boils up from a crater, it may pour down a dozen paths, but these will always be the same; unless there is an earthquake, new cascades will not form nor old rivulets run dry. In some authors earthquakes do take place—as in Tolstoy, for instance, and in S. T. Coleridge—but nothing of this kind was ever manifest in Lang, who was extraordinarily multiform, yet in his varieties strictly consistent from Oxford to the grave. As this is not generally perceived, I will take the liberty of expanding my view of his intellectual development.

To a superficial observer in late life the genius of Andrew Lang had the characteristics which we are in the habit of identifying with precocity. Yet he had not been, as a writer, precocious in his youth. One slender volume of verses represents all that he published in book-form before his thirty-fifth year. No doubt we shall learn in good time what he was doing before he flashed upon the world of journalism in all his panoply of graces, in 1876, at the close of his Merton fellowship. He was then, at all events, the finest finished product of his age, with the bright armour of Oxford burnished on his body to such a brilliance that humdrum eyes could hardly bear the radiance of it. Of the terms behind, of the fifteen years then dividing him from St. Andrews, we know as yet but little; they were years of insatiable acquirement, incessant reading, and talking, and observing—gay preparation for a life to be devoted, as no other life in our time has been, to the stimulation of other people's observation and talk and reading. There was no cloistered virtue about the bright and petulant Merton don. He was already flouting and jesting, laughing with Ariosto in the sunshine, performing with a snap of his fingers tasks which might break the back of a pedant, and concealing under an affectation of carelessness a literary ambition which knew no definite bounds.

In those days, and when he appeared for the first time in London, the poet was paramount in him. Jowett is said to have predicted that he would be greatly famous in this line, but I know not what evidence Jowett had before him. Unless I am much mistaken, it was not until Lang left Balliol that his peculiar bent became obvious. Up to that time he had been a promiscuous browser upon books, much occupied, moreover, in the struggle with ancient Greek, and immersed in Aristotle and Homer. But in the early days of his settlement at Merton he began to concentrate his powers, and I think there were certain influences which were instant and far-reaching. Among them one was pre-eminent. When Andrew Lang came up from St. Andrews he had found Matthew Arnold occupying the ancient chair of poetry at Oxford. He was a listener at some at least of the famous lectures which, in 1865, were collected as Essays in Criticism; while one of his latest experiences as a Balliol undergraduate was hearing Matthew Arnold lecture on the study of Celtic literature. His conscience was profoundly stirred by Culture and Anarchy (1869); his sense of prose-form largely determined by Friendship's Garland (1871). I have no hesitation in saying that the teaching and example of Matthew Arnold prevailed over all other Oxford influences upon the intellectual nature of Lang, while, although I think that his personal acquaintance with Arnold was very slight, yet in his social manner there was, in early days, not a little imitation of Arnold's aloofness and superfine delicacy of address. It was unconscious, of course, and nothing would have enraged Lang more than to have been accused of "imitating Uncle Matt."

The structure which his own individuality now began to build on the basis supplied by the learning of Oxford, and in particular by the study of the Greeks, and "dressed" by courses of Matthew Arnold, was from the first eclectic. Lang eschewed as completely what was not sympathetic to him as he assimilated what was attractive to him. Those who speak of his "versatility" should recollect what large tracts of the literature of the world, and even of England, existed outside the dimmest apprehension of Andrew Lang. It is, however, more useful to consider what he did apprehend; and there were two English books, published in his Oxford days, which permanently impressed him: one of these was The Earthly Paradise, the other D. G. Rossetti's Poems. In after years he tried to divest himself of the traces of these volumes, but he had fed upon their honey-dew and it had permeated his veins.

Not less important an element in the garnishing of a mind already prepared for it by academic and æsthetic studies was the absorption of the romantic part of French literature. Andrew Lang in this, as in everything else, was selective. He dipped into the wonderful lucky-bag of France wherever he saw the glitter of romance. Hence his approach, in the early seventies, was threefold: towards the mediæval lais and chansons, towards the sixteenth-century Pléiade, and towards the school of which Victor Hugo was the leader in the nineteenth century. For a long time Ronsard was Lang's poet of intensest predilection; and I think that his definite ambition was to be the Ronsard of modern England, introducing a new poetical dexterity founded on a revival of pure humanism. He had in those days what he lost, or at least dispersed, in the weariness and growing melancholia of later years—a splendid belief in poetry as a part of the renown of England, as a heritage to be received in reverence from our fathers, and to be passed on, if possible, in a brighter flame. This honest and beautiful ambition to shine as one of the permanent benefactors to national verse, in the attitude so nobly sustained four hundred years ago by Du Bellay and Ronsard, was unquestionably felt by Andrew Lang through his bright intellectual April, and supported him from Oxford times until 1882, when he published Helen of Troy. The cool reception of that epic by the principal judges of poetry caused him acute disappointment, and from that time forth he became less eager and less serious as a poet, more and more petulantly expending his wonderful technical gift on fugitive subjects. And here again, when one comes to think of it, the whole history repeated itself, since in Helen of Troy Lang simply suffered as Ronsard had done in the "Franciade." But the fact that 1882 was his year of crisis, and the tomb of his brightest ambition, must be recognised by every one who closely followed his fortunes at that time.

Lang's habit of picking out of literature and of life the plums of romance, and these alone, comes to be, to the dazzled observer of his extraordinarily vivid intellectual career, the principal guiding line. This determination to dwell, to the exclusion of all other sides of any question, on its romantic side is alone enough to rebut the charge of versatility. Lang was in a sense encyclopædic; but the vast dictionary of his knowledge had blank pages, or pages pasted down, on which he would not, or could not, read what experience had printed. Absurd as it sounds, there was always something maidenly about his mind, and he glossed over ugly matters, sordid and dull conditions, so that they made no impression whatever upon him. He had a trick, which often exasperated his acquaintances, of declaring that he had "never heard" of things that everybody else was very well aware of. He had "never heard the name" of people he disliked, of books that he thought tiresome, of events that bored him; but, more than this, he used the formula for things and persons whom he did not wish to discuss. I remember meeting in the street a famous professor, who advanced with uplifted hands, and greeted me with "What do you think Lang says now? That he has never heard of Pascal!" This merely signified that Lang, not interested (at all events for the moment) in Pascal nor in the professor, thus closed at once all possibility of discussion.

It must not be forgotten that we have lived to see him, always wonderful indeed, and always passionately devoted to perfection and purity, but worn, tired, harassed by the unceasing struggle, the lifelong slinging of sentences from that inexhaustible ink-pot. In one of the most perfect of his poems, "Natural Theology," Lang speaks of Cagn, the great hunter, who once was kind and good, but who was spoiled by fighting many things. Lang was never "spoiled," but he was injured; the surface of the radiant coin was rubbed by the vast and interminable handling of journalism. He was jaded by the toil of writing many things. Hence it is not possible but that those who knew him intimately in his later youth and early middle-age should prefer to look back at those years when he was the freshest, the most exhilarating figure in living literature, when a star seemed to dance upon the crest of his already silvering hair. Baudelaire exclaimed of Théophile Gautier: "Homme heureux! homme digne d'envie! il n'a jamais aimé que le Beau!" and of Andrew Lang in those brilliant days the same might have been said. As long as he had confidence in beauty he was safe and strong; and much that, with all affection and all respect, we must admit was rasping and disappointing in his attitude to literature in his later years, seems to have been due to a decreasing sense of confidence in the intellectual sources of beauty. It is dangerous, in the end it must be fatal, to sustain the entire structure of life and thought on the illusions of romance. But that was what Lang did—he built his house upon the rainbow.

The charm of Andrew Lang's person and company was founded upon a certain lightness, an essential gentleness and elegance which were relieved by a sharp touch; just as a very dainty fruit may be preserved from mawkishness by something delicately acid in the rind of it. His nature was slightly inhuman; it was unwise to count upon its sympathy beyond a point which was very easily reached in social intercourse. If any simple soul showed an inclination, in eighteenth-century phrase, to "repose on the bosom" of Lang, that support was immediately withdrawn, and the confiding one fell among thorns. Lang was like an Angora cat, whose gentleness and soft fur, and general aspect of pure amenity, invite to caresses, which are suddenly met by the outspread paw with claws awake. This uncertain and freakish humour was the embarrassment of his friends, who, however, were preserved from despair by the fact that no malice was meant, and that the weapons were instantly sheathed again in velvet. Only, the instinct to give a sudden slap, half in play, half in fretful caprice, was incorrigible. No one among Lang's intimate friends but had suffered from this feline impulse, which did not spare even the serenity of Robert Louis Stevenson. But, tiresome as it sometimes was, this irritable humour seldom cost Lang a friend who was worth preserving. Those who really knew him recognised that he was always shy and usually tired.

His own swift spirit never brooded upon an offence, and could not conceive that any one else should mind what he himself minded so little and forgot so soon. Impressions swept over him very rapidly, and injuries passed completely out of his memory. Indeed, all his emotions were too fleeting, and in this there was something fairy-like; quick and keen and blithe as he was, he did not seem altogether like an ordinary mortal, nor could the appeal to gross human experience be made to him with much chance of success. This, doubtless, is why almost all imaginative literature which is founded upon the darker parts of life, all squalid and painful tragedy, all stories that "don't end well," all religious experiences, all that is not superficial and romantic, was irksome to him. He tried sometimes to reconcile his mind to the consideration of real life; he concentrated his matchless powers on it; but he always disliked it. He could persuade himself to be partly just to Ibsen or Hardy or Dostoieff-sky, but what he really enjoyed was Dumas père, because that fertile romance-writer rose serene above the phenomena of actual human experience. We have seen more of this type in English literature than the Continental nations have in theirs, but even we have seen no instance of its strength and weakness so eminent as Andrew Lang. He was the fairy in our midst, the wonder-working, incorporeal, and tricksy fay of letters, who paid for all his wonderful gifts and charms by being not quite a man of like passions with the rest of us. In some verses which he scribbled to R. L. S. and threw away, twenty years ago, he acknowledged this unearthly character, and, speaking of the depredations of his kin, he said:

Faith, they might steal me, wi' ma will,
And, ken'd I ony Fairy hill,
I'd lay me down there, snod and still,
Their land to win;
For, man, I've maistly had my fill
O' this world's din.

His wit had something disconcerting in its impishness. Its rapidity and sparkle were dazzling, but it was not quite human; that is to say, it conceded too little to the exigencies of flesh and blood. If we can conceive a seraph being funny, it would be in the manner of Andrew Lang. Moreover, his wit usually danced over the surface of things, and rarely penetrated them. In verbal parry, in ironic misunderstanding, in breathless agility of topsy-turvy movement, Lang was like one of Milton's "yellow-skirted fays," sporting with the helpless, moon-bewildered traveller. His wit often had a depressing, a humiliating effect, against which one's mind presently revolted. I recollect an instance which may be thought to be apposite: I was passing through a phase of enthusiasm for Emerson, whom Lang very characteristically detested, and I was so ill-advised as to show him the famous epigram called "Brahma." Lang read it with a snort of derision (it appeared to be new to him), and immediately he improvised this parody:

If the wild bowler thinks he bowls,
Or if the batsman thinks he's bowled,
They know not, poor misguided souls,
They, too, shall perish unconsoled.
I am the batsman and the bat,
I am the bowler and the ball,
The umpire, the pavilion cat,
The roller, pitch, and stumps, and all.

This would make a pavilion cat laugh, and I felt that Emerson was done for. But when Lang had left me, and I was once more master of my mind, I reflected that the parody was but a parody, wonderful for its neatness and quickness, and for its seizure of what was awkward in the roll of Emerson's diction, but essentially superficial. However, what would wit be if it were profound? I must leave it there, feeling that I have not explained why Lang's extraordinary drollery in conversation so often left on the memory a certain sensation of distress.

But this was not the characteristic of his humour at its best, as it was displayed throughout the happiest period of his work. If, as seems possible, it is as an essayist that he will ultimately take his place in English literature, this element will continue to delight fresh generations of enchanted readers. I cannot imagine that the preface to his translation of Theocritus,Letters to Dead Authors, In the Wrong Paradise, Old Friends, and Essays in Little will ever lose their charm; but future admirers will have to pick their way to them through a tangle of history and anthropology and mythology, where there may be left no perfume and no sweetness. I am impatient to see this vast mass of writing reduced to the limits of its author's delicate, true, but somewhat evasive and ephemeral genius. However, as far as the circumstances of his temperament permitted, Andrew Lang has left with us the memory of one of our most surprising contemporaries, a man of letters who laboured without cessation from boyhood to the grave, who pursued his ideal with indomitable activity and perseverance, and who was never betrayed except by the loftiness of his own endeavour. Lang's only misfortune was not to be completely in contact with life, and his work will survive exactly where he was most faithful to his innermost illusions.

Horace G. Hutchinson (essay date 1920)

SOURCE: Hutchinson, Horace G. "Spencer Walpole and Andrew Lang." In Portraits of the Eighties, pp. 208-17. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920.

[In the following essay, Hutchinson comments on Lang's personality, his work, and the author's role as historian.]

ANDREW LANG

I hardly know why I thus couple up Andrew Lang with Spencer Walpole, unless it be that both were historians—of a sort. But it was of a widely different sort, and they would not have jogged in double harness together. Walpole's rank and mode as an historian I have just discussed. Andrew Lang was historian by accident rather—the accident that some of the people who caught his quick fancy and incited him to write about them were engaged in great historical drama—Mary Queen of Scots most notably, also Pickle the Spy, and others. Andrew Lang was a number of things intellectually, for the versatility and range of his mind were extraordinary, but of all things that which he was not was an historian at all of the type of Spencer Walpole. He did not care a bit about the measures or the political games in which the people that interested him were taking in hand, or cared only in so far as they were the setting, the scenery, for his actors. It was the actors themselves and their doings that appealed to him. And yet here again we have to make a qualification: he was interested in the activities of these persons, in the scrapes into which they fell and in the puzzles, as in a detective story, which they presented; but he was not really very interested in their characters and their motives. As he himself confessed to me once, "I can do nothing with human nature." He meant, as a writer of the novel. He was quite right in his estimate of himself. Few people probably are aware that he ever tried his hand at a novel; but he did, and very bad it was. I think it was called The Brand of Cain, or something of that kind, and I well remember his amazement to discover that I had read it. It was not altogether gratified amazement either. He was actually sorry that any one for whose opinion he cared even the least bit should have read it, so convinced was he of its badness. Of course it was only because it had his name to it that it ever got itself published.

To be sure, he wrote The Disentanglers, an ingenious idea, ingeniously worked; but it is hardly to be called a novel, or a study in humanity. He collaborated with Rider Haggard, too, in The World's Desire, but his personal share is not obvious; and, after all, its theme is a type only, and perhaps not a very probable type. And all this disability to "make anything" of human nature arose, in all likelihood, from the fact that motives and character did not present problems of real interest to him. He did not go probing down deeply into the springs of conduct; he found much more excitement in the material and the obvious. It is singular that it should be so, with his very acute intellect, but so it was.

It appears to me that I am, so far, saying everything that is negative about Lang, recording everything that he was not. It is a way, like another, of sketching a portrait, to begin with determining the lines to be left out, and having thus begun, I may continue. He was, then, as unlike as possible to Spencer Walpole, because he had not the real historian's bent of mind, he had not the weighing, judicial sense. With all my deep admiration for Andrew Lang—and let me say at once that I did admire and love him greatly—he was the last man to whom I would go for a judicious opinion on men, women, or affairs. He lived in a curious detachment, although he touched at so many points the various interests of very different men. His was, in truth, one of the most remarkable personalities and intellects that we shall find in all this portrait gallery. He touched at so many points, and yet he drove in deeply at none of them; he was really aloof all the while; and he made this merely surface contact in spite of possessing an intellect most penetrating and incisive. So, in his historical studies, if we call them so, though we should be more right in saying "studies of historical persons," he picked the actors up, let his graceful fancy, his fine intellect, and his delightful style play about with them for a time, and then dropped them back again into the welter of history for the true historian to deal with them. I have heard the term "scrappy" applied to his methods, and it was not misapplied. He himself confessed to habits of carelessness and inaccuracy in detail. I think that he exaggerated this inaccuracy: he was really far more conscientious as a writer than he gave himself the credit of being; but it is certainly impossible to think of Andrew Lang going over his proofs three times, and verifying and re-verifying his figures and citations, as Spencer Walpole did. He wrote as easily as Walpole wrote laboriously. He was indeed the quickest writer that I have ever known. I have heard him say: "Is it humanly speaking possible to write an article before dinner?"—taking out his watch—"Twenty minutes before we need go and dress! Yes, I think it just is." And off he would go—I think it was for the Daily News that he was writing at this time occasional articles about all things in general, and a few more—and scribble down the article, and as a rule these lightning articles of his were the best: these forked-lightning articles, perhaps we should say, for all his writing had the speed of merely common electricity. The reading of them did not go quite so fast. For days I have kept a letter of Andrew Lang's by me, wondering at its meaning, making intelligent guesses from time to time, and usually, at each new look, discovering the significance of some new hieroglyphic, until all was unravelled. But it was a very tangled skein, and my pity for his compositors was sore.

In its own way, Andrew Lang's intellect was the most brilliant and the most delightful that I have had the luck to encounter. I say that deliberately and with no hesitation. His fancy was so graceful, his taste so perfect. The world in which his spirit really lived was a kind of fairy-land. He came down to this terrestrial business only now and then, always with a spectator's interest in it rather than an actor's. There was a pathetic side to this. He had a great leaning to the athletic and to the primitive; the life of the savage and of the gipsy appealed to him. I am not sure but that he had some strain of gipsy blood in him. His singularly handsome dark face and large dreaming eyes gave suggestion of it, and gipsies, even of royal race, moved a good deal among the Border Scottish families to which the Langs were akin. He was thus drawn by his disposition; and yet his health was always delicate, so that the life even of the ordinary athletic man of civilisation was forbidden him. He had to be very careful in his diet; he could not travel very long distances in a day, I think because the rattle and jolt of a long train journey were too much for his head. It was all a very delicately balanced organisation, of the very finest constituents. I believe he had once been a fair bowler, with a slingy, fast action: never more than moderately good, I imagine, and less effective than his brother T. W., who was in the Oxford Eleven as a medium-paced bowler. But with this exception I can think of no form of athletics in which he took part.

And yet there was no form that did not interest him. He wrote delightfully of golf, of cricket, of fishing—he was something of a trout-fisher, by the way, though very rarely catching a trout—especially he wrote well of golf, so far as a man can write well of a game which he cannot play at all. Even a stroke a hole handicap would have complimented him too highly. But it was always the writing of an artist, though his art was not golf, but literature. He loved Sagas, and all deeds of derring-do. He loved the classics, such as Homer, because they tell stories of heroes, and he loved them even better than the Sagas, because they are heroic stories told with art, while the Sagas are absolutely artless. He would have been perfectly at home had he lived in ancient Greece, or in the Iceland of the Vikings, or in the Provence of the Troubadours—only, he would not have lived, for the climatic and sanitary conditions would have been his immediate death. But in any one of these environments he would have been more at home than in modern England, and especially in modern London. "Why people live in London," he wrote to me once, "I wonder; and my wonder ever grows." Yet he lived there, and in Marloes Road, Kensington—not one of the most romantic streets. "Where is Marloes Road?" I heard some one ask him, who wished to call on him. "You go along the Cromwell Road till you drop," said Andrew Lang. "It's there!"

So there he lived and wrote and dreamed; and it was in his dreams—by which I mean waking dreams, of course—that he was happy. He lived in Kensington, and I think that if one had asked him what life he would like best to have lived or be living—he might have said that he wished to be going with Herodotus, the old father of history, on that pilgrimage to Egypt, about which he tells us in his fourth book:

He left the land of youth, he left the young,
The smiling Gods of Greece; he passed the isle
Where Jason loitered and where Sappho sung;
He sought the secret-founted wave of Nile,
Of that old world, half dead a weary while;
Heard the Priests murmur in their mystic tongue,
And through the fanes went voyaging, among
Dark tribes that worshipped Cat and Crocodile.

He learned the tales of death Divine and birth,
Strange loves of hawk and serpent, Sky and Earth,
The marriage and the slaying of the Sun;
The shrines of ghosts and beasts he wandered through,
And mocked not of their godhead, for he knew
Behind all creeds the Spirit that is One.

That is how Lang himself writes of this bewitching adventure in the sonnet which he prefaces to a reprint of an old translation of that fourth book. The sonnet gives us a good deal of the real Lang and of his psychical cravings. He would go with the traveller for the very adventure's sake, for the brine and the tossing of the sea, for the peril by water and by land. And he would go to satisfy his yearning intellect with knowledge. He would hear stories. He would learn folk-lore, and that was of deep interest to him. Finally he would be living in a fairy-land, as remote from Marloes Road as may be.

He made up, in a measure, for Marloes Road, by going to St. Andrews in the winter—in the winter of all seasons for the East Neuk of Fife. Yet it had its delights, I know, because he used to let me come and stay with him there. The house that he took stood right on the cliff, with the splendid old ruin of the Castle on its eastern side, and northward the Firth of Tay, and Forfarshire opposite. That was a fitter habitation for a man who was dreaming of going a-Viking. He went from London, but he never went for a holiday. A holiday would be impossible for a man whose imagination worked so perpetually, and whose artistic impulse drove him to constant expression in words. He must write, and he did write, whether at St. Andrews or elsewhere. He also had the air of abundant leisure; he was always ready to talk and to idle: he took his work and his art with so little apparent seriousness that he actually never had a study, apart, to write in, either in London or anywhere else. He always seemed to regard himself rather in the light of an amateur, whose production was worth very little, so that it did not matter a jot to the world whether it was produced or not. He said to me once: "People ask me why I do not write some big book. Why should I write a big book? I have no particular message for the world."

Perhaps he had not, unless it be the common message of all artists, to make the world realise the beauty of the world as it never would do without the artist and his revelations. And yet it always made me angry to hear people talking of Andrew Lang as if he were a literary trifler, a minor poet, a writer of Ballads in Blue China, and no more. He was all this, but he was a great deal more besides. People who judged him thus had forgotten, or did not know, those serious books of his on ancient religious ceremony and so on: Custom and Myth, and Myth, Ritual, and Religion. They did not know, or did not think of, his share with Butcher and Leaf and Myers in the translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad. They did not remember his brilliant record at Oxford, nor recognise the range of his learning, stored and kept brightly ready for use by a very retentive memory. He knew old French literature, both prose and verse, better than any other man I ever met, though of course he made no speciality of it, nor of any other one subject of study. The truth is that he was so very quick of apprehension that he could grasp a subject with about half the attention that a common mind had to apply to achieve anything like the same mastery. But he worked far harder than people thought, and was far more conscientious than they supposed. For instance, I happen to know that he toiled for weeks and months over a projected history of the Jewish tribes. He did not like the point of view of Renan in his Histoire des Peuples d'Israël, although he had an unbounded admiration for it as a work of art and storehouse of knowledge. I had left him keenly engaged in this. A short while after I met him again and asked: "Well, how are the children of Israel? Are they out of the desert yet?" He had been humorously bemoaning the apparently quite unnecessary length of their sojourn in those inhospitable arenas. "Oh," he said lightly, "I have given it up, given up all idea of it; I have torn up what I had written. I have come to the conclusion that no man ought to write about it who does not know Hebrew."

He spoke thus lightly, but it was no light sacrifice that he had made. He had sacrificed months of toil, and destroyed MS. that any publisher would certainly have given good money for, even in its fragmentary style. But money, and what most men regard as the good things of this life, interested him hardly at all. Folk-lore, crystal gazing, psychical research, and old story of all kinds were the things of the spirit which really seemed to him to matter. A certain material comfort he was obliged to have, if he was to live, by reason of his delicacy of constitution, and the devoted love of Mrs. Lang assured him these, without any personal attention of his own. She shared, too, in all his literary interests, and published several books, of which Dissolving Views probably won most fame.

I do not suppose that it is possible for any one to have the least knowledge of Lang and of his work without realising the brilliance of his intellect. What I do not think has been nearly enough recognised is the warmth and kindliness of his heart. It is to be admitted of him that he was at times impatient and even petulant. Much of this, doubtless, may be put down to the score of his always rather indifferent health. It is true, however, that he habitually suffered fools badly, very badly; and also that fools were apt to suffer badly from the caustic wit which ran so readily from his pen. But there are scores of writers alive and at work today who would bear witness to the help which his kindly encouragement gave them at a time when their inexperience was in much need of such aid; and he was as liberal of his money as of his counsel. The contributors to his Red [The Red Fairy Book ], Blue [The Blue Fairy Book ], and all sorts of coloured Fairy Books were rewarded with a generosity which left very little balance for the editor, and the assistants of his musings under "The Sign of the Ship" in Longman's Magazine often ate up all the guineas that the publishers gave him for this monthly "feature."

His interests ranged widely, but two of the sides of life which are the main concern of very many men, politics and finance, appealed to him not at all, and when either of these came on the tapis he made not the slightest effort, not even so much as mere courtesy might demand, to conceal his boredom. In some ways he was more like a supernaturally brilliant child than a grown man—possibly a slightly spoilt child. It was a child's world in which his spirit moved, and moved with a whimsical fancy quite delightful.

Some of his obiter dicta are worth quoting: "This book is good, though powerful," was the opening sentence of one of his reviews of a novel in the Saturday. Of another he wrote: "A touch of the supernatural is added by the hero finding the book he wants in the London Library." This was in the early days of that admirable and now very well-equipped institution; and we may well believe that Lang, in his quest for old and little-known books on old French literature and the like, may have been a sore thorn in the side of the librarian and his ever attentive staff. He was appointed Gibbon Lecturer in Natural Theology at St. Andrews. "What line did he take?" I asked Rider Haggard, who had been at the opening lecture. "He commenced," Haggard answered, "with 'Once it began to thunder; and men began to wonder.'" It was a characteristic start for Andrew Lang to make, and perhaps the large and vague topic could not be broached much more auspiciously.

I had heard nothing of his last illness until its fatal end, and the news was very grievous. It seemed as if an element of lightness went with him from the world. But he had little reserve of strength to fight any serious attack, and, for all his gaiety and wit, he was by nature disposed to melancholy. I should imagine that his vitality was always rather below the normal. Many others have made a larger figure in the world, but there have been few in our generation of such an interesting and attractive personality.

Roger Lancelyn Green (essay date July 1994)

SOURCE: Green, Roger Lancelyn "Andrew Lang and the Fairy Tale." Review of English Studies 20, no. 79 (July 1994): 227-31.

[In the following essay, Green discusses Lang's original fairy tales, including Princess Nobdoy, The Gold of Fairnilee, and The Chronicles of Pantouflia, arguing that Lang's Pantouflia tales resemble such "literary fairy stories" as Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring.]

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Roger Lancelyn Green (essay date 1946)

SOURCE: Green, Roger Lancelyn. "The Master of Fairyland." In Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography, pp. 80-96. Leicester, England: Edmund Ward, 1946.

[In the following essay, Green provides critical commentary on Lang's Princess Nobody, Prince Prigio, Prince Ricardo, and Tales of a Fairy Court. Green notes that these stories are Lang's only original fairy tales, despite Lang being regularly and mistakenly referred to as the "author"—as opposed to the "editor"—of the Colored Fairy Books.]

The Border boy, dwelling in a land of old enchantments, among hills and rivers haunted by the legends and ballads of the early days, amidst woods fragrant with old songs and old beliefs, must almost of necessity have believed in fairies. Remembering how the Selkirk boys met together of an evening to "swap" fairy-tales, how Lang delighted to wander away up the wild and silent valleys with his fishing rod; how he would sit on the green slope between the old ruin of Fairnilee and the murmuring Tweed half seen amid the green leaves; and how he would hasten back to Viewfield in the twilight, half scared of the ghosts and bogles of which he had been reading and whose ancient haunts were among the places nearby and most familiar to him: remembering all these early influences, it seems only right that the name of Andrew Lang should still be linked most naturally and universally with fairy books.

In his boyhood the old fairy beliefs and legends, the real folk-lore, were still alive in the Border country: old Nancy, the Langs' nurse, would more than half have believed the stories of ghosts and fairies, of Whuppity Stoorie and the Red Etin, which she told to her little charges in the long winter evenings by the nursery fire.

And as Andrew grew older, he read for himself all the fairy-tales that he could possibly lay hands on. Madame d'Aulnoy came earliest, and Grimm's Household Stories; the fairies of literature in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and of humour in The Rose and the Ring, but most of all, the old traditional tales, told to him orally at first, accessible only in Grimm, and in the sophisticated versions of Perrault, and the collections derived from the Cabinet des Fées, but increasing year by year as he grew older—growing as the basic fairy-tale collections were issued: The Heroes (1856), Heroes of Asgard (1857), Planché's French Fairy Tales (1858), Dasent's Tales from the Norse (1859).

Folk-lore and ballad literature were thus the deepest and most potent influences on Lang as a boy, and their influence was increased and broadened into an intellectual as well as a sentimental interest as he became more and more engrossed in the study of anthropology.

Thus it was as an anthropologist that Lang came first to the serious consideration of fairy stories, and the result was that for long he felt almost a distaste for the more literary tales. "The folklorist is not unnaturally jealous," he wrote, "of what, in some degree, looks like folk-lore. He apprehends that purely literary stories may win their way, pruned of their excrescences, to the fabulous, and may confuse the speculations of later mythologists . . . There was a time when I regarded all contes, except contes populaires, as frivolous and vexatious."¹

But even by the time that his first collection of traditional fairy-tales, The Blue Fairy Book (1889) appeared, Lang had fallen away from his earlier and rather fanatical intolerance, and had already written three literary fairy stories of his own.

The "Fairy Book Series," however, contained little besides traditional tales, although these were adapted and re-written so as to make them suitable for children. It is actually only the first of the series that contains much besides folk-tales—and Lang departs further than he ever does in later volumes from any settled scheme. Thus, besides five stories from Madame d'Aulnoy, one from Madame Le Prince de Beaumont and one adaption from Madame de Villeneuve, there are two from The Arabian Nights, and—strangest choice of all—a condensed version of the first part of Gulliver's Travels made by May Kendall. How Lang came to allow this last to be included is inexplicable, for it is quite alien to anything in any of the fairy books, which never again depart from the traditional tales further than Madame d'Aulnoy, Hans Andersen and "The Three Bears."

But the book was an experiment, and of a kind that must have caused a certain amount of anxiety to Longman, the publisher, even with the great "draw" of Lang's name. For at that time the fairy-tale had almost ceased to be read in British nurseries, and the novel of child life, the stories of Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth, and L. T. Meade, were the only fare. Writing early in 1889 in her history of children's books, Mrs. E. M. Field says: "At the present moment the fairy-tale seems to have given way entirely in popularity to the child's story of real life, the novel of childhood, in which no effort is spared to make children appear as they are." But just before the publication of the book early in 1891, she added a note: "Since the above was written eighteen months ago, the tide of popularity seems to have set strongly in the direction of the old fairy stories."²

It would probably be no exaggeration to say that Lang was entirely responsible for this change in the public taste; for The Blue Fairy Book (1889) and

The Red Fairy Book (1890), were both enormously popular from the very start, and the later volumes in the series were sure always of a wide and appreciative welcome.

The earlier fairy books were issued also in limited editions on large paper, and for the first two of these Lang wrote Introductions of some interest which do not appear in the ordinary editions. Otherwise, his own share in any of the fairy books is limited almost exclusively to the Preface—and, of course, the actual selection and choice of the stories included. These are drawn from nearly every race and nation of the ancient or modern world, and are the finest and most enduring monument to Andrew Lang the folklorist.

The tales themselves were retold, translated or adapted mainly by Mrs. Lang, though in the earlier volumes she had the assistance of many people, including May Kendall, Florence Sellar and Sir W. A. Craigie. The True Story Book and its sequel boast a greater variety of authors, including Rider Haggard, Florence Sellar and Lang himself, who told the story of Joan of Arc at some length.

Only in the first two fairy books proper does Lang re-tell any of the stories, and there his work is of considerable interest. In The Blue Fairy Book he takes the story of Perseus, drawing his material from Pindar, Simonides and Apollodoros, but he recasts it in the form of an ordinary folk-tale by the suppression of all personal and local names; Perseus is simply "The Prince," while even the Herperides appear as "The Western Fairies," singing a song as noncommittal as their name:

"Round and round the apples of gold,
Round and round dance we;
Thus do we dance from the days of old
About the enchanted tree:
Round and round and round we go,
While the Spring is green or the stream shall flow,
Or the wind shall stir the sea."

The similar song which Danæ sings is, however, an actual translation from the lyric contained in a fragment by Simonides.

The absence of names is not, of course, essential to the ordinary folk-tale; but in the case of such a story as this, it is only by such a suppression that it can be regarded with any ease as a fairy-tale of the type best exemplified in the Grimm collection, and not merely as a fragment of the grand legendary history of Homeric Greece.

In The Red Fairy Book (1890), Lang re-tells "The Story of Sigurd" from Morris's version of the Volsunga saga, and treats it rather as he had done "The Terrible Head," though without suppressing the names. This gives us the impression that Lang considered a northern setting still to be suitable for a fairy-tale, but that the Greek scene, by literary association, was no longer sufficiently simple and wild. Lang supports this in an interesting essay on "Literary Fairy Tales" which he prefixed as an Introduction to a story by the Dutch writer, F. van Eeden, which appeared in English as Little Johannes in 1895. After discussing the usual ingredients of "The Märchen, or child's story," he goes on to say that "The civilized peoples have elaborated their childlike tales into the chief romantic myths, as of the Ship Argo, and the sagas of Heracles and Odysseus . . . European peasants keep them in shapes far more akin to the savage than to the Greek form."

It could, however, be argued that the Greek myths present versions of the traditional tales containing far purer traces of their savage origin than the oral tales handed down by peasants, vitiated and adulterated from generation to generation, until recorded by the folklorists of the nineteenth century.

However this may be, Lang's aim is obvious, and in none of the other fairy books does he include any but savage or folk-tales, the French Cabinet des Fées and Hans Andersen being the only sophisticated stories admitted. And he does not again attempt to adapt any stories from the "higher mythology" of Greece, Egypt or Scandinavia, though, of course, the northern folk-tales are included.

When, later, he came to re-tell the Greek myths for children, he presented his Tales of Troy and Greece (1907) in the tradition of Kingsley's Heroes; and we feel that it is Lang the classical scholar rather than Lang the folklorist who is telling of "Odysseus the Sacker of Cities" or "The Story of the Golden Fleece."

Now although Lang never wavered from his devotion to the old traditional fairy-tales, he did soften in his early austerity towards the literary, sophisticated and burlesque fairy story. Writing in The Academy of 16th May, 1874, he solemnly rebukes Charles Deulin for not presenting his Contes du Roi Gambrinus in their primitive Märchen form: but in 1886 Lang himself re-tells the story of Johnny Nut and the Golden Goose from Deulin's book, and in so doing sophisticates his original still more. Again, in The Academy of 15th July, 1875, in reviewing Mrs. Ewing's Jan of the Windmill, Lang's highest praise for her method is that she "never burlesques things old" as do other writers for children—yet among these other condemned story-tellers Thackeray stands supreme, and twenty years later Lang is praising him for his treatment of the traditional fairy-tale in The Rose and the Ring, where he "burlesques it with a kindly mockery."³

But it was out of his profound knowledge of folktales and his intimate acquaintance with all the formulæ of the traditional stories that Lang drew the inspiration for his own original tales. Only in The Gold of Fairnilee does he stay away from what had become the recognized method of writing a modern fairy-tale; but in the Pantouflia stories, and also in the little Princess Nobody, he is following in the steps of a respectable literary tradition, taking Thackeray as his most immediate model.

In its earliest form the literary fairy-story grew directly out of the folk-tale, and was indeed little more than a sophisticated version of the popular original. Charles Perrault seems to have laid the foundation stone of the fairy edifice with his Contes de Ma Mere Oye in 1697, for although he is telling the old folktales such as "Cinderella" and "Toads and Diamonds," he is inclined to polish his original and to make it as polite and genteel as may be; and, most important innovation of all, wherever his basic tale introduces a ghost, daimon or wonder-working beast, he substitutes a fairy.

Now the true fairy represents, on the whole, a distinct tradition, which may best be dealt with when considering such a work as The Gold of Fairnilee ; but Perrault took the literary product of the old stark folk superstition, which had already been refined and made a creature of beauty and imagination by Shakespeare and the poets, and grafted it on to the Märchen stem, where of old it grew not. For the "fairy-tales" of the brothers Grimm boast few fairies, and they are rare indeed among the traditional tales of other nations.

A year after Perrault's famous little book, Madame la Contesse de Murat laid even more stress on the identity of the characters in her Contes des Fées: but the greatest name in the annals of fairyland is that of Madame d'Aulnoy, who began to produce her fairytales during the first years of the eighteenth century.

"Madame d'Aulnoy is the true mother of the modern fairy story," says Lang. "She invented the modern Court of Fairyland, with its manners, its fairies . . . its queens, its amorous, its cruel, its good, its evil, its odious and its friendly fées; illustrious beings, the councillors of kings, who are now treated with religious respect, and now are propitiated with ribbons, scissors and sweetmeats. The fairies are as old as the Hathors of Egypt . . . but Madame d'Aulnoy first developed them into our familiar fées of fairy-tale . . . It is from Madame d'Aulnoy that The Rose and the Ring of Thackeray derives its illustrious lineage. The banter is only an exaggerated form of her charming manner."⁴

The country of the literary fairies is a most accommodating clime, and absorbs to itself every possible characteristic that it can encompass. Madame d'Aulnoy's fées were human-sized beings who dwelt in courts closely resembling that of Louis XIV; but the genuine fairy of old belief was of dwarfish ancestry, and had been drastically reduced in stature by Shakespeare, and such crude followers of his delicate suggestion as William King and the anonymous author of "Queen Mab's Invitation," thus paving the way for the usual type of tiny fairy common in Victorian stories. And it needed but to graft on to them the wings that grew between the minute shoulders of the Rosicrucian sylphs of the Count de Gabalis and "The Rape of the Lock," to complete the picture.

At the dawn of the Victorian period came the folktales of Grimm to complicate the issue; and so strong was their influence that German very soon became the language of fairyland—of Märchenland, we would fain say, borrowing the title from F. Anstey's delicious fantasy of the fairy world, In Brief Authority.

The year of Lang's birth, 1844, saw perhaps the earliest fusion of Grimm and the French Fairy Court, in a forgotten tale, The Hope of the Katzekopfs by the Reverend Francis Edward Paget, where the new tradition is exemplified very clearly.

And when Thackeray came in 1855 to construct the greatest of this kind of fairy-story, The Rose and the Ring, it remained only for him to introduce the hearty burlesque element from Fielding's extravaganza, Tom Thumb the Great (1730), which is best echoed in the heroic blank verse of his kings and princes, in their deliciously exaggerated characters, and in the names of many of his personages.

This type of story remained fairly static after Thackeray's book appeared, and little progress was made in its development until Lang came to it in the early 'nineties, and E. Nesbit produced her Unlikely Tales in and after 1900.

A few experiments were made after Thackeray to lead the fairy-story away in other directions. Alice in Wonderland appeared ten years later, and produced many worthless imitations, some of which, such as Wanted—A King, by "Maggie Browne" (Margaret Hamer) sought, without much success, to link up the new wonder tale with the older traditions.

Lewis Carroll himself also experimented in this direction, as the children's portions of Sylvie and Bruno show; but the general tendency was towards the tale of wonder in a real life setting, of which George MacDonald seems to have been the inventor, and which Mrs. Molesworth explored further in such of her early books as The Cuckoo Clock (1877), before joining the ranks of undiluted realism beside Juliana Ewing and L. T. Meade.

But Lang, before he came to write his more serious fairy-stories, and before The Blue Fairy Book had made him king undisputed of the nursery shelf, had tossed off, in the midst of his anthropological labours, a little jeu d'esprit that is now quite forgotten, The Princess Nobody: A Tale of Fairyland (1884).

This book seems to have been suggested to him by his friend and publisher, Charles Longman. For the firm had published in 1869 a tall, slim, green volume called In Fairyland: Pictures from the Elf World, wherein "Dicky" Doyle (designer of the cover of Punch and illustrator of The King of the Golden River, and The Cricket on the Hearth) pictured in a series of forty paintings a vast and various number of elves and fairies, both winged and wingless, disporting themselves among flowers and trees, with birds and insects as playfellows. To accompany—but hardly to explain—these pictures, William Allingham had supplied a number of fairy poems.

It made a very attractive volume, and the pictures have a fascination and a charm that is all their maker's own—but it was hardly a children's book.

Lang, however, took most of the pictures and wrote a little fairy-tale to fit them. Some five illustrations are omitted, most of the rest are cut down, while the double-page "Plate IV" of the earlier volume is divided into nine sections which appear, uncoloured, throughout The Princess Nobody. Lang weaves his story round the pictures with considerable ingenuity, and very seldom do we feel that anything is brought in to account for an illustration; one or two that play no particular part in the story have little verses under them, but this is a rare concession.

Another difficulty, that of making the same person recognizable in a number of pictures—for there was little or no continuity in the original volume—is cunningly explained by the number of transformations that befall the hero, Prince Comical. Only one point seems to have baffled Lang, and that is why Princess Niente has wings in some pictures but not in others—and on this, wisely, he makes no comment!

The story itself is very slight, and consists mainly of a regrouping of certain elements traditional in many nursery tales and folk-legends, both savage and civilized.

It opens with the familiar childless King, promised a child on condition that he gives "Nobody" to the dwarfish prophet; in blithe ignorance the King promises—and finds on his return to court that a child has been born to him in his absence, a princess who, until he has chosen a name for her, has been called Niente or Nobody. When she grows up, the dwarf comes to claim her, and the King is forced to submit; but he offers Niente's hand in marriage to any prince who will restore her, and a whole host sets out, including Prince Comical, who is so ugly that all the rest make a mock of him. But he has a kind heart, and on the way he protects a Daddy-long-legs who is being tormented by some wicked fairies, and the grateful creature warns his deliverer not to sleep under the magic mushrooms. Prince Comical tells his companions, but they deride his warning, and are cast into an enchanted sleep. Guided by a friendly Black Beetle, Prince Comical steals the egg from the Blue Bird, who is thus persuaded to tell him where to find Niente. He then visits the Queen of Mushroomland, who transforms him from plain Prince Comical into handsome Prince Charming, and gives Niente to him on the one condition that he shall never know her real name. He, of course, discovers the name, speaks it—and the Princess "softly and suddenly vanished away." However, in the end, the Water Fairy, who was the godmother of the Princess, brings back Niente (or Gwendoline) to him. They journey home together, the other princes come out of their magic sleep, Prince Comical regains the form of Prince Charming (which he had lost when he spoke the forbidden name), and he and Gwendoline live happily ever afterwards.

The attraction of the story is very simple, and is of course inseparable from Doyle's delightful pictures. There is gentle, almost wistful, charm in the echoes of so many nursery tales, and Lang's rondeau at the end enshrines this sentiment:

Au temps jadis! As Perrault says,
In half-forgotten fairy days!—
"There lived a king once and a queen,
As few there are, as more have been,"—
Ah, still we love the well-worn phrase,
Still love to tread the ancient ways,
To break the fence, to thread the maze,
To see the beauty we have seen,
Au temps jadis!
Here's luck to every child that strays
In Fairyland among the Fays:
That follows through the forest green
Prince Comical and Gwendoline;
That reads the tales we used to praise
Au temps jadis!

In 1888 Lang turned aside from the high road of the literary fairy story to seek his inspiration for The Gold of Fairnilee among the dark shadows of the genuine old fairy beliefs. But a year later he returned to the Fairy Court tradition, and wrote Prince Prigio, the first of his Chronicles of Pantouflia.

In this series, even more than in The Princess Nobody, Lang employs the methods which he assigns to the old folk-tales; "a certain number of incidents are shaken into many varying combinations, like the fragments of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope."⁵ "Nobody can write a new fairy-tale; you can only mix up and dress up the old, old stories, and put the characters into new dresses."⁶ "The old, old fairy-tales are the best: it is a very difficult thing indeed to write a good fairy story nowadays, but if I know a really good one, it is The Rose and the Ring."⁷

It is admittedly Thackeray that Lang follows, though just as Thackeray had added to the store laid up by Madame d'Aulnoy, so Lang goes still further than he, drawing incidents and citing authorities very far removed from the simple traditional tales. It is storyland rather than fairyland in which Lang's tales are set, and in Prince Prigio he acknowledges his "several obligations to the Learned," which include Allan Quatermain, Cyrano de Bergerac and M. Paul Sébillot (an anthropologist); while in Prince Ricardo his most obvious debts are to Madame d'Aulnoy, Cornelius Agrippa, Ariosto, The Arabian Nights, and the history of Scotland.

But the guiding spirit is Thackeray's: King Grognio is own cousin to Valoroso, and Captain McDougal, who "maintained a stern military reserve" when the whole court was in tears, is nearly allied to Captain Kuttazoff Hedzoff. Indeed, Grognio claims descent, in the story, from Cinderella and Prince Giglio—by which means Lang "places" his stories in the history of Märchenland.

In the collected edition (My Own Fairy Book, 1896) of his fairy tales, Lang groups Prigio and Ricardo together as Chronicles of Pantouflia (under which title they were later reprinted as a separate volume) and he gives, in a Preface, a delightful account of the founding of the royal family of this "central European" kingdom, which was descended, he tells us, from the "Hypnotidœ" of Greece, and whose crest "is a dormouse, dormant, proper, on a field vert, and the motto, when translated out of the original Greek, means Anything for a Quiet Life."

Lang's own, slightly quizzical, account of his fairy stories describes them excellently: "In truth I never did write any fairy books in my life, except Prince Prigio, Prince Ricardo, and Tales of a Fairy Court, that of the aforesaid Prigio. . . . They are rich in romantic adventure, and the Princes always marry the right Princesses and live happy ever afterwards, while the wicked witches, step-mothers, tutors and governesses are never cruelly punished, but retire to the country on ample pensions. I hate cruelty: and I never put a wicked step-mother in a barrel and send her tobogganing down a hill. It is true that Prince Ricardo did kill the Yellow Dwarf; but that was in fair fight, sword in hand, and the dwarf, peace to his ashes, died in harness!"⁸ As he wrote this in 1910, The Princess Nobody would have been long out of print; while he obviously considers that The Gold of Fairnilee belongs to quite a different class of story.

The first of the Pantouflia series, Prince Prigio, appeared in 1889, a little square green book, printed in green type (and also in a limited edition on large paper, printed in black) with illustrations by Gordon Browne (the son of "Phiz") who ranks with Walter Crane and H. R. Millar, the most popular and successful illustrators of children's books in the later Victorian and Edwardian periods.

The story begins in the usual way with the King and Queen who have everything to make them happy except children. At last, however, Prigio is born. Then comes the question of whom to ask to the christening: King Grognio is anxious to invite all the fairies, but the Queen does not believe in them, and refuses to encourage his foolish superstition. But the guests all refuse to come, and the fairies turn up uninvited, and leave Prigio a collection of magic presents such as the Sword of Sharpness, Seven-League Boots and the like; but the cross old fairy wishes that he shall be "too clever." When the party is over, the Queen clears away all the gifts (which she regards as "pantomime properties") into a disused attic, where they are soon forgotten. Prigio grows up "too clever by half," and earns everyone's dislike by being always right: "He showed the fencing master how to fence, and the professional cricketer how to bowl . . . He set sums to the Chancellor of the Exchequer . . . He found out all his tutors and masters in the same horrid way; correcting the accent of his French teacher, and trying to get his German tutor not to eat peas with his knife. He also endeavoured to teach the Queen-dowager, his grandmother, an art with which she had long been perfectly familiar!"

When Prigio and his two younger brothers, Alphonso and Enrico, are growing up, a Fire-drake appears in the neighbourhood and causes a drought in the country. King Grognio, who hated Prigio even more than other people did, "was not ill pleased, for," thought he, "of course my three sons must go after the brute, the eldest first, and as usual it will kill the first two and be beaten by the youngest. It is a little hard on Enrico, poor boy, but anything to get rid of that Prigio!" This fairy-tale reasoning did not, however, appeal to that Prince (who, by the way, was lying on a sofa "doing sums in compound division for fun"), and he pointed out that if the King were right, the youngest brother, Alphonso, was the correct person to send. Prigio, it should be stated, treated the matter so lightly because he had been brought up by his excellent mother not to believe in Fire-drakes, or anything else supernatural. The two younger Princes set forth in turn, but neither of them came back; and when Grognio called upon Prigio to follow their example, the Prince produced such excellent and conclusive reasons for not doing so, that the King "withdrew into a solitary place where he could express himself with freedom." When he returned from this "solitary place where he had been speaking his mind," he ordered all the court to pack up and depart from the palace, leaving Prigio there alone.

The Prince, deprived by the mischievous courtiers of cloak, boots and money, stumbles by chance on the fairy gifts, uses them, and is most puzzled when their properties begin to be apparent—until he meets the lady Rosalind, and falling in love with her, suddenly finds himself able to believe in fairy things. At length he sets out to slay the Fire-drake, having promised to give the horns and tail of it to his lady, and accomplishes its destruction by setting it to fight the Remora, or Ice-Beast of whose existence his vast reading makes him aware in the pages of Cyrano de Bergerac. A number of complications follow, including the incident of Benson, the butler (who obtains possession of the relics of the Fire-drake and straightway claims to have killed it). And finally Prigio is set the task of restoring to life Enrico and Alphonso, which he accomplishes with the aid of the "water from the Fountain of Lions"; and at the same time he restores a whole host of knights of "every age and every clime" who had been frozen by the Remora—each of whom "lifted his sword and shouted 'Long live Prince Prigio!' in Greek, Latin, Egyptian, French, German and Spanish—all of which the Prince perfectly understood and spoke like a native." So all ends happily with the marriage of Prigio and Rosalind, and he wishes, with the aid of the Wishing Cap, that he may "seem no cleverer than other people," after which "he became the most popular Prince, and finally the best beloved King who had ever sat on the throne of Pantouflia."

Even this bald outline serves to show in what ways Lang departed from the Thackeray model, and how he made this well-explored region so much his own by means of the feeling for the world of fiction as a real place, and by the whimsical use of quotation and literary reference. It is, in fact, only a simplified form of the method with which he had experimented in The Mark of Cain and was to use again with increased effect in The Disentanglers. And it bears a certain relation also to the epistolary parodies which he must have been writing at about the same time, and which appeared the following year as Old Friends.

Such a method was admirably suited to the creation of Prigio himself, who is most cleverly conceived; for he still remains interesting and attractive even when living up to his name in the most aggravating fashion. Another character whom Lang was well able to portray was the Queen, who does not believe in fairies and magic, even against the evidence of her own senses. Is there perhaps a trace here of Lang's attitude of amused petulance towards the "realist" young lady novelist of the period, whom he describes in his anonymous satire "The Log-Rolliad" :

"While female Sceptics scream with acrid scoff
Their Faith that Miracles do not come off!
And then refute the story which they tell
By this weird Portent, that their Stories sell!"⁹

Certainly she is a delightfully trying person, and her stubbornness creates many opportunities for most amusing touches. When, for example, she has, unintentionally, been transported from the court to a distant castle by magic carpet, she refuses to return by the same means, which she still considers "childish and impossible," and accordingly sets out by carriage. "The King, Benson and the Prince were not so particular, and they simply flew back to Falkenstein in the usual way, arriving at 11.35—a week before Her Majesty"—who arrives, very bored and quite convinced that nothing unusual has been happening, right at the end of the book!

Another amusing character is Benson, the English Ambassador's butler. A note in the Preface that "the return of Benson (Chapter XII) is the fruit of the research of the late Mr. Allan Quatermain," suggests that Rider Haggard had invented the incident; and the similarity between the speech of Benson and of Haggard's comic servants (such as Job in She or the butler in The Ancient Allan) may even mean that Haggard lent more practical help: otherwise, Lang has caught his friend's manner very delightfully. Haggard certainly advised Lang during the writing of the story, for Lang writes such questions as "Doesn't my fairy tale need a more vivacious beginning, and what about Alphonso and Enrico?" in his letters of the period.¹⁰

And yet another debt, which Lang acknowledges in the Preface, is to "the lady" whose "invention of erudition" suggested Prigio's final wish which rounds off the story so satisfyingly: Mrs. Lang says that "the lady" was a little girl—her niece, Miss Thrya Alleyne.

The second in the series, Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia: Being the Adventures of Prince Prigio's Son, which appeared in 1893, is a pendant to the original book.

While Prigio had been kept from a belief in fairies and the use of magical properties, Ricardo goes to the other extreme, and spends his time dashing about the world on the Shoes of Swiftness, killing monsters with the Sword of Sharpness, much to the detriment of his education and his party manners. Prigio, in an attempt to teach him a lesson, substitutes shams for most of the fairy accessories, with the result that Ricardo fails in an attempt to restore Prince Charlie to the English throne, and is only rescued from a difficult situation by the resourcefulness of the magically-endowed Princess Jacqueline who is in love with him. Ricardo, profiting by his discomfiture, mends his ways, and (his education having in the meantime, we presume, embraced the works of Madame d'Aulnoy) sets out to slay in fair fight the Yellow Dwarf—who is perhaps the only example of a villain left triumphant at the end of a fairy-tale.

Ricardo's next adventure is with the "Giant-who-does-not-know-when-he-has-had-enough," which ends in disaster, as Jacqueline is captured and shut up in the mountain under which dwells the Earthquaker. Prigio comes to her aid with his superior knowledge, and destroys the monster by dropping on to him a lump of the heaviest substance in existence, namely, Stupidity, which he fetches from its storehouse on the Moon. This also saves Manoa, the City of the Sun, which the Earthquaker was about to destroy, and which turns out to be ruled by Jacqueline's father. So all ends happily with her marriage to Ricardo, and Prigio remains King of Pantouflia—"No need such kings should ever die!"

Prince Ricardo is not altogether as successful as Prince Prigio, largely on account of its lack of plot, and the episodic nature of its incidents, which occasionally seem a trifle forced and unwieldy—while Prigio goes all with a swing and an inevitability that is irresistible.

The adventure with Prince Charlie bears no relation to the plot of the book, and is so alien as to seem a disfigurement, nor is the Giant quite as satisfactory a monster as either Fire-drake in Prigio, or even the Yellow Dwarf in Ricardo. This is the more to be regretted, as there are scenes in the book of exquisite humour, and touches also of poetic feeling that is absent from Prigio. The adventure on the Moon is one of these scenes, and the chapter describing how Princess Jacqueline "Drank the Moon" to learn King Prigio's secret is an even more charming example, and contains a very attractive magic spell, versified from Cornelius Agrippa's Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy:

"Oh Lady Moon, on the waters riding,
On shining waters, in silver sheen,
Show me the secret the heart is hiding,
Show me the truth of the thought, oh Queen!

"Oh waters white, where the Moon is riding,
That knows what shall be, and what has been,
Tell me the secret the heart is hiding,
Wash me the truth of it, clear and clean!"

Prince Ricardo differs from its predecessor in being assigned to a definite period in history, for a reference to Beatrix Esmond, and the introduction of Prince Charlie at the age of fifteen would date it as 1735; from which we would assume that the events described in the main portion of Prince Prigio happened in 1718; but the cheque which King Grognio makes out to Prigio is dated 1768—a sad slip in chronology on the part of that monarch—or of the meticulous historian Andrew Lang!

Actually, Prince Prigio has no very definite period, and Gordon Browne's illustrations suggest the late middle ages or the early sixteenth century. But in Ricardo he observes the eighteenth-century setting with care; as does A. A. Dixon, also, in Tales of a Fairy Court, even though in other respects he does not seem to have read his original with much attention.

As regards this, the last work in the series, very little need be said. It was published in 1907, and is very much an attempt to recapture the atmosphere of the earlier volumes. It is more a collection of short stories than a complete whole, and is built, not very carefully, round Prince Prigio, much of which has in consequence to be retold in a shortened form which departs from the original in a number of ways, such as the marriage of one of Prigio's brothers to the Giant's daughter—though in the former story we are told quite clearly that both brothers "were in love with their two cousins," Molinda and Kathleena, whom in the end they married. Though of little importance, such inconsistencies as this suggest that Lang's power of imagining the world of fiction and fairy-tale as a real world was of a spasmodic and unthinking kind, and not the result of any orderly and preconceived plan. Lang seems to have been a trifle untidy and vague in his habits—constantly losing important letters and manuscripts—and this lack of method is reflected in all his fiction, though it is surprisingly absent from his more serious work.

Tales of a Fairy Court is the most scrappy of the fairy stories, and the book as a whole is inferior to Prince Ricardo. Here, again, the introduction of an adventure in a Scottish historical setting detracts greatly from the verisimilitude. But in other respects the use of the traditional fairy machinery is as clever and as amusingly worked out as in the earlier books; though here, too, the lack of plot makes itself felt again and again.

This was the last of Lang's adventures into the realm of Fairy-land, and is itself isolated from the earlier period when he was exploring that dim region in so many directions.

Only in the editing of the old, old tales did he persist until the end of his life, and to cull these he was obliged to go ever further afield. And the unusual nature of the later "Fairy Books" helped still more to perpetuate the belief that Lang was actually the author of the whole series. As late as 1910, when The Lilac Fairy Book appeared, he is still denying this imputation: "My part has been that of Adam, according to Mark Twain, in the Garden of Eden. Eve worked, Adam superintended. I also superintend. I find out where the stories are . . . I do not write the stories out of my own head. The reputation of having written all the Fairy Books (a European reputation in Nurseries and in the United States of America) is
. . . slowly killing me!"

Notes

1. "Literary Fairy Tales": Lang's introduction to F. Van Eeden's Little Johannes, 1895.

2. E. M. Field: The Child and His Book, 1891; pp. 235 and 242.

3. "Literary Fairy Tales": Lang's introduction to F. Van Eeden's Little Johannes, 1895.

4. "Literary Fairy Tales": Lang's introduction to F. Van Eeden's Little Johannes, 1895.

5. Lang's Preface to The Grey Fairy Book, 1900;
p. vii.

6. Lang's Preface to The Lilac Fairy Book, 1910;
p. viii.

7. Lang's Preface to Irene Maunder's The Plain Princess, 1905.

8. Lang's Preface to The Lilac Fairy Book, 1910;
p. vi.

9. "The Log-Rolliad": College Echoes (St. Andrews), 8th January 1891.

10. Letter from Lang to Rider Haggard; MS. at Ditchingham House, no date.

Roger Lancelyn Green (essay date 1946)

SOURCE: Green, Roger Lancelyn. "Fairnilee and Pantouflia." In Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography, pp. 97-108. Leicester, England: Edmund Ward, 1946.

[In the following essay, Green explores how the origins of The Gold of Fairnilee can be found in Lang's childhood experiences and literary influences.]

As a writer of original fairy stories, Andrew Lang was very much the literary man at play, and was usually content to let his light and Puckish fancy dance gaily among the scenes and situations of a generally accepted and somewhat artificial Fairyland.

But on one occasion he seems to have thrown off his habitual "cloak of indifference and light banter," and, seeking for a new and deeper well of magical and romantic inspiration, to have found it in the legends and memories of his much-loved Border home.

"For us," he writes, "the true poetry is the poetry that wakes again the true self; the wistful soul slumbering undisturbed in the tumult of the world, and only aroused, like the Sleeping Princess in the Scottish fairy-tale, by the magic song"¹ And in his case the magic song was the music of the Tweed and of the waters of the north wandering among the hills where dwelt yet the echoes of old story and old belief.

"A mist of memory broods and floats,
The Border waters flow;
The air is full of ballad notes
Borne out of long ago.

"Old songs that sung themselves to me,
Sweet through a boy's day-dream,
While Trout below the blossom'd tree
Plashed in the golden stream."²

"The spirit of Faery," he said, "is a Northern spirit"³ , and it was this spirit that he invoked when he wrote The Gold of Fairnilee in 1888.

In deserting all the literary traditions of Fairyland and going for his inspiration to the Border ballads and to the ancient folk beliefs and superstitions, Lang was not acting unreasonably or from any spirit of forced innovation: for the fairies of the north are indeed the true fairies, and they were the products of the popular and literary creed of many centuries.

These fairies are of a confused origin—members, perhaps, of an early, persecuted race, dwarfish and earth-dwelling, or perhaps in origin the ghosts of men long dead. Certainly they are of a malignant disposition, and, beneath the frown of the Christian churchmen, came to be regarded as tributaries of the Devil, paying a "tiend to Hell" once every seven years, of an unbaptized babe or of some human willing to become subject to their reign. By night these evil visitants came to the homesteads of mortal folk to steal away children and leave hideous changelings in their place—a superstition still prevalent in Ireland about fifty years ago when a young woman was burnt by her husband on the charge of being a changeling. Such ancient beliefs die slowly, and only the modern age, science, industry and the annihilation of distance has succeeded in destroying them.

Among more literary classes the popular fairy-lore in the Middle Ages became diluted and changed by the addition of classical and romantic elements. Perhaps the best example of this is the Middle English poem of "Sir Orfeo," which tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in a setting of British fairy belief, making Persephone queen of that fairyland under the ground to which, in the ballad, the Fairy Queen leads Thomas the Rhymer.

Another confusion with the fairies was that of the elves of a more Teutonic origin, those elves who took charge of the infant Arthur in Layaman's Brut, endowing him with moral and physical virtues, and making him a present of fairy swords and armour.

Chaucer, in the Canterbury Tales, still speaks of

Pluto, that is the king of fayerye . . .
Folwinge his wyf, the quene Proserpyne,

but to him they have begun to seem beneficent spirits, and they perform a moral purpose in the story of Januarie and his false wife.

It was on such a substratum as this that Shakespeare built when, in Charles Lamb's phrase, he "invented the fairies." His transcendent imagination welded together all the earlier floating beliefs: Oberon, the "fairy knight" of Huon of Bordeau; Titania, another name for Artemis, and so by a confusion with Hekate, none other than the "quene Proserpyne"; and Puck, the more English popular fairy, descended from the Teutonic elves, and became the Brownie, the earliest mention of whom, according to Lang, is in 1518, where John Major or Muir, in his Dissertation on the Gospel of St. Matthew, "speaks of Brownies as jocular spirits who do odd jobs about a house, throw stones and other objects, and are apt to provoke curiosity rather than alarm."⁴

But it was from the pre-Shakespearean conception of the fairy world that Lang drew his inspiration and his materials, nor does there seem to be more than one fairy story of a later date that has any very close relation to the lines on which Lang worked.

This isolated example is called Alice Learmont, and was written by Dinah Maria Mulock, the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, at a very early stage in her career. It appeared anonymously in 1852, and was reissued as hers in 1884. It is quite possible that Lang may have known this story, though he makes no mention of it; but any similarity between it and The Gold of Fairnilee lies simply in the fact that the sources for the central theme in each story were the Border ballads of "Thomas the Rhymer" and "Young Tamlane." Dinah Mulock does not keep very near to the tradition, and shows the influence of the later literary conventions; her fairies, for example, have wings—a very late addition, dating probably from the Sylphs of Pope; but in other respects they claim to be pre-Shakespeare:—"he paints me," says the Fairy Queen in the story, "so little after received tradition, and so much out of his own fancy, that I hardly know my own likeness!"

Lang, however, does not allow any later tradition to influence The Gold of Fairnilee ; indeed, one might almost hesitate to call it a "fairy story" in the ordinary sense—as Lang himself seems to have felt when he excludes it from the list of his original fairy-tales given in the Preface to The Lilac Fairy Book.

The plot is very simple, and concerns little Randal Ker of Fairnilee, whose father is killed at the Battle of Flodden (1513) in the first chapter of the story. Randal lives with his widowed mother at Fairnilee, with Jean, a little English girl captured in a Border raid, for companion. One Midsummer Day, Randal decides to visit a fairy well on the hills beyond Tweed; he reaches it about nightfall, and when he has wished to see the Fairy Queen, she spirits him away to Fairyland. Jean, Lady Ker and Nancy, the old nurse, pass seven miserable years not knowing what has become of Randal; but at the end of that time, Jean, who is now grown up, visits the wishing well on Midsummer Eve, plucks the magic rose, and wins back Randal by the Sign of the Cross. From Fairyland Randal brings with him only a phial of magic water, a little of which, when he had chanced to rub it on his eyes, showed him the false and empty hollowness of the Fairy Queen and her realm. The old nurse, hearing the story, takes the bottle, and by anointing her eyes with it sees where the ancient treasure, the Gold of Fairnilee, lies beneath the soil of the Camp o' Rink; Randal and Jean dig it up, and with it buy food for the people in a time of famine. And the story ends happily with the marriage of Jean and Randal.

The description of Randal's abduction by the Fairy Queen is taken, in one place almost verbatim, from "Thomas the Rhymer," and Jean at the well recalls Janet in "Young Tamlane":

"She had na' pu'd a red, red rose,
A rose but barely three:
Till up and starts a wee, wee man
At lady Janet's knee."

And besides this legendary lore there is also a spice of history behind the story: Lang writes, in a humorous apology for family legends introduced into fiction: "Will the Kers of Faldonside be down on this humble head because I have told a tale in which one of them was carried off to Fairyland? Fairyland was tributary to the Evil One, and the clan may take offence!"⁵

But perhaps the chief inspiration for the story lay in the place, Fairnilee itself, and in the associations that, from his boyhood, had made it dear to Lang. Of the book he wrote to Rider Haggard at some time in 1888, probably in answer to some criticism of the plot: "I dare say you would have made more of the Scotch treasure, much to Arrowsmith's (the publisher) advantage, but I can't do fiction. It's only a lot of childish reminiscences of old times in a better place than 1 Marloes Road."⁶

The amusements of Randal and Jean are clearly modelled on those of the Lang children, just as the old nurse, Nancy, is the very same as the Langs' nurse whom Mrs. Sellar describes in her Recollections and Impressions. And the ruined house of Fairnilee was a favourite haunt of Andrew and his brothers in their childhood; here he and Patrick Lang dug for treasure, and here he came to fish, perhaps with his friend, Alexander Roberts, who built the new house about 1905. When Lang was a boy, Fairnilee belonged to the Pringles of Haining, and later to their descendants, the Pringle-Pattersons. Lang describes the place very lovingly, "The house of Fairnilee, hidden by its woods, on the right hand of the road which runs by Tweed, exactly opposite the house of Yair. Here the Fairy Queen trysted with Thomas the Rhymer. Here the philosopher who now prattles passed many an hour in his boyhood, 'thinking of the times that are long enough agone.'" In those days the stately house, with the coat-of-arms of the Rutherfords over the door, had roofs at least on its corner turrets. But from one turret the roof has now fallen, and on the other, at a perilous angle, sticks a tattered conical roof, like the cap on the head of an intoxicated man, the ivy has been stripped off, the stairs are broken down—all is ruin. Yet this house has the sunniest aspect of any on Tweedside . . . It was a rich house once, and there is room for a large, merry family. Of old, about 1490, it belonged to the Kers—the family of Ker of Faldonside, who aimed his pistol at Queen Mary when Rizzio was slain, and who wedded the widow of John Knox . . . In 1700 the Rutherfords bought the place, and set their shield upon the door . . . The daughter of the first Rutherford, who married Alison Ker, was author of "The Flowers of the Forest," at least of one version of that song, and was the first to detect the genius of Scott when he was a little child. She was born in 1713 . . . She had seen the "Fifteen," the "Forty-Five," the Terror; she had seen Burns in his prime and Scott in his glorious youth . . . Her house is roofless and the ancient lovers' tree behind it has fallen. There remain only crumbling, fissured walls, and the enclosure of the pleasance—The Flowers of the Forest are a "wede awa'!"⁷

Since Lang wrote thus in 1894 the old house of Fairnilee has been "wede awa'" even more, probably by the hand of man; but what remains has been set in order, and the decay arrested. Only about a third of the house is left, the end furthest from the approach, but this portion has been roofed and the windows glazed. One of the turrets remains—that in which "The Flowers of the Forest" is said to have been written; on the ragged ends of the walls where the rest of the building has been pulled down the creeper is now draping itself, while the foundations of the house remain as a terrace wall about two feet above the ground. This picturesque ruin stands in the midst of gardens, terraced banks, and well-kept lawns, while behind it and a little to the right stands Alexander Roberts' great new house, now the seat of Lord Craigmyle.

"There are many trees crowding all round, and there are hills round it, too; and far below you hear the Tweed whispering all day. The house is called 'Fairnilee,' which means 'The Fairies' Field'; for people believed in fairies, as you shall hear, when Randal was a boy, and even when my father was a boy."

The valley of the Tweed and the lands about Fairnilee were of all the Border country the parts most loved by Lang, and it is this which gives to The Gold of Fairnilee its sincerity and its depth of feeling. Nearby was the old church of Caddonfoot, and here it was Lang's dearest wish to be buried: "If a Tweedside fisher might have his desire, he would sleep the long sleep in the little churchyard that lies lonely above the pool of Caddon-foot."⁸ Lang even attempted to buy land for his grave in the churchyard, but it was not allowed, as he was not a parishioner. He longed to lie "like Scott within the sound of Tweed," but it was not permitted. "If I 'walk,' may I walk there!" he said, speaking of the Tweed by Fairnilee: and nowhere does one feel nearer to Andrew Lang than there.

With all this of memory and ballad lore behind him, Lang produced in The Gold of Fairnilee, perhaps the best prose work of his whole career. The spirit and manner of this tale differ utterly from those of all his other fairy stories, and from nearly all else that he wrote save in the most heartfelt of his poems. One can glimpse him from time to time in The World's Desire and A Monk of Fife ; he is plainly apparent in the short story "The Romance of the First Radical," in Aucassin and Nicolete, we feel the same spirit at work; but Andrew Lang, the poet with the wistful, melancholy soul, can nowhere be seen more clearly than in this simple little tale.

The cold, clear magic of the north, austere as the hills of Ettrick and of Yarrow, is breathed over the whole piece. But the austerity is the quiet simplicity of the truest affection, and the coldness is the gentle calm of the love that is beyond passion.

The Gold of Fairnilee is quite spontaneous, quite sincere: Lang was by nature a romantic, permeated by northern fairy-lore and the deep, clear feelings of the north; and when the depths of these feelings overcame his habitual reserve—when the melancholy soul looked forth without the vizor of the gay mind—it was in the poignant simplicity of the northern romance that he found his natural and truest expression. This explains, too, his dislike of Morris's prose romances, which at first sight would have seemed in Lang's own vein. The medium, perhaps, is too near for either to have been able fully to appreciate the other's working in it: it was Morris's method that jarred on Lang, the Gothic decoration, the wealth of words, the warmth and bright colouring—the pre-Raphaelite technique applied to literature. Only in his early works, in The Defence of Guinevere and The Hollow Land, does Morris write with simple and unforced sincerity, and it was these early works alone that Lang rated so highly. That the truth is also present, and, indeed, a deeper, nobler truth, in the later romances of Morris, Lang does not seem to have been able to recognize. His own simplicity in romantic writing was increased and clarified by the classics; and the unpublished prologue and the early chapters of The World's Desire, although in a Greek and not a northern setting, come very near to The Gold of Fairnilee —thus illustrating Lang's assertion that the true fairy spirit dwelt only in Greece and the north. Morris, on the other hand, although influenced also by the classics, and later by the sagas, came to them indirectly, and saw them to a great extent as reflections in a rich medieval mirror. Nowhere is the difference in technique and temperament more easily apparent than in their translations of the Odyssey. Lang condemned Morris's version often and repeatedly, and parodied it on more than one occasion. What Morris thought of the "Butcher and Lang" version can only be surmised from the fact that when Lang, with whom he was slightly acquainted, sent him a copy, he ignored it completely.⁹

Lang's style in The Gold of Fairnilee is best illustrated by a quotation. This, a passage chosen almost at random, describes Jean's approach to the wishing well on the fatal Midsummer Eve when she goes to win back the lost Randal.

"Her feet did not seem to carry her the way she wanted to go. It seemed as if something within her were moving her in a kind of dream. She felt herself going on through the forest, she did not know where. Deeper into the wood she went, and now it grew so dark that she saw scarce anything; only she felt the fragrance of briar roses, and it seemed to her that she was guided towards these roses. Then she knew that there was a hand in her hand, though she saw nobody, and the hand seemed to lead her on. And she came to an open space in the forest, and there the silver light fell clear from the sky, and she saw a great shadowy rose tree, covered with white wild roses.

"The hand was still in her hand, and Jeanie began to wish for nothing so much in the world as to gather some of these roses. She put out her hand and she plucked one, and there before her stood a strange creature—a dwarf, dressed in yellow and red, with a very angry face.

"'Who are you,' he cried, 'that pluck my roses without my will?'

"'And who are you?' said Jeanie, trembling, 'and what right have you on the hills of this world?'

"Then she made the holy sign of the Cross, and the face of the elf grew black, and the light went out of the sky.

"She only saw the faint glimmer of the white flowers, and a kind of shadow standing where the dwarf stood.

"'I bid you tell me,' said Jeanie, 'whether you are a Christian man, or a spirit that dreads the holy sign,' and she crossed him again.

"Now all grew dark as the darkest winter's night. The air was warm and deadly still, and heavy with the scent of the fairy flowers.

"In the blackness and the silence, Jeanie made the sacred sign for the third time. Then a clear fresh wind blew on her face, and the forest boughs were shaken, and the silver light grew and gained on the darkness, and she began to see a shape standing where the dwarf had stood. It was far taller than the dwarf, and the light grew and grew, and a star looked down out of the night, and Jean saw Randal standing by her. And she kissed him, and he kissed her, and he put his hand in hers, and they went out of the wood together."

The Gold of Fairnilee is probably the fullest example that we possess of Lang's true voice as a romantic; apart from this, the voice is heard clearly only in some of the poems, and, besides the more finite instances already mentioned, in some stray passages scattered up and down the vast concourse of his writings. Otherwise, the gay mind hides the melancholy soul almost completely; the one is seldom altogether lacking; we feel again and again that it is there, but the other is the visible, tangible part—the iron mask hiding we know not what Prince of Fairyland. "There was a touch of the elf about him," says J. M. Barrie. "Touch seems hardly the right word, because one could never touch him; he was too elusive for that."¹⁰

It was perhaps part of this very elusiveness that led Lang away from the depth and wistfulness of his Border fairy-tale to the light, humorous, gently burlesque court of Pantouflia.

The mildly satirical fairy-story of the Thackeray tradition is a far easier form of literature to write than anything approaching the old folk-tales and legendary romances; and it was also a type of writing that came most easily to Lang of the gay mind, who confessed once that he was possessed by "the literary follét who delights in mild mischief."¹¹ Yet in its essentials Prince Prigio goes contrary to Lang's own ideals, for it is a burlesque, however kindly, of the old tales. Of course, he was inventing no new genre when he wrote The Chronicles of Pantouflia, but merely carrying the methods of F. E. Paget, Thackeray and Tom Hood one step further, even as they had elaborated the methods of Madame d'Aulnoy and her followers. The Gold of Fairnilee should not be compared with Prince Prigio, any more than Alice with Grimm's tales. It is dangerous to make any very definite attempt to put fairy stories into precise categories, for most of them lie somewhere between the extremes of "primitive" (to which we would assign Alice Learmont and The Gold of Fairnilee ) and "sophisticated" (to which The Rose and the Ring and Prince Prigio belong), and are best left scattered in-determinately between these extremes.

Thus, although it would be unfair to criticize one of Lang's tales by the standards of the other, we can go so far as to say that the Pantouflia stories belong to a lower and commoner form of art than The Gold of Fairnilee. And yet, considered solely as books for children, one would be forced reluctantly to set Prince Prigio first. For lightness, humour, gay adventure have ever been the most popular with the majority of young readers. For every one child devoted to George MacDonald, there are a hundred whose faith is pledged to E. Nesbit, and the same distinction seems to hold good between Lang's two stories. The last twelve years have seen three new editions of Prince Prigio, but only one of The Gold of Fairnilee —and that has been exhausted for some time.

In its own field, Prince Prigio is only surpassed by The Rose and the Ring, but the two are sufficiently dissimilar for there to be ample room for both. Thackeray is a second Fielding—more gentle, more refined, more whimsical—but still the bold dash and the breadth of outline are there. He is the novelist at play, creating strongly-defined characters, however much burlesqued: "Angelica is a child's Blanche Amory, Betsinda is a child's Laura Bell, Bulbo is the Foker of the nursery"¹² , as Lang himself observed. His scenes and characters stand out in hard outline like an illustration by Walter Crane, while Lang's recall the fine strokes and delicate drawing of Leslie Brooke. Lang has none of Fielding's violence, nor his loud-voiced hilarity; as ever, he is gentle, almost dreamy, almost apologetic. To the adult reader Lang is far more acceptable than Thackeray, for his story still amuses in its quiet, unpretentious way, while the slap-stick and the loud burlesque of The Rose and the Ring fail to hold the attention quite as it used to do. The child of today, if we may take the fare spread for him as symptomatic of his own tastes, delights in bright colours heavily and ruthlessly laid on, in awkward and uncouth figures from which refinement has been drained away with sentiment, and beauty with the subtler shades of the imagination. And so Prince Prigio, though still read and still enjoyed, hangs still on the border-line between the few real nursery classics and the oblivion that has swallowed up so much that well deserves to live.

It is the undercurrent of that power and vision which produced The Gold of Fairnilee that gives to Prince Prigio, and to much of Prince Ricardo also, the intangible something—one might almost call it the soul—which makes of them living works of literature that will not easily die. Although they must be regarded to some extent as burlesque, yet the sense of reality in a serious and living world is seldom lost: the characters are never overdrawn as Thackeray's tend to be, nor are they reduced to the cruel level of the everyday world as are Mrs. Gaskell's in her tale "Curious If True." Prigio's adventures are all very serious matters to him, his love for Lady Rosalind is a romantic and not a courtly passion; Ricardo and Jacqueline are more like children than grown-up people, yet they are sincere and simple in their affections, and there is no hint of the lush sentimentality over young love that defiles S. R. Crockett's otherwise excellent children's stories. It is this underlying texture of romance that serves to bring Prigio and even Ricardo near to The Gold of Fairnilee, for it gives something more than humour and charm, though so indefinitely that hardly any particular passage can be pointed out as possessing the magic touch. The simple love-making of Prigio and Rosalind—"So the two went into the garden together and talked about a number of things"—or Prigio's meeting with the Ladies of the Moon: all very slight touches, yet never out of place as they would be in The Rose and the Ring.

In whatever setting he placed his stories, Lang never failed to profit by his unequalled knowledge of the old folk-tales, and their seriousness of purpose is never absent, even at the Court of Pantouflia. "In the old stories," he says, "despite the impossibility of the incidents, the interest is always real and human. The princes and princesses fall in love and marry—nothing could be more human than that. Their lives and loves are crossed by human sorrows . . . The hero and heroine are persecuted or separated by cruel step-mothers or enchanters; they have wandering and sorrows to suffer; they have adventures to achieve and difficulties to overcome. They must display courage, loyalty and address, courtesy, gentleness and gratitude. Thus they are living in a real human world, though it wears a mythical face, though there are giants and lions in the way. The old fairy-tales which a silly sort of people disparage . . . are really 'full of matter,' and unobtrusively teach the true lessons of our wayfaring in a world of perplexities and obstructions."¹³

All this is present in Pantouflia, however much hidden by the humour and apparent flippancy. It is more surely there in The Gold of Fairnilee, for that, as I have suggested, is the clearer, more sincere revelation of the true mind of its maker, and greater book, even if not so successful in its appeal to its professed audience, or so much a book for constant and delighted reading as Prince Prigio.

The author of the Pantouflia stories is the Andrew Lang whom most people knew—the only Andrew Lang to all but the most penetrating and to all but the closest of his friends. To few people indeed was the wall broken down which he had built up between his true self and the world:

"Over the wall we never could see,
Over the wall and away"—¹⁴

as he wrote in a poem which did not seem to him worth including in any of his books. Two other poems, made up in dreams, he published as curiosities¹⁵ , perhaps not realizing how much they reveal his "secretest man." Another dream-glimpse, less known, but not out of place in an account of his fairy-tale writings, lies buried, like so much of his work, in the forgotten volumes of old magazines:

"I seemed to be sitting on the side of a Scottish hill, on Yarrow I think, with a fair lady of great beauty and charm. She instructed me that three times in my life she would appear to me, when I plucked a sprig of white heather. 'But do not pluck for the third time,' she said, 'till your death is approaching, and then I will come to you and be your guide and comfort through the lonely ways of Death.' So, in my dream, time went by: twice I had gathered the white heather, and twice seen the fair lady. At last I was lying on the hillside again, and by chance my idle hand broke a flower of the white heather. Instantly she appeared weeping, and told me that the last chance was wasted, and that I, like other men, must go alone down the ways of Death. Then she kissed me, and her immortal face was wet, and as cold as stone. . . ."¹⁶

Notes

1. "Popular Poetry": Wit and Wisdom, 21st June 1890.

2. "Twilight on Tweed": Poetical Works of 1923, vol. i, p. 23. (Ballads and Lyrics, 1872.)

3. "Comedies of Shakespeare: vii": Harper's Magazine, April 1892.

4. "Argument for the Existence of a Brownie": Illustrated London News, 25th March 1893.

5. "At the Sign of the Ship": Longmans' Magazine, July 1889.

6. Letter from Lang to Haggard: MS. at Ditchingham House (n.d.).

7. "An Old House": Illustrated London News, 27th October, 1894.

8. Angling Sketches, 1891; p. 130.

9. "Advice to Young Authors": College Echoes (St. Andrews), 1st April 1907.

10. J. M. Barrie: Address (to) The Royal Society of Literature, 28th November 1912.

11. Memoir by Lang prefixed to R. F. Murray: His Poems, 1894; p. lxiii.

12. "Literary Fairy Tales": Lang's introduction to F. Van Eeden's Little Johannes, 1895.

13. "Modern Fairy Tales": Illustrated London News, 3rd December 1892.

14. "Over the Wall": first published in Lady Charnwood's Call Back Yesterday, 1938.

15. See Poetical Works of 1923; vol. i, p. 111; and vol. iii, p. 158.

16. "At the Sign of the Ship": Longmans' Magazine, December 1887.

A Short-Title Bibliography of the Works of Andrew Lang

This bibliography includes books by Lang alone; by him in collaboration with others; translations by him alone or in collaboration; introductions and prefaces by him to books by others, and a few contributions to books by others. Reprints of selections or extracts from his books are not usually included. For his more important magazine articles see "Addenda to Bibliography."

Titles printed up to the left-hand margin indicate books or translations by Lang alone or in collaboration, or works in which his share exceeds a third of the whole book.

1863

St. Leonard's Magazine (with contributions by others).

1872

Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, and Other Poems.

1877

Aristotle's Politics—Bolland and Lang.

Odyssey Book VI (privately printed).

1878

The Folklore of France. (Privately printed pamphlet) (Off-print from Folklore Record).

1879

The Odyssey of Homer (with S. H. Butcher).

Specimens of a Translation of Theocritus. (Privately printed pamphlet).

Oxford.

1880

XXII Ballades in Blue China.

Theocritus, Bion and Moschus.

1881

Notes on Pictures by Millais (pamphlet of 30 pages).

The Library.

XXXII Ballades in Blue China.

Introduction to "The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe."

1882

The Black Thief: A Play. Privately printed.

Helen of Troy.

1883

The Iliad of Homer (with Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers).

1884

Ballades and Verses Vain (New York) edited by Austin Dobson.

The Princess Nobody: A Tale of Fairyland.

Much Darker Days. By "A. Huge Longway."

Custom and Myth.

Rhymes a La Mode.

Introduction to Molière's Les Precieuses Ridicules.

Introduction to Mrs. Hunt's translation of Grimm's Household Tales.

1885

That Very Mab (Anonymous). (With May Kendall).

1886

Letters to Dead Authors.

Books and Bookmen. American Edition with two extra essays.

"La Mythologie (Paris)." Article from The Encyclopædia Britannica vol. xvii.

The Mark of Cain.

Politics of Aristotle: Introductory Essays.

"Lines on the Shelley Society." Privately printed poem.

In the Wrong Paradise and Other Stories.

Books and Bookmen. English Edition.

Contribution ("On Dogs") to The New Amphion.

1887

He (Anonymous, with W. H. Pollock).

Cupid and Psyche: Introductory Treatise. 86 pages. ("Bibliothèque de Carabas.")

Books and Bookmen. Second Edition with one variant essay.

Almæ Matres. 3-page pamphlet.

Johnny Nut and the Golden Goose (from the French of Charles Deulin).

Myth, Ritual and Religion. Two volumes.

Aucassin and Nicolete.

"Old St. Leonard's Days." Contribution to Alma Mater's Mirror.

Introduction to Lamb's Beauty and the Beast.

1888

Perrault's Popular Tales: Introductory Treatise 115 pages.

XXXII Ballades in Blue China. Enlarged Edition.

Pictures at Play: By Two Art Critics. (With W. E. Henley.)

The Gold of Fairnilee.

Grass of Parnassus.

Introduction to Ballads of Books.

Introduction to Border Ballads.

Introduction to Herodotus' Euterpe ("Bibliothèque de Carabas").

"History of Cricket." Contribution to Cricket. Badminton Library.

1889

Letters on Literature.

The Dead Leman. From the French of Theophile Gautier, etc. (With Paul Sylvestre.)

Lost Leaders.

Prince Prigio.

Ode to Golf. Privately printed.

Introduction to From my Verandah in New Guinea by Romily.

Introduction to The Blue Fairy Book (large paper only).

Preface and Editing—The Blue Fairy Book.

1890

How to Fail in Literature.

Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody.

Etudes Traditionnists (Paris). Essays from The Saturday Review, translated by H. Carnoy.

Sir Stafford Northcote: Life, Letters and Diaries. Two volumes.

The World's Desire. (With H. Rider Haggard.)

Introduction to Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses.

Introduction to Kipling's The Courting of Dinah Shadd, etc. (New York).

Introduction to H. L. Havell's translation of Longinus.

Introduction to The Red Fairy Book. (Large paper only).

Preface and Editing—The Red Fairy Book.

Introduction to The Strife of Love in a Dream.

Introduction to Rae's Song's and Verses.

"History of Golf." Contribution to Golf. Badminton Library.

1891

Essays in Little.

Angling Sketches.

On Calais Sands. Poem with music.

Contribution to Famous Golf Links.

Introductory to Malory's Morte d'Arthur (Somers' Edition).

Preface and Editing—The Blue Poetry Book.

Introduction to Elizabethan Songs edited by E. H. Garrett.

Introduction to Selected Poems of Robert Burns.

1892

William Young Sellar: A Brief Memoir. Privately printed.

Grass of Parnassus: First and Last Rhymes (with many additions).

A Batch of Golfing Papers (With Others.)

Introduction to Sellars' Roman Poets: Horace.

Preface and Editing—The Green Fairy Book.

"Piccadilly." Contribution to The Great Streets of the World.

1892-1894. Introductions and notes to The Waverley Novels. Border Edition. In all 430 pages by Andrew Lang.

1893

Homer and the Epic.

Kirk's Secret Commonwealth: Introductory Treatise. 77 pages. ("Bibliothèque de Carabas.")

Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia.

St. Andrews.

Letters to Dead Authors. American Edition. (With Four Additional Letters never published in England).

The Tercentenary of Izaak Walton. Privately printed.

Introduction to Cox's Cinderella Variants.

Introduction to R. Duff's Kings of Cricket.

Introduction to Du Camp's Theophile Gautier.

Preface, Contribution, Editing—The True Story Book.

1894

Memoir of R. F. Murray. 62 pages. In R. F. Murray: His Poems.

Ban and Arriere Ban: A Rally of Fugitive Rhymes.

Cock Lane and Common-Sense.

Introduction to Scott's Lyrics and Ballads.

Introduction to Lever's Harry Lorrequer (U.S.A.).

Preface, Editing—The Yellow Fairy Book.

Introduction to Van Eeden's Little Johannes.

1895

The Voices of Jeanne D'Arc. Privately printed pamphlet.

My Own Fairy Book.

Introduction to Scott's Poetical Works.

Preface, Contribution, Editing—The Red True Story Book.

Introduction to T. T. Stoddart's The Death Wake.

1896

A Monk of Fife.

The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart. Two volumes.

Introduction to Poems and Songs of Burns.

Introduction to Parker's Australian Legendary Tales.

Preface, Editing—The Animal Story Book.

Introduction to Roth's Natives of Sarawak.

Introduction to Walton's Complete Angler.

Contribution to The Poetry of Sport. Badminton Library.

1897

Pickle the Spy.

Modern Mythology: A Reply to Max Müller.

The Book of Dreams and Ghosts.

Miracles of Madame Saint Catherine of Fierbois. Translation from the French.

Introduction to A Collection of Ballads.

Introduction to E. About's The King of the Mountains.

Preface, Editing—The Pink Fairy Book.

Introduction to Sybil Corbet's Animal Land.

Introduction to Scott's The Lady of the Lake.

Introduction, Editing—Selections from Wordsworth.

Introduction to The Nursery Rhyme Book.

Introduction, Editing—The Highlands of Scotland in 1750.

Introductions to the Gadshill Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens. 34 volumes.

1898

The Companions of Pickle.

The Making of Religion.

Waiting on the Glesca Train! Poem set to music by R. T. Boothby.

Introduction to Holmes' Autocrat at the Breakfast Table.

Introduction to Parker's More Australian Legendary Tales.

Preface, Editing—Arabian Nights' Entertainments.

Introduction, Editing—Selections from Coleridge.

Introduction to Shayton's Pleasures of Literature.

1899

Homeric Hymns: Translations with Essays.

Parson Kelly. (With A. E. W. Mason.)

Myth, Ritual and Religion. Second edition, rewritten and enlarged.

Introduction to Mackenzie's Prophecies of the Braham Seer.

Introduction to Companetti's Traditional Poetry of the Finns.

Preface, Editing—The Red Book of Animal Stories.

Introduction to Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare.

1900

A History of Scotland. Volume I.

Prince Charles Edward Stuart.

Notes and Names in Books. Privately printed pamphlet (U.S.A.).

Preface, Editing—The Grey Fairy Book.

Introduction to Brown's Rab and His Friends, etc.

1901

Alfred Tennyson.

The Mystery of Mary Stuart.

Magic and Religion.

Preface to Nigel Oliphant's Seige of the Legations in Peking.

Preface, Editing—The Violet Fairy Book.

1902

A History of Scotland. Volume II.

James VI and the Gowrie Mystery.

The Disentanglers.

The Young Ruthven. Privately printed ballad.

Introduction, Editing—The Gowrie Conspiracy: Confessions of Sprott.

Introduction to Victor Hugo's Notre Dame.

Preface, Editing—The Book of Romance.

1903

The Valet's Tragedy and other Studies in Secret History.

Social Origins. With Primal Law, by J. J. Atkinson.

The Story of the Golden Fleece.

Lyrics. Pirate Edition by Moscher (U.S.A.).

Memoir—George Douglas Brown. The House with the Green Shutters.

Introduction, Editing—Social England Illustrated.

Introduction to Dumas's The Three Musketeers.

Preface, Editing—The Crimson Fairy Book.

1904

A History of Scotland. Volume III.

Historical Mysteries.

New Collected Rhymes.

Introduction to Maitland's Apology.

Introduction to Charles Elton's William Shakespeare.

Introduction to Scott's The Lady of the Lake.

Preface, Editing—The Brown Fairy Book.

Introduction to Robert Barclay's Memoirs.

1905

John Knox and the Reformation.

Adventures among Books.

The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot.

The Secret of the Totem.

The Clyde Mystery.

Introduction to Irene Maunder's The Plain Princess.

Introduction to Thomas's Crystal Gazing.

Introduction to Scott's Marmion.

Introduction to Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Preface, Editing—The Red Book of Romance.

1906

Life of Sir Walter Scott.

The Story of Joan of Arc.

Portraits and Jewels of Mary Stuart.

Homer and His Age.

New and Old Letters to Dead Authors.

Contribution to Homes and Haunts of Famous Authors.

Introduction to Parker's The Eahlayi Tribe.

Preface, Editing—The Orange Fairy Book.

1907

A History of Scotland. Volume IV.

The King over the Water. (With Alice Shield.)

Tales of a Fairy Court.

Tales of Troy and Greece.

Introduction to Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.

Contribution to The Poet's Country.

Contribution to Anthropological Essays.

Introduction to J. A. Farrer's Literary Forgeries.

Preface, Editing—The Olive Fairy Book.

Introduction to Dumas's My Memoirs.

Introduction to All's Well that Ends Well (Caxton Shakespeare).

Contributions to The Union of 1707.

1908

The Maid of France.

Origins of Religion.

Origins of Terms of Human Relationship. Pamphlet.

Three Poets of French Bohemia. Pirate Edition by Moscher of essay in Dark Blue, May 1871. (U.S.A.)

Introduction to School Edition of Quentin Durward.

Editing—Select Poems of Jean Ingelow.

Contribution to Anthropology and the Classics.

Preface, Editing—The Book of Princes and Princesses (by Mrs. Lang).

Introduction to Alice Shield's The Cardinal of York.

1909

Sir George Mackenzie of Rosenhaugh: His Life and Times.

La Vie de Jeanne D'Arc de M. Anatole France. Not published in English. (Paris.)

Introduction to Robert Murray's The Scarlet Gown.

Introduction to Charles Murray's Hamewith.

Preface, Editing—The Red Book of Heroes (by Mrs. Lang).

1910

The World of Homer.

Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy.

Does Ridicule Kill? Pirate Edition by Moscher of essay in Morning Post. (U.S.A.)

Introduction to E. Dagnell's Folk Stories from Nigeria.

Introduction to Charles Reade's A Good Fight.

Preface, Editing—The Lilac Fairy Book.

1911

Ballades and Rhymes. New Introduction.

A Short History of Scotland.

Method in the Study of Totemism.

"Religio Loci." Contribution to Votiva Tabella. St. Andrews.

Introduction to J. V. Morgan's A Study in Nationality.

Introduction to Swanston Edition of the Works of R. L. Stevenson.

Preface, Editing—All Sorts of Stories Book (by Mrs. Lang.)

Presidential Address to the Society for Psychical Research.

1912

A History of English Literature.

Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown.

Books and Bookmen. New Introduction.

Ode on a Distant Memory of Jane Eyre, etc. Privately printed poems edited by C. K. Shorter.

In Praise of Frugality. Translated from Pope Leo XII. Poem, privately printed by "W. F. P." Limited to 13 copies.

Ode to the Opening Century. Translated from Pope Leo XII. Privately printed poem. Limited to 13 copies.

Introduction to The Annesley Case.

Introduction to Barnett and Dale's Anthology of English Prose.

Preface, Editing—The Book of Saints and Heroes (by Mrs. Lang).

1913

Highways and Byways on the Border. (With John Lang.)

Preface to Mrs. Lang's Men, Women and Minxes.

Edited—The Strange Story Book (by Mrs. Lang, including Preface).

1923

Poetical Works. Four volumes. Edited by Mrs. Lang.

1932

Chronicles of Pantouflia. Prince Prigio and Prince Ricardo.

1944

Andrew Lang and St. Andrews. A Centenary Anthology. Edited by J. B. Salmond.

Roger Lancelyn Green (essay date 1953)

SOURCE: Green, Roger Lancelyn. "Andrew Lang." In Tellers of Tales, pp. 108-24. Leicester, England: Edmund Ward, 1953.

[In the following essay, Green examines Lang's fairy tales, romantic fiction, and the author's influence upon such other authors as Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M. Barrie.]

By a strange chance Mrs Molesworth, one of the greatest writers of the "child-novel," was born in 1839, the year of the publication of Holiday House, the earliest real example of that type of story: following on this it is even stranger to find that in 1844, the year when The Hope of the Katzekopfs, the first true "literary fairy-story" appeared, was born Andrew Lang, whose name is more intimately connected with fairies than that of any other Englishman since Shakespeare.

It is strange also to realize that Lang is best remembered now by The Blue Fairy Book and the rest of that series—books that he did not write! For all the stories in them are the old tales; he merely collected them, gathered them together from all the nations of the world, past as well as present. Yet in doing this he deserves the gratitude and remembrance of us all nearly as much as Grimm himself.

Some of us also will remember other books by Andrew Lang—books of which he is indeed the author, fairy-tales that are truly his, of the three best of which two have recently been reprinted and may be bought by anyone who wants a really good story, charmingly and amusingly written; also imaginative adventure stories, much less well remembered; poetry that at times is almost great; essays that if we but find them at the right age are indeed among the best of all introductions to the best of English literature; translations of Homer and of the first of romances, Aucassin and Nicolete, a song-story of old France that is one of the loveliest of all fairy-tales. And these are only a few of the things that this strange, dearly loved, but little remembered man wrote. The older among us may read his histories, his lives of Joan of Arc and Prince Charlie; may read about the early myths of the world and the savage men who first told the ancient savage tales that have grown into our familiar favourites, such as "Cinderella" and "Cupid and Psyche"; and nearly as many other subjects as they wish. Indeed, Lang himself once said that he had written every form of real literature ever invented except a sermon and a political pamphlet! And he wrote so much that one of his friends calculated that two hundred large volumes, printed in small print, would not be sufficient to contain it all.

Out of all this we can only mention very little here: just the best of the fairy books which Lang wrote or collected, and a little about his romantic stories, and the very important and powerful influence that he had on the "tellers of tales" of his own period, among whom were such writers as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard, J. M. Barrie, and A. E. W. Mason.

To understand his own stories and the feelings which made him exert his influence on literature in the way he did, it is helpful, or at least interesting, to know as much as possible about Lang himself in his own early years.

Andrew Lang was born on March 31st, 1844, at Viewfields, Selkirk, on the Scottish side of the Border. Below the house where he and his brothers and sister lived flowed the river Tweed, and round about him the hills rose up wild and lonely, haunted by old legends and beliefs, famous at almost every turn for some exciting incident in the history of that, the most romantic stretch of country in all Britain.

Like most dwellers on the Border, Andrew was a keen fisherman from a very early age; indeed, he tells us that he commenced angling at the age of four! His home was a very pleasant and happy one: "a beautiful house and a lovely nursery," as a little girl who used to play with Andrew's sister Nellie remembers. Andrew himself she remembers only as an oldish schoolboy, when he was always "buried in a book, and quite oblivious to his surroundings, and certainly with no use for little girls." In those days he found great difficulty in pronouncing the letter "L," and was consequently known to his friends as "Wang"! His aunt, Mrs W. Y. Sellar, describes him at an even earlier age (eight or nine) as "a handsome and dark-eyed boy," though shy and awkward.

We may catch many little glimpses of how Andrew and his brothers and sister passed their time round about Selkirk, from the best of all his stories, The Gold of Fairnilee. "It's only a lot of childish reminiscences," he wrote, and Fairnilee, only a mile or two from his home, was perhaps his favourite spot as a boy in all the Border. There he would sit and dream on the grassy hillside above the Tweed where, according to the old ballad, the Fairy Queen had met with Thomas the Rhymer; there he would dig for treasure with his brother Patrick, and clamber about the ruins of the old fortified house. Or like Randal and Jean in the story, the Lang children would spend the summer days exploring the hills and woods in the vale of Tweed, following the little streams up to their sources, hunting for golden nuggets in their waters, or making dams; and in winter tracking the hares and rabbits and foxes through the snow with the big sheepdog "Yarrow," or sliding upon the frozen boat pond, or feeding the wild game, made tame by the cold, with porridge. And in the long winter evenings "they sat by the nursery fire, and those were almost the pleasantest hours, for the old nurse would tell them old Scotch stories of elves and fairies . . . of the Red Etin, or some other awful bogle . . . of Whuppity Stoorie, the wicked old witch with the spinning wheel. . . . She was a great woman for stories, and believed in fairies and bogles. . . . Other stories the old nurse had about hidden treasures and buried gold. If you believed her, there was hardly an old stone on the hillside, but had gold under it."

Very, very early Andrew became a great reader—he was so keen indeed that he used to arrange six open books on six chairs, and go from one to the other reading them by turns. The first books that he read were fairy-tales, and very soon the poems and novels of Walter Scott, whose home at Abbotsford was only a few miles from Selkirk. "When I was a little boy," Andrew Lang wrote long afterwards, with almost an air of apology, "it is to be supposed that I was a little muff; for I read every fairy-tale I could lay my hands on, and knew all the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and all the ghosts in Sir Walter Scott, and I hated machinery of every description." And a little later he and his friends would meet in a barn to listen to tales told by an old shepherd. The Rose and the Ring came out when he was a boy, and remained always his very favourite of all "invented" fairy stories, and he also read greedily the works of such authors as Dickens, Thackeray, Marryat and Edgar Allan Poe. But of all "boys' books," he tells us that he delighted most in books about Red Indians: "I remember I bought a tomahawk, and as we also had lots of spears and boomerangs from Australia, the poultry used to have rather a rough time of it. I never could do very much with a boomerang, but I could throw a spear to a hair's breadth, as many a chicken had occasion to discover. . . . I also made a stone pipe like Hiawatha's, but I never could drill a hole in the stem, so it did not 'draw' like a civilized pipe."

At first Andrew lived at home, and went to Selkirk Grammar School, but later he was sent to Edinburgh, where, however, he was still a day boy, living a rather lonely life with an aged relation. In November, 1861, he went to St Leonard's College, at St Andrew's University, where he remained for a year-and-a-half, the happiest time of his whole life. He did exceedingly well in all subjects except mathematics, and after a little less than a year at Glasgow University, and a term of "cramming" at Loretto School, he won a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford, whither he proceeded in October, 1864.

Here he continued his brilliant career, taking a First in Classics in 1868, and becoming a Fellow of Merton College.

When at home during the vacations he was always ready to join in the family amusements, and one of his favourites was writing humorous plays in verse for the family to act. One of these was about Agamemnon, and told how, on returning home from Troy, he found "Mrs Agamemnon" quietly enjoying a game of whist! One actor in these little plays was his cousin Florence Sellar, about ten years younger than he, and nearly seventy years later she could still remember her part in this one, and repeat some of it to me. Andrew was busy writing poetry in those days, and his little cousin Florence was always asking whether he had written still more "pomes." So when at the end of 1871 his first (and best) volume of poetry was published, he sent a copy to her with the inscription "Florence Sellar, my very last pomes."

Andrew Lang continued to be a Fellow of Merton for seven years, during which time he did very little writing, though sitting in the lovely, quiet, old college garden under the ancient limes he began his famous translation of the Odyssey. In the autumn of 1872 he was taken ill with lung trouble, and went to the south of France for most of the following year, where he first met Robert Louis Stevenson, who soon became a great friend of his, and came to stay with him at Merton a little later. But in 1875 Lang gave up his Fellowship, married Leonora Blanche Alleyne, and removed to London, where he settled at 1 Marloes Road, Kensington, his home for the rest of his life.

Now he began writing in earnest many, many essays and book reviews in magazines as well as his own books of so many different sorts. At first he wanted to be a poet, but a long poem, Helen of Troy (1882), had not very much success, and, as was usual with him, he was so easily discouraged that he seldom afterwards tried to write any serious poetry.

Very soon, however, he became exceedingly well known as a critic, and was now able to help and encourage the many young authors whose work he considered was good. Stevenson was the most famous of these, but another hardly less important was Rider Haggard, who soon became Lang's very best friend, and who returned the friendship as warmly: "Of the friend I know not what to say," wrote Rider Haggard, "save that I reckon it one of the privileges of my life to be able to call him by that much misused name; the tenderest, the purest and highest minded of human creatures, one from whom true goodness and nobility of soul radiate in every common word and act, though often half hidden in a jest, the most perfect of gentlemen—such is Andrew Lang."

Usually, it was only his closer friends who thoroughly understood and loved Lang, for he was one of the shyest of men, and this shyness was often apt to take the form of rudeness and abruptness. He was never shy with children, however, and they had always the happiest memories of him: there was Dorothea Thorpe (Lady Charnwood), for instance, who found him "the best of friends at any age," and used to wander round the old bookshops with him, and carry on conversations consisting entirely of quotations from Dickens; or there were the children of W. B. Richmond (the artist who painted Lang's portrait) with whom "he would pass whole days" playing cricket; or his little god-daughter Lilias Rider Haggard, for whom he used to write amusing verses in the books that he gave her; or "the lady" who helped him with the last chapter of Prince Prigio —and many more.

Certainly Andrew Lang must have been one of the most lovable people any child could wish to know.

From his earliest boyhood Lang had been interested in fairies: he had been brought up, not only on those written or collected by Madame d'Aulnoy, Grimm, and the rest, but on the oral tales, legends and superstitions of the country people amongst whom he lived. It is difficult to imagine how great a change has come in the last hundred years, and how solitary and primitive many parts of Scotland remained even at the end of the nineteenth century. Many of the old beliefs and traditions were still alive, and still credited by the simple people whom Lang met as a boy on the lonely moors above Ettrick and Yarrow.

And when he grew up, his interest in fairies became even stronger, though more scientific and academic. The serious study of "traditional tales" (those in the Grimms' collection are all "traditional tales," as opposed to much of Hans Andersen, which is literary), though the plaything of learned men since a certain Mr William Wagstaffe wrote a Treatise on the History of Tom Thumb early in the eighteenth century, had in Lang's time only recently become a properly recognized science. The early Victorian students of the subject had very soon been puzzled to find that ancient or savage peoples all over the world told more or less the same stories. A famous German professor named Max Müller had invented a theory which explained this mystery in a strange and to us rather ludicrous way, but in the eighteen-seventies his explanation was so generally accepted that it had even begun to be taught in schools. But when Andrew Lang was a young don at Merton, he became dissatisfied with Müller's theory, and at last published a famous essay called "Mythology and Fairy Tales" in 1873, which showed how unsatisfactory Müller's explanation was, and suggested another alternative, which is much the same as that now generally accepted. Lang's works on mythology and folklore are themselves rather dull reading now to most people, and they are only mentioned here to show how it came about that he was able to make his collections of fairy-tales with so much authority and such a great learning in fairy lore.

But before this famous series began, he had already written original fairy stories of his own. The first of these is not very important, and is now practically forgotten. It is called The Princess Nobody, and was written in 1884 to fit a series of very delightful pictures by the artist, Dicky Doyle (uncle of Conan Doyle), who drew the cover of Punch. Lang wrote a simple, charming little tale, fitting cleverly in with the pictures; all about the Princess Niente or Nobody, who is carried away by a dwarf to whom the king had promised her by mistake (he had of course promised "Nobody"!), and how all the princes of Fairyland set out to rescue her, but only Prince Comical succeeded in doing so. And he lost her again for a time by disobeying her warning never to speak her real name. However, all ends happily, and the Prince, after suffering various changes, is turned from plain Prince Comical into handsome Prince Charming.

But it is his next fairy story, The Gold of Fairnilee (1888), that is really important, and which is in many ways the best thing that he ever wrote. This is quite unlike most of the other fairy stories of the period, and indeed the only one at all similar to it is Mrs Craik's Alice Learmont. Even more closely than this is, it is founded on the Border ballads and on the old legends and superstitions of Scotland. There is none of the light and charm of the usual fairyland. George MacDonald has a little of the cold, grim conception of the old legends, but Lang breaks completely away from every later tradition, and gives a simple but powerful picture of the true fairyland, the only fairy world that has really been believed in. Mrs Craik tells of the same underground land of empty, hollow beauty and soulless, unfeeling fairies, but she has little of Lang's power and directness of style and emotion wherewith to capture more than the semblance of that world. In The Gold of Fairnilee Lang wrote from the very depths of his feelings—perhaps for the only time in all his multitudinous writings, except in a few of his best poems, for few writers have been so shy and reserved as he. And, with his usual touch of gentle pessimism, he did not know how good a piece of work he had done: "I dare say you would have made more of the Scotch treasure," he wrote to Rider Haggard at the time, "but I can't do fiction. It's only a lot of childish reminiscences of old times in a better place than 1 Marloes Road."

Perhaps it is hardly a fairy story in the usual sense, but rather a legendary romance. It is set in an historical period, the time of the Battle of Flodden (1513); it describes a real place, and many of its characters actually lived. Yet it is a tale of brilliant imagination, and is one of the best pieces of romantic writing of its period. And all this does not prevent it from being an interesting and exciting story, grand reading at any age.

Next year Lang wrote another fairy story, Prince Prigio (1889); but in this he returns to the gay, humorous fairy court of Thackeray, Tom Hood, and the rest. Prigio's mother does not believe in fairies, and so none are asked to the christening of the little Crown Prince of Pantouflia: but they all come, nevertheless, and the cross one decrees that Prigio shall be "too clever by half." The others are more generous, and give him a rare assortment of gifts, the Sword of Sharpness, the Seven League Boots, the Cap of Invisibility, and so on (not for nothing did Lang know more of the old fairy-tales of the world than most other men), and the fun begins when Prigio is just grown up, and chances upon these things one day in the old attic where the unbelieving Queen had thrown them. Prigio is, of course, much too clever to believe in them either (he was in the habit of lying on a sofa and doing long division sums for fun—he was that sort of Prince!)—but they work properly all the same, and Prigio soon turns his uncomfortable cleverness to really useful account as thrilling and romantic adventures begin to befall him. But it is far too good a book for me to give away any more of the plot—and it is quite easy to get hold of a copy of it now, for it was reprinted in 1943 as Chronicles of Pantouflia.

This volume contains also Lang's next fairy story, Prince Ricardo (1893), which tells of the adventures of Prigio's son, who (by contrast) was brought up to believe in and use all his father's fairy properties—with results nearly as amusing, and sometimes more exciting, than those which befell Prigio. It is not quite such a successful story as the former, having little plot, and at least one incident (the adventure with Prince Charlie) which could far better have been left out, but is nevertheless excellent reading, and the two stories taken together may fairly be considered as making a good second to Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring.

Lang only wrote one more original fairy story, Tales of a Fairy Court (1907), which is also about Pantouflia, and though definitely inferior, is none the less entertaining reading; but in 1889 he had issued The Blue Fairy Book, and begun the custom of a yearly volume of fairy-tale, true story, and romance, that he continued until his death.

When The Blue Fairy Book appeared, stories such as those of J. H. Ewing and Mrs Molesworth were so popular as almost to exclude any other type of children's book. Children preferred the story of real child-life and adventure so much, we are told, that they had given up being interested in fairy-tales—just as now it is said that no child likes anything less possible than Arthur Ransome's stories! But it was no more true then than (we hope and believe) it is now. The Blue Fairy Book was popular at once, and the Red, Green, and Yellow Fairy Books following in the next few years met with as ready a welcome. Of course, there is room for all kinds of literature, among young readers as well as among older ones: but many perverse people refuse to realize this—as they refused to in Lang's day. We may enjoy The Hobbit just as much as Swallows and Amazons, or The Gold of Fairnilee as much as The Carved Lions—all are good, and there is no reason at all to say that one kind is the best and the other hardly worth considering: we enjoy the two sorts in different ways, that is all; just as a little later we enjoy (if we are wise) Tess of the D'Urbervilles as much as The Master of Ballantrae, and do not try to say that the first is great literature and the second merely light fiction, just because the one is a novel of character and the other a tale of adventure—and neither ever intended to be other than it is.

This is not straying from Andrew Lang as far as might be imagined, for this was his belief also, and it was his mission to defend romance at a time when foolish critics were trying clamorously to persuade people (and they are still doing it!) that "realist" novels were the only good or great novels that could be written. It was this belief which made him give such warm support and encouragement to so many writers such as Stevenson, Haggard, Doyle, and the rest, though out of the many whom he encouraged, only the first two reach anywhere near supreme greatness, a sad misfortune in an age that produced such great "realists" as Hardy and Galsworthy!

At this time, too, the reading of young people became more and more wide and general. Though Stevenson and Haggard began by writing for the grown-up public, their books soon became specially the possession of boys, and before long of girls also.

Lang is responsible for this change in outlook probably as much as anyone: he believed wholeheartedly in the value of romantic fiction for young readers, and, indeed, sometimes even overdid this very excellent belief, as when he condemned Stalky and Co. for not being sufficiently romantic or idealistic.

Although he did so much to encourage the writing and reading of romance and adventure tales, he wrote very little of this type of thing himself. If we exclude The Gold of Fairnilee from the list (it stands midway between romance and fairy-tale), little remains. There is that strangely moving and enthralling book The World's Desire (1890) which Lang and Haggard wrote together, and which, though it does not quite succeed in being a great book, is yet, as the poet William Canton wrote as early as 1895, "one of the most strikingly picturesque and imaginative—and strangely enough one of the least appreciated—of recent romances."

Anyone with an early love of Greek myths and stories (one does well to begin with Lang's Tales of Troy and Greece (1907) and Kingsley's The Heroes) should take particular delight in this continuation of the Odyssey. For the hero is Odysseus and the heroine Helen of Troy, while the scene of nearly the whole book is Egypt at the time of the Ten Plagues and the Exodus. It is a unique book, for it is as exciting as almost anything written by Haggard, and as hauntingly beautiful in many places as the best of Lang.

The only historical romance that Lang wrote by himself was A Monk of Fife (1896), a story about the life and death of Joan of Arc, and at times rather a beautifully written story, though a little dreary in places, and not very well constructed as a whole. It was an excellent first attempt, however, and had not Lang been so easily discouraged, he might after one or two more experiments have written a truly great romance. But he only tried once more, and this in a very different manner, in Parson Kelly (1900), a lively, entertaining and exciting story of the little Jacobite plot of 1722, which he wrote in collaboration with A. E. W. Mason. This, after the first few rather slow chapters, is a first-rate adventure story, more historically accurate (though one might well take it for a complete invention) and more cleverly written than most books of this kind.

The more one studies Andrew Lang the more one feels what a sadly disappointing author he is—not in the books and poems that he did write, some of which are very near to real greatness—but on account of the feeling that he might so easily have written more of the type of literature in which he excelled, and have written books of undisputed genius.

He seems to have had more power in himself, more knowledge and more capability to write truly great romance in prose or poetry than any other writer of his time—and yet to have been unable to use his full powers to the uttermost. Perhaps, like Prince Prigio, he "knew too much": for his vast knowledge positively got in the way when he wrote fiction, as Rider Haggard noted when the two of them were writing The World's Desire. Certainly his excessive shyness and reserve prevented him from showing in his writings the truest and deepest feelings of his heart, and he has to be greatly moved by some memory (as of his happy childhood in The Gold of Fairnilee ) before he ceases, even for a short time, to be self-conscious.

How romantic an imagination he had behind his usual mask of learning and flippancy can well be seen by the poems that he made up in his sleep, or by some of the strange "fairy-tale" dreams that he had. Two of the latter make such good stories, and are so hidden away in a forgotten corner of his works, that they may well be brought out into the light of day again. The first dream is rather a poetic one: "I seemed to be sitting on the side of a Scottish hill, on Yarrow, I think, with a fair lady of great beauty and charm. She instructed me that three times in my life she would appear to me, when I plucked a sprig of white heather. 'But do not pluck for the third time,' she said, 'till your death is approaching, and then I will come to you, and be your guide and comfort through the lonely ways of Death.' So, in my dream, time went by: twice I had gathered the white heather, and twice seen the fair lady. At last I was lying on the hillside again, and by chance my idle hand broke a flower of the white heather. Instantly she appeared weeping, and told me that the last chance was wasted, and that I, like other men, must go alone down the ways of Death. Then she kissed me, and her immortal face was wet, and as cold as stone."

The other dream is less charming and more ghastly: "I dreamed that I was a magician of the right sort, and that I had long been engaged in a conflict with another magician. He died, and was buried. But this was not the end of him. His vampire was as lively and hostile as ever he had been. In this distress I sought the advice of another mage, who counselled me to open the coffin of my enemy, and pronounce the incantations which would raise his body, and then have it out with him as between man and man. So my friend and I opened the coffin, and found it full of thin white dust. Over this we pronounced the incantations: it did not raise the body of my foe, but the dust became full of blood! Then I awoke, and was not sorry it was a dream!"

Even in real life Lang was ready for anything that sounded romantic, and once, in about 1886, he and Rider Haggard were very nearly concerned in a real hunt for treasure; indeed, Haggard had already paid his share towards the cost of the expedition, when it was discovered that the "treasure" had been stolen from a church in South America by an unscrupulous Finn!

In his later years Andrew Lang wrote little or no poetry, fiction or fairy-tales, but concentrated almost entirely on Scottish history, folk-lore, and Homeric scholarship. He became even more melancholy, too, and towards the end morbidly depressed over public affairs and over the threat of blindness (he had long had sight only in one eye). Yet to the last he remained beautiful exceedingly, tall, languid and very decorative, with snow-white hair while yet his eyebrows and moustache were dark. He grew tired and dispirited (no wonder, after writing in forty years more than any half-dozen ordinary authors in their whole lives!) and even his childfriends found him less interesting company. He died on July 20th, 1912, at Banchory, near Aberdeen, after a sudden attack of heart failure.

It had been his wish to be buried in the little churchyard above the Tweed, near Fairnilee ("If I 'walk' may I 'walk' there!" he wrote), but the church authorities would not allow it. Instead he was buried in a corner of the big "burying-ground" at St Andrew's, the spot which he once described as "so dull, you couldn't see over the wall!"

But at least he lies within sound of the northern sea, in the ancient town that he knew and loved so well:

A little city, worn and gray,
The gray North Ocean girds it round;
And o'er the rocks, and up the bay,
The long sea-rollers surge and sound;
And still the thin and biting spray
Drives down the melancholy street,
And still endure, and still decay,
Towers that the salt winds vainly beat.
St Andrew's by the northern sea,
That is a haunted town to me!

J. R. R. Tolkien (essay date 1964)

SOURCE: Tolkien, J. R. R. "On Fairy-Stories." In Tree and Leaf, pp. 33-46. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.

[In the following excerpt, Tolkien—the acclaimed author of the Lord of the Rings series—examines the value and function of fairy tales in modern culture, refuting Lang's assertaion that fairy tales belong primarily to the realm of childhood.]

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Ellin Greene (review date 15 March 1967)

SOURCE: Greene, Ellin. Review of The Blue Fairy Book, The Brown Fairy Book, and The Green Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Jacomb Hood and H. J. Ford. School Library Journal 92, no. 6 (15 March 1967): 127.

Gr. 4-6—These are hard-cover editions of the Dover paperback reprints published in 1965. All are unabridged reissues of the original editions published by Longmans, Green, at the turn of the century. The original edition of The Blue Fairy Book was allowed to go out of print because of the objectionable story, "The Bronze Ring" which is now omitted from the revised edition published by McKay. This new McGraw edition is the only hard-cover edition of The Brown Fairy Book in print, and it contains "What the Rose Did to the Cypress," a story as offensive to minority groups as "The Bronze Ring." The Green Fairy Book (McGraw) includes five stories not included in the revised Longmans edition. There is a place for this traditional folklore in the collection, but it would be well to re-read these collections in the light of today's social conscience before circulating them to children. Recommended as source material in folklore.

Times Literary Supplement (review date 25 May 1967)

SOURCE: "Older than Reading and Writing." Times Literary Supplement, no. 3404 (25 May 1967): 440.

[In the following review, the critic comments on the appeal of Lang's original fairy tales to modern readers, particularly the stories recounted in The Gold of Fairnilee and The Princess Nobody.]

"Nobody really wrote most of the stories . . . they are older than reading and writing and arose like wild flowers before men had any education to quarrel over." Many of Andrew Lang's stories can be found in other famous collections. Yet, for anyone lucky enough to be given Andrew Lang as a child, it is his version which sticks in the mind. In so far as there can be a definitive telling of a fairy tale, time and again it is his, and the appearance of the new Nonesuch collection, handsomely illustrated by Margery Gill, is a welcome event.

What is it that gives his books such unfailing magic? To try to isolate his charm is like distilling the dew in the morning. It cannot be taken apart. It simply exists because of itself.

There is nothing soft or sentimental about Lang's stories. They are the real thing, with no synthetic overlay to make them "suitable for children". But whereas Grimm or Perrault can be frightening or grotesque, everything that Lang ever wrote is imbued with the same feeling of sanity and good sense. It is something to do with the quality of his mind. These are tales of a kindly man, a man of humour and discretion, and also of far-reaching knowledge and great interest in the world around him.

Perhaps it is this undertow of erudition which makes his own tales so curiously attractive. He wrote only five original fairy stories: The Princess Nobody (1884), The Gold of Fairnilee (1888), Prince Prigio (1889), Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia (1893) and Tales of a Fairy Court (1906). Three of these, The Gold of Fairnilee, The Princess Nobody and Tales of a Fairy Court, have now been reprinted in the Gollancz Revivals series, with an introduction by Gillian Avery.

They are three very different stories, involving three very different kinds of fairies, but in all of them the magic is so firmly rooted in the real that it carries utter conviction. The Gold of Fairnilee is set in the border country which Lang himself knew as a child, and is filled with the ancient, numinous magic of "Thomas the Rhymer". We believe in it, because the people in the story believe in it and to them, though the gold is Roman gold, it is no less mysterious than the terrible, green-clad elves who steal away Randal all the days of his boyhood.

The Gold of Fairnilee is a true tale of faerie, but such is Lang's genius that the Dickie Doyle fairies of The Princess Nobody and the burlesque characters of Tales of a Fairy Court (which contains some early adventures of Prince Prigio) are equally perfect in their own way.

The Victorians may be said to have invented the cult of childhood and many long-forgotten Victorian children's books are deservedly returning to favour. But Lang is something different. There is nothing specialized or emasculated in the tone of voice in which he speaks to children. He knows, none better, the details which will please them. The prince, in The Princess Nobody pays "no more attention to his ally (the faithful Black Beetle) than if he had been an earwig", the wicked magician Zerubabelelogram in Tales of a Fairy Court is drowned uproariously in a sea of champagne, singing to the last that "the magic life is a jolly life" as he goes down for the third time. But nothing is excluded. Lang has no urge to protect children from reality—only to help them grow into coming to terms with it.

Marcia R. Lieberman (essay date December 1972)

SOURCE: Lieberman, Marcia R. "'Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale." College English 34, no. 3 (December 1972): 383-95.

[In the following essay, Lieberman analyzes the traditional fairy tales collected in Lang's The Blue Fairy Book in terms of the sexual roles, behavior, and psychology of women.]

In a review of children's stories for a Christmas issue of The New York Review of Books, Alison Lurie praised traditional fairy and folk tales as

one of the few sorts of classic children's literature of which a radical feminist would approve. . . . These stories suggest a society in which women are as competent and active as men, at every age and in every class. Gretel, not Hansel, defeats the Witch; and for every clever youngest son there is a youngest daughter equally resourceful. The contrast is greatest in maturity, where women are often more powerful than men. Real help for the hero or heroine comes most frequently from a fairy godmother or wise woman, and real trouble from a witch or wicked stepmother. . . . To prepare children for women's liberation, therefore, and to protect them against Future Shock, you had better buy at least one collection of fairy tales. . . .¹

Radical feminists, apparently, bought neither Ms. Lurie's ideas nor the collections of fairy tales. It is hard to see how children could be "prepared" for women's liberation by reading fairy tales; an analysis of those fairy tales that children actually read indicates instead that they serve to acculturate women to traditional social roles.

Ms. Lurie has now repeated her argument in a recent article, in which she objects to the opinion that feminists actually have of such stories as "Cinderella" and "Snow White":

It is true that some of the tales we know best, those that have been popularized by Disney, have this sort of heroine. But from the point of view of European folklore they are a very unrepresentative selection. They reflect the taste of the refined literary men who edited the first popular collections of fairy tales for children during the Victorian era. Andrew Lang, for instance, chose the tales in his Blue Fairy Book (first published in 1889) from among literally thousands known to him as a folklorist; and he chose them . . . partly for their moral lesson. Folk tales recorded in the field by scholars are full of everything Lang leaves out: sex, death, low humor, and female initiative.

In the other more recent collections of tales—as well as in Lang's later collections—there are more active heroines. . . .²

No one would disagree with Ms. Lurie that Andrew Lang was very selective in choosing his tales, but to a feminist who wishes to understand the acculturation of women, this is beside the point. Only the best-known stories, those that everyone has read or heard, indeed, those that Disney has popularized, have affected masses of children in our culture. Cinderella, the Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White are mythic figures who have replaced the old Greek and Norse gods, goddesses, and heroes for most children. The "folk tales recorded in the field by scholars," to which Ms. Lurie refers, or even Andrew Lang's later collections, are so relatively unknown that they cannot seriously be considered in a study of the meaning of fairy tales to women.

In this light, The Blue Fairy Book is a very fruitful book to analyze, for it contains many of the most famous stories, and has perhaps been the best-known and hence most influential collection of tales. It was compiled by Andrew Lang and first published by Longman's Green, and Co. in London in 1889. It was followed by The Red Fairy Book, and then [The Green Fairy Book ], and then by many others, [The Yellow Fairy Book ], [The Brown Fairy Book ], [The Rose Fairy Book ], [The Violet Fairy Book ], etc. In the preface to The Green Fairy Book, in 1892, Lang noted that the stories were made not only to amuse children, but also to teach them. He pointed out that many of the stories have a moral, although, he wrote, "we think more as we read them of the diversion than of the lesson."³ The distinction that Lang drew between diversions and lessons is misleading, for children do not categorize their reading as diverting or instructive, but as interesting or boring. If we are concerned, then, about what our children are being taught, we must pay particular attention to those stories that are so beguiling that children think more as they read them "of the diversion than of the lesson"; perhaps literature is suggestive in direct proportion to its ability to divert. We know that children are socialized or culturally conditioned by movies, television programs, and the stories they read or hear, and we have begun to wonder at the influence that children's stories and entertainments had upon us, though we cannot now measure the extent of that influence.

Generations of children have read the popular fairy books, and in doing so may have absorbed far more from them than merely the outlines of the various stories. What is the precise effect that the story of "Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs" has upon a child? Not only do children find out what happens to the various princes and princesses, wood-cutters, witches, and children of their favorite tales, but they also learn behavioral and associational patterns, value systems, and how to predict the consequences of specific acts or circumstances. Among other things, these tales present a picture of sexual roles, behavior, and psychology, and a way of predicting outcome or fate according to sex, which is important because of the intense interest that children take in "endings"; they always want to know how things will "turn out." A close examination of the treatment of girls and women in fairy tales reveals certain patterns which are keenly interesting not only in themselves, but also as material which has undoubtedly played a major contribution in forming the sexual role concept of children, and in suggesting to them the limitations that are imposed by sex upon a person's chances of success in various endeavors. It is now being questioned whether those traits that have been characterized as feminine have a biological or a cultural basis: discarding the assumptions of the past, we are asking what is inherent in our nature, and what has become ours through the gentle but forcible process of acculturation. Many feminists accept nothing as a "given" about the nature of female personality; nearly all the work on that vast subject is yet to be done. In considering the possibility that gender has a cultural character and origin we need to examine the primary channels of acculturation. Millions of women must surely have formed their psycho-sexual self-concepts, and their ideas of what they could or could not accomplish, what sort of behavior would be rewarded, and of the nature of reward itself, in part from their favorite fairy tales. These stories have been made the repositories of the dreams, hopes, and fantasies of generations of girls. An analysis of the women in The Blue Fairy Book presents a picture that does not accord with Ms. Lurie's hypothesis.

Certain premises and patterns emerge at once, of which only the stereotyped figure of the wicked stepmother has received much general notice. The beauty-contest is a constant and primary device in many of the stories. Where there are several daughters in a family, or several unrelated girls in a story, the prettiest is invariably singled out and designated for reward, or first for punishment and later for reward. Beautiful girls are never ignored; they may be oppressed at first by wicked figures, as the jealous Queen persecutes Snow-White, but ultimately they are chosen for reward. Two fundamental conventions are associated here: the special destiny of the youngest child when there are several children in a family (this holds true for youngest brothers as well as for youngest sisters, as long as the siblings are of the same sex), and the focus on beauty as a girl's most valuable asset, perhaps her only valuable asset. Good-temper and meekness are so regularly associated with beauty, and ill-temper with ugliness, that this in itself must influence children's expectations. The most famous example of this associational pattern occurs in "Cinderella," with the opposition of the ugly, cruel, bad-tempered older sisters to the younger, beautiful, sweet Cinderella, but in The Blue Fairy Book it also occurs in many other stories, such as "Beauty and the Beast" and "Toads and Diamonds." Even when there is no series of sisters (in "Snow-White and Rose-Red" both girls are beautiful and sweet) the beautiful single daughter is nearly always noted for her docility, gentleness, and good temper.

This pattern, and the concomitant one of reward distribution, probably acts to promote jealousy and divisiveness among girls. The stories reflect an intensely competitive spirit: they are frequently about contests, for which there can be only one winner because there is only one prize. Girls win the prize if they are the fairest of them all; boys win if they are bold, active, and lucky. If a child identifies with the beauty, she may learn to be suspicious of ugly girls, who are portrayed as cruel, sly, and unscrupulous in these stories; if she identifies with the plain girls, she may learn to be suspicious and jealous of pretty girls, beauty being a gift of fate, not something that can be attained. There are no examples of a crossed-pattern, that is, of plain but good-tempered girls. It is a psychological truth that as children, and as women, girls fear homeliness (even attractive girls are frequently convinced that they are plain), and this fear is a major source of anxiety, diffidence, and convictions of inadequacy and inferiority among women. It is probably also a source of envy and discord among them. Girls may be predisposed to imagine that there is a link between the lovable face and the lovable character, and to fear, if plain themselves, that they will also prove to be unpleasant, thus using the patterns to set up self-fulfilling prophecies.

The immediate and predictable result of being beautiful is being chosen, this word having profound importance to a girl. The beautiful girl does not have to do anything to merit being chosen; she does not have to show pluck, resourcefulness, or wit; she is chosen because she is beautiful. Prince Hyacinth chooses the Dear Little Princess for his bride from among the portraits of many princesses that are shown to him because she is the prettiest; the bear chooses the beautiful youngest daughter in "East of the Sun & West of the Moon"; at least twenty kings compete to win Bellissima in "The Yellow Dwarf"; the prince who penetrates the jungle of thorns and briars to find the Sleeping Beauty does so because he had heard about her loveliness; Cinderella instantly captivates her prince during a ball that amounts to a beauty contest; the old king in "The White Cat" says he will designate as his heir whichever of his sons brings home the loveliest princess, thereby creating a beauty contest as a hurdle to inheriting his crown; the prince in "The Water-Lily or The Gold-Spinners" rescues and marries the youngest and fairest of the three enslaved maidens; the King falls in love with Goldilocks because of her beauty; the enchanted sheep dies for love of the beautiful Miranda in "The Wonderful Sheep"; Prince Darling pursues Celia because she is beautiful; the young king in "Trusty John" demands the Princess of the Golden Roof for her beauty, and so on. This is a principal factor contributing to the passivity of most of the females in these stories (even those few heroines who are given some sort of active role are usually passive in another part of the story). Since the heroines are chosen for their beauty (en soi), not for anything they do (pour soi), they seem to exist passively until they are seen by the hero, or described to him. They wait, are chosen, and are rewarded.

Marriage is the fulcrum and major event of nearly every fairy tale; it is the reward for girls, or sometimes their punishment. (This is almost equally true for boys, although the boy who wins the hand of the princess gets power as well as a pretty wife, because the princess is often part of a package deal including half or all of a kingdom). While it would be futile and anachronistic to suppose that these tales could or should have depicted alternate options or rewards for heroines or heroes, we must still observe that marriage dominates them, and note what they show as leading to marriage, and as resulting from it. Poor boys play an active role in winning kingdoms and princesses; Espen Cinderlad, the despised and youngest of the three brothers in so many Norwegian folk tales, wins the Princess on the Glass Hill by riding up a veritable hill of glass. Poor girls are chosen by princes because they have been seen by them.

Marriage is associated with getting rich: it will be seen that the reward basis in fairy and folk tales is overwhelmingly mercenary. Good, poor, and pretty girls always win rich and handsome princes, never merely handsome, good, but poor men. (If the heroine or hero is already rich, she or he may marry someone of equal rank and wealth, as in "The White Cat," "Trusty John," "The Sleeping Beauty," etc.; if poor, she or he marries someone richer.) Since girls are chosen for their beauty, it is easy for a child to infer that beauty leads to wealth, that being chosen means getting rich. Beauty has an obviously commercial advantage even in stories in which marriage appears to be a punishment rather than a reward: "Bluebeard," in which the suitor is wealthy though ugly, and the stories in which a girl is wooed by a beast, such as "Beauty and the Beast," "East of the Sun & West of the Moon," and "The Black Bull of Norroway."

The bear in "East of the Sun & West of the Moon" promises to enrich the whole family of a poor husbandman if they will give him the beautiful youngest daughter. Although the girl at first refuses to go, her beauty is seen as the family's sole asset, and she is sold, like a commodity, to the bear (the family does not know that he is a prince under an enchantment). "Beauty and the Beast" is similar to this part of "East of the Sun," and the Snow-White of "Snow-White and Rose-Red" also becomes rich upon marrying an enchanted prince who had been a bear.⁴ Cinderella may be the best-known story of this type.

Apart from the princesses who are served out as prizes in competitions (to the lad who can ride up a glass hill, or slay a giant, or answer three riddles, or bring back some rarity), won by lucky fellows like Espen Cinderlad, a few girls in The Blue Fairy Book find themselves chosen as brides for mercantile reasons, such as the girl in "Toads and Diamonds" who was rewarded by a fairy so that flowers and jewels dropped from her mouth whenever she spoke. In "Rumpelstiltzkin," the little dwarf helps the poor miller's daughter to spin straw into gold for three successive nights, so that the King thinks to himself, "'She's only a miller's daughter, it's true . . . but I couldn't find a richer wife if I were to search the whole world over,'" consequently making her his queen.⁵ The system of rewards in fairy tales, then, equates these three factors: being beautiful, being chosen, and getting rich.

Alison Lurie suggests that perhaps fairy tales are the first real women's literature, that they are literally old wives' tales: "throughout Europe . . . the storytellers from whom the Grimm Brothers and their followers heard them were most often women; in some areas they were all women."⁶ She wonders if the stories do not reflect a matriarchal society in which women held power, and she mentions Gretel as an example of an active, resourceful young heroine (I will set aside the problem of the power of older women for the moment). An examination of the best-known stories shows that active resourceful girls are in fact rare; most of the heroines are passive, submissive, and helpless. In the story of "Hansel and Gretel" it is true that Gretel pushes the witch into the oven; Hansel is locked up in the stable, where the witch has been fattening him. At the beginning of the story, however, when the children overhear their parents' plan to lose them in the forest, we read that "Gretel wept bitterly and spoke to Hansel: 'Now it's all up with us.' 'No, no, Gretel,' said Hansel, 'don't fret yourself, I'll be able to find a way of escape, no fear.'" (p. 251) It is Hansel who devises the plan of gathering pebbles and dropping them on the path as they are led into the forest. "Later, in the dark forest, Gretel began to cry, and said: 'How are we ever to get out of the wood?' But Hansel comforted her. 'Wait a bit,' he said, 'till the moon is up, and then we'll find our way sure enough.' And when the full moon had risen he took his sister by the hand and followed the pebbles, which shone like new threepenny bits, and showed them the path." (p. 252)

After they get home, they overhear their parents scheming to lose them again. Gretel weeps again, and again Hansel consoles her. Gretel does perform the decisive action at the end, but for the first half of the story she is the frightened little sister, looking to her brother for comfort and help.

Even so, Gretel is one of the most active of the girls, but her company is small. The heroines of the very similar "East of the Sun" and "The Black Bull of Norroway" are initially passive, but then undertake difficult quests when they lose their men. The heroine of "East of the Sun" succumbs to curiosity (the common trap for women: this story is derived from the myth of Cupid and Psyche), and attempts to look at her bear-lover during the night, and the second heroine forgets to remain motionless while her bull-lover fights with the devil (good girls sit still). The lovers disappear when their commands are broken. The girls travel to the ends of the earth seeking them, but they cannot make themselves seen or recognized by their men until the last moment. The Master-maid, in a story whose conclusion resembles these other two, is concealed in a backroom of a giant's house. A prince, looking for adventure, comes to serve the giant, who gives him tasks that are impossible to accomplish. The Master-maid knows the giant's secrets and tells the prince how to do the impossible chores. She knows what to do, but does not act herself. When the giant tells her to kill the prince, she helps the prince to run away, escaping with him. Without her advice the escape would be impossible, yet apparently she had never attempted to run away herself, but had been waiting in the back room for a prince-escort to show up.

Most of the heroines in The Blue Fairy Book, however, are entirely passive, submissive, and helpless. This is most obviously true of the Sleeping Beauty, who lies asleep, in the ultimate state of passivity, waiting for a brave prince to awaken and save her. (She is like the Snow-White of "Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs," who lies in a death-like sleep, her beauty being visible through her glass coffin, until a prince comes along and falls in love with her.) When the prince does penetrate the tangle of thorns and brambles, enters the castle, finds her chamber, and awakens her, the princess opens her eyes and says, "'Is it you, my Prince? You have waited a long while.'" (p. 59) This is not the end of the story, although it is the most famous part. The Sleeping Beauty, who was, while enchanted, the archetype of the passive, waiting beauty, retains this character in the second part, when she is awake. She marries the prince, and has two children who look savory to her mother-in-law, an Ogress with a taste for human flesh. While her son is away on a hunting trip the Ogress Queen orders the cook to kill and serve for dinner first one child and then the other. The cook hides the children, serving first a roast lamb and then a kid, instead. When the Ogress demands that her daughter-in-law be killed next, the cook tells her the Queen-mother's orders. The young Queen folds up at once: "'Do it; do it' (said she, stretching out her neck). 'Execute your orders, and then I shall go and see my children . . . whom I so much and so tenderly loved.'" (p. 62) The compassionate cook, however, decides to hide her too, and the young King returns in time to save them all from the Ogress' wrath and impending disaster.

Cinderella plays as passive a role in her story. After leaving her slipper at the ball she has nothing more to do but stay home and wait. The prince has commanded that the slipper be carried to every house in the kingdom, and that it be tried on the foot of every woman. Cinderella can remain quietly at home; the prince's servant will come to her house and will discover her identity. Cinderella's male counterpart, Espen Cinderlad, the hero of a great many Norwegian folk tales, plays a very different role. Although he is the youngest of the three brothers, as Cinderella is the youngest sister, he is a Cinderlad by choice. His brothers may ridicule and despise him, but no one forces him to sit by the fire and poke in the ashes all day; he elects to do so. All the while, he knows that he is the cleverest of the three, and eventually he leaves the fireside and wins a princess and half a kingdom by undertaking some adventure or winning a contest.

The Princess on the Glass Hill is the prototype of female passivity. The whole story is in the title; the Princess has been perched somehow on top of a glass hill, and thus made virtually inaccessible. There she sits, a waiting prize for whatever man can ride a horse up the glassy slope. So many of the heroines of fairy stories, including the well-known Rapunzel, are locked up in towers, locked into a magic sleep, imprisoned by giants, or otherwise enslaved, and waiting to be rescued by a passing prince, that the helpless, imprisoned maiden is the quintessential heroine of the fairy tale.

In the interesting story of "The Goose-Girl," an old Queen sends off her beautiful daughter, accompanied by a maid, to be married to a distant prince. The Queen gives her daughter a rag stained with three drops of her own blood. During the journey the maid brusquely refuses to bring the Princess a drink of water, saying "'I don't mean to be your servant any longer.'" The intimidated Princess only murmurs, "'Oh! heaven, what am I to do?'" (p. 266) This continues, the maid growing ruder, the Princess meeker, until she loses the rag, whereupon the maid rejoices, knowing that she now has full power over the girl, "for in losing the drops of blood the Princess had become weak and powerless." (p. 268) The maid commands the Princess to change clothes and horses with her, and never to speak to anyone about what has happened. The possession of the rag had assured the Princess' social status; without it she becomes dé-classée, and while her behavior was no less meek and docile before losing the rag than afterwards, there is no formal role reversal until she loses it. Upon their arrival the maid presents herself as the Prince's bride, while the Princess is given the job of goose-girl. At length, due solely to the intervention of others, the secret is discovered, the maid killed, and the goose-girl married to the Prince.

The heroine of "Felicia and the Pot of Pinks" is equally submissive to ill-treatment. After their father's death, her brother forbids her to sit on his chairs:

Felicia, who was very gentle, said nothing, but stood up crying quietly; while Bruno, for that was her brother's name, sat comfortably by the fire. Presently, when suppertime came, Bruno had a delicious egg, and he threw the shell to Felicia, saying:

'There, that is all I can give you; if you don't like it, go out and catch frogs; there are plenty of them in the marsh close by.' Felicia did not answer but she cried more bitterly than ever, and went away to her own little room.

(p. 148)

The underlying associational pattern of these stories links the figures of the victimized girl and the interesting girl; it is always the interesting girl, the special girl, who is in trouble. It needs to be asked whether a child's absorption of the associational patterns found in these myths and legends may not sensitize the personality, rendering it susceptible to melodramatic self-conceptions and expectations. Because victimized girls like Felicia, the Goose-girl, and Cinderella are invariably rescued and rewarded, indeed glorified, children learn that suffering goodness can afford to remain meek, and need not and perhaps should not strive to defend itself, for if it did so perhaps the fairy godmother would not turn up for once, to set things right at the end. Moreover, the special thrill of persecution, bordering at once upon self-pity and self-righteousness, would have to be surrendered. Submissive, meek, passive female behavior is suggested and rewarded by the action of these stories.

Many of the girls are not merely passive, however; they are frequently victims and even martyrs as well. The Cinderella story is not simply a rags-to-riches tale. Cinderella is no Horatio Alger; her name is partly synonymous with female martyrdom. Her ugly older sisters, who are jealous of her beauty, keep her dressed in rags and hidden at home. They order her to do all the meanest housework. Cinderella bears this ill-treatment meekly: she is the patient sufferer, an object of pity. When the older sisters go off to the ball she bursts into tears; it is only the sound of her weeping that arouses her fairy godmother. Ultimately, her loneliness and her suffering are sentimentalized and become an integral part of her glamor. "Cinderella" and the other stories of this type show children that the girl who is singled out for rejection and bad treatment, and who submits to her lot, weeping but never running away, has a special compensatory destiny awaiting her. One of the pleasures provided by these stories is that the child-reader is free to indulge in pity, to be sorry for the heroine. The girl in tears is invariably the heroine; that is one of the ways the child can identify the heroine, for no one mistakenly feels sorry for the ugly older sisters, or for any of the villains or villainesses. When these characters suffer, they are only receiving their "just deserts." The child who dreams of being a Cinderella dreams perforce not only of being chosen and elevated by a prince, but also of being a glamorous sufferer or victim. What these stories convey is that women in distress are interesting. Fairy stories provide children with a concentrated early introduction to the archetype of the suffering heroine, who is currently alive (though not so well) under the name of Jenny Cavilleri.

The girl who marries Blue Beard is a prime example of the helpless damsel-victim, desperately waiting for a rescuer. She knows that her husband will not hesitate to murder her, because she has seen the corpses of his other murdered wives in the forbidden closet. The enraged Blue Beard announces that he will cut off her head; he gives her fifteen minutes to say her prayers, after which he bellows for her so loudly that the house trembles:

The distressed wife came down, and threw herself at his feet, all in tears, with her hair about her shoulders.

'This signifies nothing,' said Blue Beard: 'you must die': then, taking hold of her hair with one hand, and lifting up the sword with the other, he was going to take off her head. The poor lady, turning about to him, and looking at him with dying eyes, desired him to afford her one little moment to recollect herself.

'No, no,' said he, 'recommend thyself to God,' and was just about to strike. . . .

(p. 295)

"At this very instant," as the story continues, her brothers rush in and save her.

It is worth noticing that the one Greek legend that Lang included in The Blue Fairy Book is the Perseus story, which Lang entitled "The Terrible Head." It features two utterly helpless women, the first being Danae, who is put into a chest with her infant son, Perseus, and thrown out to sea, to drown or starve or drift away. Fortunately the chest comes to land, and Danae and her baby are saved. At the conclusion of the story, as the grown-up Perseus is flying home with the Gorgon's head, he looks down and sees "a beautiful girl chained to a stake at the high-water mark of the sea. The girl was so frightened or so tired that she was only prevented from falling by the iron chain about her waist, and there she hung, as if she were dead." (p. 190) Perseus learns that she has been left there as a sacrifice to a sea-monster; he cuts her free, kills the monster, and carries her off as his bride.

Few other rescues are as dramatic as that of Blue Beard's wife or of Andromeda, but the device of the rescue itself is constantly used. The sexes of the rescuer and the person in danger are almost as constantly predictable; men come along to rescue women who are in danger of death, or are enslaved, imprisoned, abused, or plunged into an enchanted sleep which resembles death. Two well-known stories that were not included in The Blue Fairy Book, "Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Rapunzel," are notable examples of this type: Snow-White is saved from a sleep which everyone assumes is death by the arrival of a handsome prince; Rapunzel, locked up in a tower by a cruel witch, is found and initially rescued by her prince.

Whatever the condition of younger women in fairy tales, Alison Lurie claims that the older women in the tales are often more active and powerful than men. It is true that some older women in fairy tales have power, but of what kind? In order to understand the meaning of women's power in fairy tales, we must examine the nature, the value, and the use of their power.

There are only a few powerful good women in The Blue Fairy Book, and they are nearly all fairies: the tiny, jolly, ugly old fairy in "Prince Hyacinth," the stately fairies in "Prince Darling," "Toads and Diamonds," and "Felicia," and of course Cinderella's fairy godmother. They are rarely on the scene; they only appear in order to save young people in distress, and then they're off again. These good fairies have gender only in a technical sense; to children, they probably appear as women only in the sense that dwarfs and wizards appear as men. They are not human beings, they are asexual, and many of them are old. They are not examples of powerful women with whom children can identify as role models; they do not provide meaningful alternatives to the stereotype of the younger, passive heroine. A girl may hope to become a princess, but can she ever become a fairy?

Powerful, bad, older women appear to outnumber powerful, good ones. A certain number of these are also not fully human; they are fairies, witches, trolls, or Ogresses. It is generally implied that such females are wicked because of their race: thus the young king in "The Sleeping Beauty" fears his mother while he loves her, "for she was of the race of the Ogres, and the King (his father) would never have married her had it not been for her vast riches; it was even whispered about the Court that she had Ogreish inclinations, and that, whenever she saw little children passing by, she had all the difficulty in the world to avoid falling upon them." (p. 60) Either extra-human race or extreme ugliness is often associated with female wickedness, and in such a way as to suggest that they explain the wickedness. The evil Fairy of the Desert in "The Yellow Dwarf" is described as a "tall old woman, whose ugliness was even more surprising than her extreme old age." (p. 39) The sheep-king in "The Wonderful Sheep" tells Miranda that he was transformed into a sheep by a fairy "'whom I had known as long as I could remember, and whose ugliness had always horrified me.'" (p. 223) The bear-prince in "East of the Sun" is under a spell cast by a troll-hag, and the fairy who considers herself slighted by the Sleeping Beauty's parents is described as being old: the original illustration for Lang's book shows her to be an ugly old crone, whereas the other fairies are young and lovely.

In the case of wicked but human women, it is also implied that being ill-favored is corollary to being ill-natured, as with Cinderella's step-mother and step-sisters. Cinderella is pretty and sweet, like her dead mother. The step-mother is proud and haughty, and her two daughters by her former husband are like her, so that their ill-temper appears to be genetic, or at least transmitted by the mother. The circumstances in "Toads and Diamonds" are similar: the old widow has two daughters, of whom the eldest resembles her mother "in face and humour. . . . They were both so disagreeable and so proud that there was no living with them. The youngest, who was the very picture of her father for courtesy and sweetness of temper, was withal one of the most beautiful girls ever seen." (p. 274)

Powerful good women are nearly always fairies, and they are remote: they come only when desperately needed. Whether human or extra-human, those women who are either partially or thoroughly evil are generally shown as active, ambitious, strong-willed and, most often, ugly. They are jealous of any woman more beautiful than they, which is not surprising in view of the power deriving from beauty in fairy tales. In "Cinderella" the domineering step-mother and step-sisters contrast with the passive heroine. The odious step-mother wants power, and successfully makes her will prevail in the house; we are told that Cinderella bore her ill-treatment patiently, "and dared not tell her father, who would have rattled her off; for his wife governed him entirely." The wicked maid in "The Goose-Girl" is not described as being either fair or ugly (except that the Princess appears to be fairer than the maid at the end), but like the other female villains she is jealous of beauty and greedy for wealth. She decides to usurp the Princess' place, and being evil she is also strong and determined, and initially successful. Being powerful is mainly associated with being unwomanly.

The moral value of activity thus becomes sex-linked.⁷ The boy who sets out to seek his fortune, like Dick Whittington, Jack the Giant-Killer, or Espen Cinderlad, is a stock figure and, provided that he has a kind heart, is assured of success. What is praiseworthy in males, however, is rejected in females; the counterpart of the energetic, aspiring boy is the scheming, ambitious woman. Some heroines show a kind of strength in their ability to endure, but they do not actively seek to change their lot. (The only exceptions to this rule are in the stories that appear to derive from the myth of Cupid and Psyche: "East of the Sun" and "The Black Bull of Norroway," in which the heroines seek their lost lovers. We may speculate whether the pre-Christian origin of these stories diminishes the stress placed on female passivity and acceptance, but this is purely conjectural.) We can remark that these stories reflect a bias against the active, ambitious, "pushy" woman, and have probably also served to instill this bias in young readers. They establish a dichotomy between those women who are gentle, passive, and fair, and those who are active, wicked, and ugly. Women who are powerful and good are never human; those women who are human, and who have power or seek it, are nearly always portrayed as repulsive.

While character depiction in fairy tales is, to be sure, meagre, and we can usually group characters according to temperamental type (beautiful and sweet, or ugly and evil), there are a couple of girls who are not portrayed as being either perfectly admirable or as wicked. The princesses in "The Yellow Dwarf," "Goldilocks," and "Trusty John" are described as being spoiled, vain, and wilful: the problem is that they refuse to marry anyone. The Queen in "The Yellow Dwarf" expostulates with her daughter:

'Bellissima,' she said, 'I do wish you would not be so proud. What makes you despise all these nice kings? I wish you to marry one of them, and you do not try to please me.'

'I am so happy,' Bellissima answered: 'do leave me in peace, madam. I don't want to care for anyone.'

'But you would be very happy with any of these princes,' said the Queen, 'and I shall be very angry if you fall in love with anyone who is not worthy of you.'

But the Princess thought so much of herself that she did not consider any one of her lovers clever or handsome enough for her; and her mother, who was getting really angry at her determination not to be married, began to wish that she had not allowed her to have her own way so much.

(p. 31)

Princess Goldilocks similarly refuses to consider marriage, although she is not as adamant as Bellissima. The princess in the Grimms' story, "King Thrush-beard," which is not included in this collection, behaves like Bellissima; her angry father declares that he will give her to the very next comer, whatever his rank: the next man to enter the castle being a beggar, the king marries his daughter to him. This princess suffers poverty with her beggar-husband, until he reveals himself as one of the suitor kings she had rejected. Bellissima is punished more severely; indeed, her story is remarkable because it is one of the rare examples outside of H. C. Andersen of a story with a sad ending. Because Bellissima had refused to marry, she is forced by a train of circumstances to promise to marry the ugly Yellow Dwarf. She tries to avoid this fate by consenting to wed one of her suitors at last, but the dwarf intervenes at the wedding. Ultimately the dwarf kills the suitor, whom Bellissima had come to love, and she dies of a broken heart. A kind mermaid transforms the ill-fated lovers into two palm trees.

These princesses are portrayed as reprehensible because they refuse to marry; hence, they are considered "stuck-up," as children would say. The alternate construction, that they wished to preserve their freedom and their identity, is denied or disallowed (although Bellissima had said to her mother, "'I am so happy, do leave me in peace, madam.'") There is a sense of triumph when a wilful princess submits or is forced to submit to a husband.

The Blue Fairy Book is filled with weddings, but it shows little of married life. It contains thirty stories in which marriage is a component, but eighteen of these stories literally end with the wedding. Most of the other twelve show so little of the marital life of the hero or heroine that technically they too may be said to end with marriage. Only a few of the stories show any part of the married life of young people, or even of old ones. The Sleeping Beauty is a totally passive wife and mother, and Blue Beard's wife, like the Sleeping Beauty, depends on a man to rescue her. Whereas the Sleeping Beauty is menaced by her mother-in-law who, being an Ogress, is only half-human, Blue Beard's wife is endangered by being the wife of her ferocious husband. (Her error may be ascribed to her having an independent sense of curiosity, or to rash disobedience.) This widely-known story established a potent myth in which a helpless woman violates her husband's arbitrary command and then is subject to his savage, implacable fury. It is fully the counterpoise of the other stock marital situation containing a scheming, overbearing wife and a timid, hen-pecked husband, as in "Cinderella"; moreover, whereas the domineering wife is always implicitly regarded as abhorrent, the helpless, threatened, passive wife is uncritically viewed and thus implicitly approved of. As Andromeda, Blue Beard's wife, or the imperiled Pauline, her function is to provide us with a couple of thrills of a more or less sadistic tincture.

The other peculiar aspect of the depiction of marriage in these stories is that nearly all the young heroes and heroines are the children of widows or widowers; only five of the thirty-seven stories in the book contain a set of parents: these include "The Sleeping Beauty," in which the parents leave the castle when the hundred-year enchantment begins, and the two similar tales of "Little Thumb" and "Hansel and Gretel," in both of which the parents decide to get rid of their children because they are too poor to feed them. (In "Little Thumb" the husband persuades his reluctant wife, and in "Hansel and Gretel" the wife persuades her reluctant husband.) Cinderella has two parents, but the only one who plays a part in the story is her step-mother. In general, the young people of these stories are described as having only one parent, or none. Although marriage is such a constant event in the stories, and is central to their reward system, few marriages are indeed shown in fairy tales. Like the White Queen's rule, there's jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today. The stories can be described as being preoccupied with marriage without portraying it; as a real condition, it's nearly always off-stage.

In effect, these stories focus upon courtship, which is magnified into the most important and exciting part of a girl's life, brief though courtship is, because it is the part of her life in which she most counts as a person herself. After marriage she ceases to be wooed, her consent is no longer sought, she derives her status from her husband, and her personal identity is thus snuffed out. When fairy tales show courtship as exciting, and conclude with marriage, and the vague statement that "they lived happily ever after," children may develop a deep-seated desire always to be courted, since marriage is literally the end of the story.

The controversy about what is biologically determined and what is learned has just begun. These are the questions now being asked, and not yet answered: to what extent is passivity a biological attribute of females; to what extent is it culturally determined? Perhaps it will be argued that these stories show archetypal female behavior, but one may wonder to what extent they reflect female attributes, or to what extent they serve as training manuals for girls? If one argued that the characteristically passive behavior of female characters in fairy stories is a reflection of an attribute inherent in female personality, would one also argue, as consistency would require, that the mercantile reward system of fairy stories reflects values that are inherent in human nature? We must consider the possibility that the classical attributes of "femininity" found in these stories are in fact imprinted in children and reinforced by the stories themselves. Analyses of the influence of the most popular children's literature may give us an insight into some of the origins of psycho-sexual identity.

Notes

1. Alison Lurie, "Fairy Tale Liberation," The New York Review of Books, December 17, 1970,p. 42.

2. Lurie, "Witches and Fairies: Fitzgerald to Up-dike," The New York Review of Books, December 2, 1971, p. 6.

3. Andrew Lang, ed., The Green Fairy Book (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. ix-xi.

4. In these stories, the girl who marries a beast must agree to accept and love a beast as a husband; the girl must give herself to a beast in order to get a man. When she is willing to do this, he can shed his frightening, rough appearance and show his gentler form, demonstrating the softening agency of women (as in the story of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester). These heroines have an agentive role, insofar as they are responsible for the literal reformation of the male.

5. Lang, ed., The Blue Fairy Book (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 98. All quotations are from this edition.

6. Lurie, "Fairy Tale Liberation," loc. cit.

7. Ruth Kelso's Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956) demonstrates that "the moral ideal for the lady is essentially Christian . . . as that for the gentleman is essentially pagan. For him the ideal is self-expansion and realization. . . . For the lady the direct opposite is prescribed. The eminently Christian virtues of chastity, humility, piety, and patience under suffering and wrong, are the necessary virtues." (p. 36)

Language Arts (review date March 1979)

SOURCE: Review of The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and The Green Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, re-edited by Brian Alderson, illustrated by John Lawrence, Faith Jacques, and Antony Maitland. Language Arts 56, no. 3 (March 1979): 292-93.

Through new translations and reorganization, Alderson accomplishes Lang's original goal of presenting delightful folk stories to children [in The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and The Green Fairy Book ], while rectifying Lang's weaknesses which had been criticized—the inclusion of literary fairy tales and tampering with the original tales to please Victorian tastes. Alderson's "Notes" are as much a tribute to literary detection as to scholarship, sure to engross the reader as much as the tales themselves. The editor includes Lang's introduction and prefaces to the three original volumes. Comparison of the "new" "Three Little Pigs" with Lang's version in the Green Fairy Book gives you an idea of Alderson's attainments. The Blue Fairy Book contains the most familiar stories, while succeeding volumes present more unfamiliar ones from a greater number of countries. Black/white illustrations hew to the spirit of the collection, without detracting from the text. Maitland's seem lighter and more humorous, with Jacques' having a more vigorous quality. Illustrators and editor have made it possible for a new generation to enjoy a near-classic anthology neglected for many decades.

Dorothea Scott (review date April 1979)

SOURCE: Scott, Dorothea. Review of The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and The Green Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, re-edited by Brian Alderson, illustrated by John Lawrence, Faith Jacques, and Antony Maitland. School Library Journal 25, no. 8 (April 1979): 58.

Gr. 4 Up—In these re-editings of the classic Colour anthologies, [The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and The Green Fairy Book, ] Alderson's outstanding contribution lies in the scholarly notes to the revised versions of the stories chosen by Lang where he has traced sources for nearly all the tales, a Herculean task which deserves our admiration. (Lang's own references are at best incomplete and at worst, downright wrong.) In the Blue Fairy Book, the choice naturally fell on the most popular stories of Perrault and Grimm. In the case of the first, Lang's selection of the earliest English Samber-Gent versions of 1729 are retained with only minor changes. With the seven stories from Grimm in the Blue, the nine in the Red, and the 13 in the Green, Lang used the versions of Sellar, Farquharson, and Blakely (not always making it clear which translator was responsible for which story). Alderson feels that none of these is entirely satisfactory; he describes the more extensive changes he has made, and in three instances rejects Lang's chosen version (in one case for Edgar Taylor's, the earliest in English, and in the other two for translations of his own). One of these is "The Story of the Fisherman and His Wife" which, in the original German, has the hero and heroine dwelling in a piss-pot. No one until Alderson has been brave enough to translate this but have said instead that they lived in a pigsty, a ditch, a hovel, a lowly chamber, or a vinegar jar! However, American children may be less comfortable with Alderson's north country dialect rendering of "Well, everything went along gradely for a couple of weeks," than with Lang's more direct, "All went well for a week or a fortnight." And the flounder, being an enchanted prince, should speak in a regal way and not say, "Nah, what d'you want then?" Alderson has used Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse for Norwegian stories, rather than Hunt's versions used by Lang. (There are four of these stories in the Blue and nine in the Red. ) It is when we come to Rumanian, Finnish, and Russian tales translated from German versions and stories from Basile filtered through the same medium, that Alderson's detective work is most apparent, though. Accuracy and concern to preserve the quality of the oral tradition characterize Alderson's versions, and no one is likely to mind the altered order of the stories nor to regret the omission of a few literary tales and of an abridged "Gulliver." John Lawrence, the illustrator of the Blue Fairy Book has certainly been successful as have the two other illustrators, Faith Jacques for the Red and Antony Maitland for the Green. Children will pour over the details of the lively black-and-white drawings in each collection with as much fascination as their elders once felt for the original illustrations of H. J. Ford and others.

Eric L. Montenyohl (essay date October 1988)

SOURCE: Montenyohl, Eric L. "Andrew Lang's Contributions to English Folk Narrative Scholarship: A Reevaluation." Western Folklore 47, no. 4 (October 1988): 269-84.

[In the following essay, Montenyohl focuses on Lang's leadership role in the Folk-Lore Society, his scholarly essays, and his theoretical debates with fellow folklorists.]

In 1951 Richard M. Dorson's article on "The Great Team of English Folklorists" recalled the vigor of folklore scholarship and activities in England during the late Victorian period. He listed the numerous accomplishments (the first folklore society, the first folklore journal, an International Folklore Congress, etc.) and credited many of these achievements to the group of private scholars he dubbed "the Great Team."¹ Undoubtedly, Dorson's Great Team led English folklore activities for a generation. Yet one member in particular emerges as a key figure in the history of English folklore—the Scot, Andrew Lang.

Dorson credits Lang with leading the Great Team, although this leadership is associated almost exclusively with his verbal duel with Max Müller over solar mythology. To be sure, Lang was involved in an extended debate with Müller and others about the merits of solar mythology. But Lang's activities encompassed much more; in fact, this debate is only one example of three broad areas in which he pushed English folklorists into the dominant position in folklore scholarship. Lang led the English folklorists away from the prevailing interest in customs and antiquities and into narrative scholarship via his debates on solar mythology and the proper relationships between myth, legend, and Märchen. He served the Folk-Lore Society in a variety of ways which spurred both popular and scholarly interest in the Society, culminating in the International Folk-Lore Congress of 1891. Finally, in the 1880s and 1890s he challenged other English folklorists to expand folk narrative research to include historical and contemporary memorates and legends; when they failed to follow his proposal, he persevered, bringing out several important, if little-known, works. All three areas of Lang's leadership deserve recognition, for they have had a lasting impact on English folklore scholarship.

THE GENESIS OF A FOLKTALE SCHOLAR

When the young classics scholar Andrew Lang began his encounters with folklore, English folktale scholarship had been dominated by antiquarians, philologists, and comparative mythologists for a decade; Max Müller had already become the dominant scholar because of his expertise as a philologist. As early as 1863, when he was a student of nineteen at St. Andrews, Lang produced an essay indicating his deep interest in Märchen. ² Well before the publication of E. B. Tylor's major theoretical works, Lang employs a comparative method to demonstrate persistent elements in tales and myths. This first essay also acknowledges the contributions of the linguistic theory of the Grimms and of Dasent:

. . . while Nursery Tales have been almost banished from the Nursery, they have become the legitimate prey of scientific men, philologists, and antiquarians. In fact, there seems to have been a sort of barter—the children getting the science in exchange for the stories. These stories—I mean the traditional Nursery Tales—have become, in the hands of such men as Dasent and the two Grimms, no small proof of the common eastern origin of the Aryan Race. . . . We find, for instance, in all the traditions and mythology of the Aryan tribes in Europe, a common supernatural machinery. The shoes of swiftness, the cap of darkness, (the German Nebel-Cappe), and the sword of sharpness, were possessed not less by Perseus than by Jack the Giant-Killer, and by the King of the Golden Mountains. . . . But the most widely diffused of all these myths, and the one which has undergone least change in its essential features is that which in Greek is the fable of Cupid and Psyche. No one can read the Greek fable, Grimms' story of the "Lady and the Lion," the tale in the Norse collection called "East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon," our own "Beauty and the Beast," and the "Black Bull o' Norroway," without seeing striking and essential points of resemblance.³

A decade later, Lang encountered E. B. Tylor's published works and published his own theoretical essay dealing with folktales and their relationship to myth.⁴ "Mythology and Fairy Tales" appeared in the Fortnightly Review and demonstrated that Lang was well-versed in the materials of classical mythology and Märchen and thoroughly familiar with the theories of both Tylor and Müller.

. . . the very opposite of Mr. Müller's view is the true one, namely that the Märchen, far from being the detritus of the higher mythology, are the remains of an earlier formation, and that in most cases in which they tally with the higher epic, they preserve an older and more savage form of the same myth, containing more allusions to cannibalism, to magic, or Shamanism, to kinship with the beasts, and to bestial transformations.⁵

Not only did Lang now dispute the premise of the Grimms and Müller that myths degenerated into Märchen, he based his argument on data which few people had considered relevant. For example, he pointed out that "As Märchen are not peculiar to Indo-European races, but are common to Finns, Samoyeds, Zulus, it will follow that they must be attributed to an epoch prior to the rise of such distinctions as Aryan and Semitic."⁶ With evidence collected and published by Victorian explorers and missionaries, Lang challenged the philologists' assertion that related narratives are due to the diffusion of cultures with related languages.

In this essay Lang indicated the battle lines he was to observe during the dispute over solar mythology. He would draw on Tylor's research and theory, fortifying it further from other anthropological and ethnological works. Müller and other advocates of solar mythology, Lang argued, were wrong in viewing cultural development as degenerative (based primarily on their interpretation of linguistic changes); in utilizing only Indo-European linguistic data, thus excluding cross-cultural anthropological evidence; and in creating interpretive equations to explain myths based primarily on the names of characters (and with no uniform results).

"Mythology and Fairy Tales" also indicated Lang's fluency with Märchen sources. In addition to those specifically tied to classical mythology (e.g., Cupid and Psyche) with which he would already be familiar, Lang cited collections or translations by Castren (Samoyed), Campbell (the West Highlands of Scotland), Dasent (Norse), Callaway (Zulu), and Von Hahn (Greek and Albanian). While Lang's scholarly interest in the Märchen did come about at least partially because of his fascination for Greek mythology, he mastered the available folktale scholarship—both literary and ethnographic.

Although Richard M. Dorson's description of this debate over the value of solar mythology gives the impression that, once begun, a battle raged, nearly the opposite (at least at first) is true. Only an opening salvo had been fired and the sides taken. Lang did not pursue his attack on Max Müller and the solar mythologists until almost the end of the decade.

In 1879, in a "Preface" to the Society's journal, Folk-Lore Record, Lang displayed an amazing grasp of ethnographic data as though they were meticulously archived and multiply cross-indexed in his mind. He, of course, argued for an evolutionary approach based on anthropological evidence: customs, beliefs, tales, even relics are applied to explain curiosities among contemporary peasant cultures. Lang warned of the danger of dating materials from written versions:

It is a common error to suppose that, because a tale is found in the Veda, the Veda is its original source. But, in point of fact, the Veda is only the oldest literary document in which we meet the tale. It probably existed long before the Vedic age, just as the story of Cupid and Psyche is older than Apuleius, or the Black Bull o' Norroway older than Sidney's Arcadia.⁷

Lang concluded the essay by stating the "purpose of this hurried sketch will have been fulfilled if it induces students of folk-lore to make anthropology part of their method."⁸

The next skirmish in Lang's assault on Müller's theory came in the 1881 essay "Mr. Max Müller's Philosophy of Mythology." Lang's lengthy analysis discovered a number of contradictions in Müller's writings. For instance, Müller admitted that "wherever we look, in every part of the world, we find the same kind of stories, the same traditions, the same myths."⁹ But Müller's philological theory tied manifestations of culture to diffusion of peoples with related languages. This admission that myths, traditions, and stories were universal provided Lang with support for his argument for the psychological unity of humankind across cultures. Lang also pointed out inconsistencies in Müller's theory that attempted to tie language development to other manifestations of culture, specifically to mythology, but also to narrative in general.

Lang pursued all possible inconsistencies with a vengeance. Using the myth of Cronus and Zeus as an example—since he could point to versions also from New Zealand Maoris and African Bushmen (two cultures then regarded as particularly primitive, and thus radically different from Greek culture)—he pointed out that Müller's theory explained the barbarous story of mutilation and cannibalism as a narrative invented late in Greek cultural development, "not only after Greek was a developed language, but after one of its suffixes had absolutely lost its original meaning. In that case, is it not curious that men essentially civilised should have invented two stories so essentially savage?"¹⁰

Against Müller's philological method, Lang proved a particularly formidable and dogged opponent by posing apparently simple questions:

This is the eternal difficulty of the philological method. How are you to suppose that forgetfulness of the meaning of words so frequently led civilised men to ideas essentially savage? How are you to be certain that the story was originally told of the god or hero whose name you analyse by the aid of philology?¹¹

Further, Lang disputed his opponent's data as evidence by pointing out that:

1. The Vedas do not represent the ordinary conversation of men, in which the process of naming and forgetting names is said to have existed.
2. The Vedas are post-Mythopoeic.
3. There is no reason to suppose that Vedic practice influenced the Greeks, who had long before left that branch of the Aryan stock which (after the separation) spoke in Sanscrit.¹²

Lang followed this extensive attack on Müller and the solar mythologists with other essays on nearly the same points. "Primitive Belief and Savage Metaphysics" (1882) was ostensibly a review essay of Charles F. Keary's Outlines of Human Belief among the Indo-European Races (1882).¹³ It actually was another volley by an ethnologist (Lang) against the philologists. "Anthropology and the Vedas" (1883) focused on the comparative values of anthropology versus literary texts (the Vedas) to provide information about the early stages of human belief.¹⁴ In "The Seamy Side of Vedic Religion" (1883), Lang compared barbaric practices from Indian culture to those found in classical Greek culture and contemporary "savage" cultures.¹⁵ Finally, in 1884, Lang collected a number of previously-published essays, grouped them with some new ones, and published the assemblage as Custom and Myth.

Lang's most intense assault on Müller and solar mythology occurred from 1884 through 1888. Not coincidentally, during this period his attention was focused primarily on the Volksmärchen. Up until 1884 Lang's references to Märchen had appeared solely in essays disputing cultural, linguistic, and narrative theory with the solar mythologists (such as "Cupid, Psyche and the 'Sun-Frog'" and "A Far-Travelled Tale" in Custom and Myth ). In 1884, however, Lang began to demonstrate skill as a Volksmärchen scholar per se, examining and writing on questions central to folktale study. For instance, in 1884 Lang contributed the introduction to Margaret Hunt's translation of Grimm's Household Tales. There, he posed three questions:

1. How are we to explain the Diffusion of household tales?
2. What is the Origin of household tales?
3. What are the Relations between märchen and the higher mythologies?¹⁶

These questions were cleverly designed to allow Lang to present (and dismiss) solar mythology as one view before presenting his own. Lang's answers (in the order he presents them) are:

1. The origin of the irrational element in myth and tale is to be found in the qualities of the uncivilised imagination.
2. The process of Diffusion remains uncertain. Much may be due to the identity everywhere of early fancy: something to transmission.
3. Household tales occupy a middle place between the stories of savages and the myths of early civilisations.¹⁷

Lang frankly admitted "the process of evolution . . . is the mainspring of our system."¹⁸ The scholarly introduction to this new translation—the first scholarly version of the Grimm's Household Tales—was most fortuitous.

Grimm's Household Tales was a key work in Lang's career because it was the first work demonstrating an interest in the Volksmärchen and in issues specifically relating to folklore (the origin and transmission of folktales, and the evolution of narratives across generic boundaries) for their own sake. His past scholarship had always focused eventually on myth, and Märchen only in relation to this other narrative form. In doing so, Lang concentrated on the "savage" and "barbarous" elements in these narratives as indications of the age of the tales, and thus Märchen were a tool for illustrating broader cultural relationships. Even in Custom and Myth this theoretical stance predominates. With Grimm's Household Tales, however, the questions cited by Lang certainly were the central issues of folklorists (and applied to Märchen, the most popular narrative genre). Further, this work firmly tied Lang's cross-cultural methodology in the introduction to an extensive collection of texts for scholars to test this theory upon. And the newly-translated scholarly notes provided other variants for Lang and other British folktale scholars to draw upon. Lang was to recreate this combination—a scholarly introductory essay to popular household tales—successfully several more times in 1887-88. All of these volumes helped to identify Lang's name with the Märchen genre and, at the same time, establish his credentials as a folk narrative, and especially Volksmärchen, scholar. Lang, however, had not finished his debate with solar mythologists, and he returned to find that he was under fire.

Müller's essay "The Savage" criticized Lang's vague terms for other cultures ("primitive," "backward," "savage").¹⁹ Müller attacked Lang's indistinct notion of the savage, pointing out Lang's lack of firm criteria for the term. In fact, he named several cultures which had been described as savage, notably including eighteenth-century Scotland in the list. Pointing to the problems of classifying cultures, he continued: "Every generation is apt to consider the measure of comfort which it has reached as indispensable to civilised life, but very often, in small as well as great things, what is called civilised today may be called barbarous tomorrow."²⁰ Müller argued that even Darwin's notion of savagery was naive and overlooked linguistic sophistication. He again urged the study of language and literature.

In response, Lang's "Myths and Mythologists" appeared, reminding readers that, contrary to assertions by Müller and others, solar mythology had not been advanced from a theory to "a generally recognised fact."²¹ The essay constituted another attempt by Lang to dismantle his opponents' theory by arguing that the whole philological interpretation of myths was not much more than a series of contradictory etymological conjectures for which "we propose to substitute, as one main instrument, the method of Völkerpsychologie, or 'Folklore' or 'ethnopsychology' or anthropology, or, to use Dr. [Isaac] Taylor's term, 'the Hottentotic method.'"²²

"Myths and Mythologists" was quickly followed by three more works. The first, perhaps Lang's greatest contribution to anthropology, was the complete presentation in two volumes of evolutionary theory applied to culture: Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1887).²³ Its publication firmly established Lang as the leader of the British anthropological school. In addition, Lang wrote the entries for "Mythology" and "Tale" for the new edition of the Encylopedia Britannica, evidence of his victory over Müller in comparative mythology and his dominance in folklore.²⁴

Lang's position as the nominal head of a new British theoretical school did not keep him from pursuing his favorite genre, the Märchen. In 1887 he wrote introductions to two works, a new printing of Charles Lamb's Beauty and the Beast and Apuleius's Cupid and Psyche.²⁵ In Cupid and Psyche, Lang broke the narrative down into separate episodes and motifs before examining the ideas behind each one, a methodology quite advanced for the time. Cosquin's argument for the Indian origin of fables was challenged by Lang's examination of the story motif by motif. As each one is considered, Lang presented its known cultural occurrences, including amongst African Bushmen, American Indians, and other "savage" cultures. He concluded that he did not know the place of origin for Cupid and Psyche, but he found no reason that it should have been India.

In 1888 Lang edited and wrote the introduction to Perrault's Popular Tales, a classic of comparative narrative research.²⁶ The "Introduction" began with a biographical sketch of Charles Perrault and included a discussion of whether Perrault or his son Pierre Darmancour wrote the tales or whether they collaborated on them. Then Lang turned to Perrault's contes, contrasting them with traditional tales (Volksmärchen), especially concerning the appearance of fairies. Lang devoted sixty pages of this introduction to a close analysis of Perrault's eight narratives. The conclusion summarized the theories of the origin and diffusion of popular tales—without the doctrinal criticism characteristic of much of Lang's work.

After 1888, Andrew Lang's contributions to English narrative (and especially Märchen) study and scholarship largely moved along different paths. To be sure, when prodded by solar mythologists—and especially Max Müller—Lang responded, most notably in Modern Mythology (1897), a point-by-point rebuttal to Müller and his colleagues. A few other minor essays continued the debate, long after the issue was settled. Stimulated by the dispute, by 1888 Lang had mastered a voluminous scholarship ranging from ethnographies of "savage cultures" to classical collections of myths and folktales and had assumed the position of pre-eminent folktale scholar in Britain, no mean feat with Märchen scholars George Laurence Gomme, Edwin Sidney Hartland, Joseph Jacobs, and W. R. S. Ralston active. However, Lang's work writing scholarly introductions to traditional tales (such as the Grimms') set the standard for folktale scholarship.

LEADERSHIP IN THE FOLK-LORE SOCIETY

Although organizational duties are not usually considered to be as important as theoretical and analytical publications, Lang's activities with the Folk-Lore Society are particularly significant. His leadership, especially in the years when he served as President, had a profound effect on the Society and opened up new paths for narrative scholarship. The important relationship between Lang and his scholarly colleagues in the Society nurtured both sides for a time and led to inspired research.

From the founding of the Folk-Lore Society in London in 1878 Andrew Lang sat on the Council along with Gomme, Müller, Ralston, Thoms, Tylor, and others. In the early years, with the exception of the comments in his "Preface" to volume 2 of the Folk-Lore Record, Lang's work was strictly scholarly analysis and generally devoid of theoretical disagreements.²⁷ In fact, there is very little mention of Lang until 1881 when the Folk-Tale Committee was created

to frame a standard scheme of Folk-tale classification, to ascertain what steps should be taken for the classifying and indexing of existing collections of Folk-tales in accordance with such a scheme, and to devise a system of Folk-tale terminology. The Committee appointed by the Council are Messrs. Nutt, Ralston, Lang, Brabrook, Gomme, Wheatley, Solly, Blind, and Clodd, Reverend A. H. Sayce, and Miss Frere.²⁸

In 1882 the Folk-Tale Committee reported that they had investigated three proposed schemes for the classification of folktales, found them all inadequate, and proposed to investigate the "incidents and formulae" of the tales by way of a collaborative effort from members of the Society.²⁹ This proposed analysis of a significant body of folktales in order to create a tale-type index long antedates the birth of the Aarne-Thompson Types of the Folktale and extended well beyond the regional boundaries Aarne had begun with. In 1883 the Folk-Tale Committee announced that they sought volunteers to analyze folktales and published an eight-page list of collections from around the world with which they hoped to begin. Later in 1883 notice was given that Lang had volunteered to read "Savage Folk-Tales," while Nutt, Gomme, Apperson, and others had specified particular collections.³⁰

Over the next four years Lang's duties reading "Savage Folk-Tales" served him in good stead in moving beyond the theoretical statements of Custom and Myth to the comparative folklore scholarship on the Grimm and Perrault tales. The Folk-Tale Committee continued to publish summaries of tales from a number of collections for analysis into tale-types. This, however, ultimately must have been tiresome, for it required close scholarship and painstaking organizational skills. Further, it depended upon other committee members' voluntarily reading, analyzing, and preparing written commentaries on folktales for publication in the society's journal.

In 1888 Lang rose to the Presidency of the Folk-Lore Society.³¹ This had an immediate impact on the attendance at meetings of the Society; at his first meeting as President "the attendance was larger than at any meeting since the inaugural meeting of the Society ten years before."³² As President, Lang had nominal duties, such as serving as chair for the meetings he attended. However, the position also allowed him to deliver an annual Presidential Address. Lang chose to do so only twice (and only one of those was published); the other times he allowed George Laurence Gomme, the Director of the Society, to give the speech. While President of the Folk-Lore Society, Lang also had thrust upon him the responsibility for the 1891 International Folk-Lore Congress, proposed by the Paris Congress of 1889. In addition to his duties with the host Folk-Lore Society, Lang was also elected President of the 1891 Congress, an indication that his work on the "anthropological theory" had been singled out for recognition. In fact, his service as President of the Folk-Lore Congress of 1891 climaxed Lang's organizational contributions to folklore studies. Following the speech Lang apparently attended little of the Congress—a fact that is rather surprising, since so many of the papers responded to his anthropological theory and extensive writings on the Märchen. ³³

Lang also helped conceive and work towards the world's first tale-type index. Once he had assumed the additional duties of President of the Society, however, the Folk-Tale Committee significantly altered the original plan for an exhaustive "tabulation" of folktales, since this procedure had been "the subject of some criticism, both at the Folk-Lore Congress in Paris in 1889 and by scholars at home. . . . To arrive at quicker results," it was decided that the tales should be "taken up group by group"; and as the tabulation of each group of tales was completed, the information would be published separately for the use of Members. The first group selected for the purpose was "Cinderella."³⁴

Lang's status as the pre-eminent folklorist and Märchen scholar in England served to inspire increasing interest in the Folk-Lore Society and its activities. In 1892 Lang stepped down from his position as President of the Society and George Laurence Gomme was elected to succeed him.

THE CREATION OF A PSYCHO-FOLKLORIST

Lang's final contribution to narrative study actually began with the publication of an obscure article, "The Comparative Study of Ghost-Stories," in 1885. Colleagues may have thought then that Lang was only pursuing variants of "savage" myths as he had done in Custom and Myth. In the article, Lang does relate ghost stories to a mythopoeic faculty common to all stages of culture, but he also argues for the serious study of contemporary ghost-stories. Nine years later, Lang brought out an important new work, Cock Lane and Common-Sense, in which he proposed expanding the field of folklore and the interests of the Folk-Lore Society to include contemporary narratives of psychic events. The book was ignored as scholarship, unreviewed in folklore journals. This book may, however, have helped generate Edward Clodd's jibes about the Society for Psychical Research in his 1895 Presidential Address to the Folk-Lore Society, remarks which in turn inspired Lang's "Protest of a Psycho-Folklorist." ³⁵ Disputing Clodd's contention that men of science, and particularly folklorists, had no place in the S.P.R., Lang responded:

If I do not misjudge Mr. Clodd, his real or chief objection to psychical research is that all its followers, with different "degrees of certainty," believe "in the validity of phenomena purporting to be 'caused by spiritual beings, together with the belief thence arising of the community of the living and the so-called dead.' . . . One may be a psycho-folklorist, without accepting, or heeding, what phenomena may "purport" to be. Never mind what they "purport" to be, . . . The question for the psycho-folklorist is, "Are there such phenomena? If so, do they throw light on the problems of folklore?"³⁶

In citing evidence connected to the New Zealand fire walk, Lang concluded that "I can understand why Psychical Researchers become interested, but I cannot see why Folklorists cease to be interested."³⁷ Clodd immediately responded that his objection was:

not to the research, but to the method of it, which under the guise of the scientific, is pseudoscientific. . . . As a folklorist I repudiate it [psychical research] because that investigation is worthless, being vitiated by imperfectly guarded methods, and by the preconceptions of the researchers.³⁸

Clodd and most of the Folk-Lore Society, including the rest of the Great Team, stood firm in asserting "the science of folklore."³⁹ Lang persisted in his comparative studies of ghost stories and other psychic events, producing The Book of Dreams and Ghosts (1897). In the preface to the second edition of Cock Lane and Common-Sense, Lang argued one final time of the need to extend the boundaries of contemporary folklore studies:

Since the first publication of Cock Lane and Common-Sense in 1894, nothing has occurred to alter greatly the author's opinions. He has tried to make the Folk-Lore Society see that such things as modern reports of wraiths, ghosts, "fire-walking," . . . are within their province, and within the province of anthropology. In this attempt he has not quite succeeded. As he understands the situation, folk-lorists and anthropologists will hear gladly about wraiths, ghosts, corpse-candles, hauntings, crystal-gazing, and walking unharmed through fire, as long as these things are part of vague rural tradition, or of savage belief. But, as soon as there is first-hand evidence of honourable men and women for the apparent existence of any of the phenomena enumerated, then Folk-lore officially refuses to have anything to do with the subject. Folk-lore will register and compare vague savage or popular beliefs; but when educated living persons vouch for phenomena which (if truly stated) account in part for the origin of these popular or savage beliefs, then Folk-lore turns a deaf ear. The logic of this attitude does not commend itself to the author. . . .⁴⁰

Lang's proposal to extend narrative research to what are now called memorates, personal experience narratives, and legends was revolutionary and threatening to other members of the Folk-Lore Society. They refused to turn away from their focus on rural and savage cultures, believing this to be the essence of their "science." While Lang remained nominally a Vice-President of the Folk-Lore Society until his death, his publications through the society generally dealt with Australian aboriginal culture; his controversial work was apparently unwelcome in the folklore publications, although some of it was eventually published in the publications of the Society for Psychical Research. As a result, the Folk-Lore Society and its publications gradually sank back into the stasis of its early days. Lang chose an independent route in studying tales of the supernatural, writing his own fairy tales, and editing his popular Christmas book series, which included the colored fairy books.⁴¹

* * *

Richard M. Dorson acknowledges Andrew Lang as a leader of the Great Team. But Dorson's concern with folklore theory obscures the larger picture in the Lang-Müller dispute. Debate and confrontation were simply Lang's methodology. He was, after all, a professional writer, a man of letters, not an academic. He had the time and intense interest to write and respond. The debate over solar mythology is but one example of his verbal skills put to good use. Another important example is the debate with Joseph Jacobs, begun with Jacobs's paper at the 1891 International Congress. The theoretical question concerned monogenesis versus polygenesis, diffusion versus psychic unity. As the debate developed, both utilized versions of Cinderella to cite as supporting evidence. Eventually, Lang ceased the debate with Jacobs and Alfred Nutt, but not before utilizing the introduction to Marion Roalfe Cox's monograph on Cinderella as well as a review of that work to make his points.⁴² This debate caused more attention to be given to the Cox Cinderella and the frustration in its massive but inconclusive assemblage of data from around the world. As a result, the Folk-Lore Society published no more monographs on groups of folktales.

Lang, at his finest in any kind of dispute, could and did bash the entrenched paradigm of solar mythology. In so doing, he led English anthropology away from the library study of Indo-European languages and comparative mythology toward contemporary and historical ethnographic data. He helped build one of the greatest teams of narrative scholars in folklore history, and a decade of concentration on Märchen. He attracted attention to the Folk-Lore Society and its journals over the same period. He even proposed expanding folklore scholarship beyond rural, peasant and savage groups. Yet that same spirit of provocation led ultimately to the demise of the Great Team and the regression of the Folk-Lore Society to a somnolent state. The debate with Joseph Jacobs and Alfred Nutt effectively quashed the promising folktale efforts of the Folk-Lore Society, and the entrenched stance of Clodd and others concerning the "science of folk-lore" effectively pushed Lang out of the Folk-Lore Society and into the Society for Psychical Research.

A closer look at Andrew Lang's career in folkloristics points out that the records of events—the Lang debates with Müller or Jacobs, for example—are as complex as the personalities involved. Folklorists and historians do a disservice by simplifying the events, describing them only in terms of a single issue or theory. The historical data, as manifestations of the folk, are sometimes contradictory but nevertheless worth study, analysis, and interpretation.

Notes

1. Richard M. Dorson, "The Great Team of English Folklorists," Journal of American Folklore 64 (1951): 1. Dorson wrote widely about the English folklorists and Andrew Lang in particular, including his "Andrew Lang's Folklore Interests as Revealed in 'At the Sign of the Ship,'" Western Folklore 11 (1952): 1-19; "The First Group of British Folklorists," Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 1-8, 333-340; "The Eclipse of Solar Mythology," Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 393-416; The British Folklorists: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Peasant Customs and Savage Myths, 2 vols. (London, 1968); "The Reception of the British Folklorists, or Have You Read the Great Team?" in Folklore Studies in Honour of Herbert Halpert, ed. Kenneth S. Goldstein and Neil S. Rosenberg (St. John's, Newfoundland, 1980), 145-55.

2. Andrew Lang, "Scottish Nursery Tales," St. Andrews University Magazine (April, 1863): 172-79. The essay includes the texts of two Märchen which Lang collected, "Rashin Coatie," and "Nicht, Nought, Nothing."

3. Ibid., 172-3.

4. The circumstances of Lang's discovery of Tylor's works are recorded in Lang's first essay in Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor in Honour of his 75th Birthday Oct. 2 1907 (Oxford, 1907), 1.

5. Andrew Lang, "Mythology and Fairy Tales," Fortnightly Review (May 1873): 620.

6. Ibid.

7. Andrew Lang, "Preface" Folk-Lore Record 2 (1879): iii; emphasis is in the original. The title of the Folk-Lore Society's journal changed from the Folk-Lore Record (1878-82) to Folk-Lore Journal (1883-89) to, finally, Folk-Lore (1890-, eventually dropping the hyphen).

8. Ibid., viii.

9. Cited in Andrew Lang, "Mr. Max Müller's Philosophy of Mythology," Fraser's Magazine N.S. 24 (1881): 167.

10. Ibid., 171.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 183.

13. Andrew Lang, "Primitive Belief and Savage Metaphysics," Fraser's Magazine 105 O.S., 26 N.S. (June 1882): 734-44.

14. Andrew Lang, "Anthropology and the Vedas," Folk-Lore Journal 1 (1883): 107-14.

15. Lang, "The Seamy Side of Vedic Religion," Saturday Review (Feb. 24, 1883): 234-5.

16. Andrew Lang, "Introduction," to Grimm's Household Tales, ed. Margaret Hunt (London, 1884; reissued Detroit, 1968), xiii.

17. Ibid., xliii.

18. Ibid., xlvi.

19. F. Max Müller, "The Savage," The Nineteenth Century (January 1885): 109-32. Lang had apparently used the word "primitive" so vaguely in earlier articles that, when Müller attacked him for imprecision, he abandoned the word altogether. Instead, he went to the relativistic and anthropomorphic term "backward."

20. Ibid., 115.

21. Andrew Lang, "Myths and Mythologists," The Nineteenth Century (January 1886): 50-65. Müller had asserted the factual status of solar mythology in a series of articles in the publication.

22. Ibid., 58.

23. Andrew Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion. 2 vols. (London, 1887).

24. Andrew Lang, "Mythology," Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th edition. (London and New York, 1926), vol. 19: 128-44. Also, Lang, "Tale," vol. 26, p. 369. Both were originally written for the 9th edition, 1888.

25. Andrew Lang, "Introduction," to Charles Lamb, Beauty and the Beast (London, 1887). Also, Lang, "Introduction" to William Adlington (trans.), The Most Pleasant and Delectable Tale of the Marriage of Cupid and Psyche [by Apuleius Madaurensis] (London, 1887).

26. Andrew Lang, ed., Perrault's Popular Tales (Oxford, 1888; reprinted New York, 1977).

27. For instance, Lang, "The Folk-Lore of France," Folk-Lore Record 1 (1878): 99-117. Probably another example would have been his "The Folk-Lore of Modern Greece" which the May 1878 Report of the Council indicated had been accepted for the next Folk-Lore Record but was never published.

28. "Notices and News," Folk-Lore Record 4 (1881): 202.

29. "Fourth Report," Folk-Lore Record 5 (1882): 205. The three schemes were those by von Hahn, Baring Gould, and Alfred Nutt.

30. "Notices and News," Folk-Lore Journal 1 (1883): 128; see also "Fifth Record": 402.

31. "Annual Report of the Council: Thursday, 6th December, 1888," Folk-Lore Journal 7 (1889): 1.

32. "Proceedings at the Annual Meeting Held . . . Thursday Evening, December 6th, 1888," Folk-Lore Journal 7 (1889): 18.

33. While attendance at the sessions is not given, transcriptions of discussion after the papers are, and Lang seems to have abdicated his leadership role to his followers Gomme and Hartland (the Chairman of the Folk-Tale Section). The conference papers are collected in The International Folk-Lore Congress 1891: Papers and Transactions, ed. Joseph Jacobs and Alfred Nutt (London, 1892). Also see Lang's own remarks given in Marian Roalfe Cox's Cinderella, cited below.

34. "Proceedings at the Annual Meeting of the Folk-Lore Society," Folk-Lore 1 (1890): 399.

35. Andrew Lang, "Protest of a Psycho-Folklorist," Folk-Lore 6 (1895): 236-48; see also Edward Clodd, "A Reply to the Foregoing 'Protest,'" Folk-Lore 6 (1895): 248-58.

36. Lang, "Protest," 242.

37. Ibid., 248.

38. Clodd, "A Reply to the Foregoing 'Protest,'" 248.

39. See, for example, George Laurence Gomme, "The Science of Folk-Lore," Folk-Lore Journal 3 (1885): 1-16; or Edwin Sidney Hartland's The Science of Fairy Tales (1891) as manifestations of this.

40. Andrew Lang, Cock Lane and Common-Sense (London, 1901), ix.

41. For a fuller exploration of these aspects of Lang's career, see my "Andrew Lang and the Fairy Tale" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1986).

42. Andrew Lang, "Introduction" to Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants (London, 1892). Also unsigned review "Cinderella," London Daily News (16 March 1893), 5.

Harold Bloom (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: Bloom, Harold. "Andrew Lang, 1844-1912." In Classic Fantasy Writers, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 124-36. New York, N.Y.: Chelsea House Publishers, 1994.

[In the following excerpt, Bloom provides a synopsis of Lang's publication history and incorporates commentary on Lang's writing by such noted authors as J. M. Barrie, Percy Muir, and Eleanor De Selms Langstaff.]

Andrew Lang was born in Selkirk, Scotland, on March 31, 1844. Selkirk is in the Lowland or Border region of Scotland, close to England, and its history of warfare as well as its rich tradition of folklore profoundly shaped Lang's imagination. He was educated at St. Andrew's (1861-64), where he won a scholarship that allowed him to attend Oxford from 1865 until 1868, when he became a fellow. In 1875 Lang married Leonora Alleyne, resigned his fellowship, and moved to London, where he began working as a journalist.

His first published book, the verse collection Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, appeared in 1872 and was followed by more than 150 volumes. These included poetry (such as Ballads in Blue China, 1880-88; Helen of Troy, 1882; Grass of Parnassus, 1888); translations of the Odyssey (with S. H. Butcher, 1879) and the Iliad (with W. Leaf and E. Myers, 1883); three books on the Homeric question (Homer and the Epic, 1893; Homer and His Age, 1906; The World of Homer, 1910); a book on the Baconian controversy arguing in favor of Shakespearean authorship (Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown, 1912); and several works on folklore and religion, notably Custom and Myth (1884), Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887; rev. 1899), and The Making of Religion (1898). Lang also wrote literary reminiscences, imaginary letters and dialogues (such as Letters to Dead Authors, 1886), and historical monographs that were controversially supportive of the Stuarts (including Pickle the Spy; or, The Incognito of Prince Charles, 1896). Lang was a prolific and successful journalist as well who was notorious for being able to write articles while riding the train, watching a race, or engaging in conversation.

In addition to these other pursuits, Lang also wrote fiction. He published his first fairy tale for children, The Princess Nobody: A Tale of Fairy Land, in 1884, and four more original fairy tales followed: The Gold of Fairnilee (1888), Prince Prigio (1889), Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia (1893), and Tales of a Fairy Court (1907). Lang also collaborated with his friend H. Rider Haggard on an historical fantasy for adults, The World's Desire (1890). But he is best remembered today for a series of fairy tale collections that he edited, in which each volume is named after a color, beginning with The Blue Fairy Book, published in 1889. Lang produced at least one new collection of stories for children every year for the next twenty years, most commonly editing stories collected and translated by his wife and other scholars. Still widely read today, the "color" fairy books did much to revive contemporary interest in fairy tales, despite objections to their violent content (which Lang vigorously rebutted). Lang died in Banchory, Scotland, on July 22, 1912.

CRITICAL EXTRACTS

J. M. BARRIE

Though written in the fine English of which Mr. Lang is a master, it is not probable that [The World's Desire ] will repeat the success of Mr. Haggard's early stories. At first thought this seems surprising, for that one of these writers has a gift of story-telling is as certain as that the other has a delightful command of words. Mr. Haggard has no humour that is not better omitted from his pages, but he is dramatic; his writing is ungraceful but vigorous. Mr. Lang's humour is unfailing, but he is better at parodying writers whom he likes than at character drawing, so that he has not the dramatic faculty. His writing is always graceful. He is certainly one of our "Forty." Surely, then, the two in collaboration should produce a masterpiece. So it might be said, but The World's Desire is really not a work of great account, and probably for this very reason, that Mr. Haggard was to supply the matter and Mr. Lang the manner. He who puts style into Mr. Haggard's books must become their author, style being as much to a book as art to a picture. Collaboration in fiction, indeed, is a mistake, for the reason that two men cannot combine so as to be one. Now, though for convenience's sake we speak of the various qualities that go to the making of a great novelist as if they were distinct, yet they cannot be separated, nor may they be lent. The crowning misfortune of The World's Desire is that it is sometimes dull, a failing we should not find in any book written by Mr. Lang or Mr. Haggard alone. The characters do not interest as human beings, because the good ones are assisted by miracles from the gods above, while the bad ones can at any moment summon the gods from below. There is a lack of Mr. Haggard's realism and Mr. Lang's humour. The imitation of Homer is capital, but it wearies. It is as an allegory that the story is impressive, and though it is at times really striking when thus regarded, the public do not care for allegories. The slaughter is terrible, but hardly tragic. Yet it should be said that the story has one singularly beautiful moment: when Telegonous discovers that he has slain his father, Odysseus. This is most tragic, most pathetic, because the writing is so artistic. Throughout the story, too, there is scattered some very musical verse.

J. M. Barrie, [Review of The World's Desire ], British Weekly, 20 November 1890, p. 54.

* * *

ANDREW LANG

It is a truism that the supernatural in fiction should, as a general rule, be left in the vague. In the creepiest tale I ever read, the horror lay in this—there was no ghost! You may describe a ghost with all the most hideous features that fancy can suggest—saucer eyes, red staring hair, a forked tail, and what you please—but the reader only laughs. It is wiser to make as if you were going to describe the spectre, and then break off, exclaiming, "But no! No pen can describe, no memory, thank Heaven, can recall, the horror of that hour!" So writers, as a rule, prefer to leave their terror (usually styled "The Thing") entirely in the dark, and to the frightened fancy of the student. [ . . . ]

[ . . . ] take the scene outside the closed door of the vanished Dr. Jekyll, in Mr. Stevenson's well-known apologue:

They are waiting on the threshold of the chamber whence the doctor has disappeared—the chamber tenanted by what? A voice comes from the room. "Sir," said Poole, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, "was that my master's voice?"

A friend, a man of affairs, and a person never accused of being fanciful, told me that he read through the book to that point in a lonely Highland chateau, at night, and that he did not think it well to finish the story till next morning, but rushed to bed. So the passage seems "well-found" and successful by dint of suggestion. On the other side, perhaps, only Scotsmen brought up in country places, familiar from childhood with the terrors of Cameronian myth, and from childhood apt to haunt the lonely churchyards, never stirred since the year of the great Plague choked the soil with the dead, perhaps they only know how much shudder may be found in Mr. Stevenson's "Thrawn Janet." The black smouldering heat in the hills and glens that are commonly so fresh, the aspect of Man, the Tempter of the Brethren, we know them, and we have enough of the old blood in us to be thrilled by that masterpiece of the described supernatural. It may be only a local success, it may not much affect the English reader, but it is of sure appeal to the Lowland Scot. The ancestral Covenanter within us awakens, and is terrified by his ancient fears.

Perhaps it may die out in a positive age—this power of learning to shudder. To us it descends from very long ago, from the far-off forefathers who dreaded the dark, and who, half starved and all untaught, saw spirits everywhere, and scarce discerned waking experience from dreams. When we are all perfect positivist philosophers, when a thousand generations of nurses that never heard of ghosts have educated the thousand and first generation of children, then the supernatural may fade out of fiction. But has it not grown and increased since Wordsworth wanted the "Ancient Mariner" to have "a profession and a character," since Southey called that poem a Dutch piece of work, since Lamb had to pretend to dislike its "miracles"? Why, as science becomes more cocksure, have men and women become more and more fond of old follies, and more pleased with the stirring of ancient dread within their veins?

Andrew Lang, "The Supernatural in Fiction," Adventures among Books (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), pp. 273, 278-80.

. . .* * *

PERCY MUIR

The five columns listing [Lang's] work in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature are not exhaustive, although he is shown as poet, critic, parodist, historian, anthropologist, occultist, fisherman, golfer, and translator. He was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, and contributed many papers to their Proceedings.

He was, in short, a versatile fellow; he delved below the surface of many subjects, and usually emerged with something that would serve for an essay or an article, if not a book. He was a scholar who could make a scholarly subject more palatable than caviare in general. The penalty of this, however, was that his scholarship never entirely deserted him, and even in his most popular fictional writings there is always a slight tang of midnight oil.

Thus in his collaboration with Haggard, The World's Desire, although the yarn is a good one, one is a little too conscious that one of the authors is closely familiar with Icelandic saga. Similarly his own fairytales, excellent though some of them are, and even some of the collections, are not entirely freed from the anthropological background with which Lang himself was so familiar that he hardly detected its presence, or, if he did, thought it no matter.

Fairies had interested him since childhood. Not only had he been brought up on Perrault and Grimm, but he grew up in the Border country, where legends and tales of the "little people" abounded. Fairnilee, the locale of his best story, is Border country, and appears to be little more than a reconstruction of his own childhood adventures in search of fairy folk and fairy treasure.

Lang's two stories Prince Prigio (1889) and Prince Ricardo (1893) have recently been reprinted; but the immortality of his tales is tenuous. For us he is possibly more important as an influence, a background, than for what he wrote himself. He encouraged other romantic writers like Haggard and Stevenson, whom he recognised to be better at this particular job than he was himself; and in his writings and indefatigable collections he provided a valuable quarry for prospectors.

Percy Muir, English Children's Books: 1600 to 1900 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1954), pp. 153-54.

* * *

ELEANOR DE SELMS LANGSTAFF

In general, Lang moved from the known to the lesser known in his selection of tales—the tried and the true to the more experimental. In keeping with his concept of making manifest the universality of the human experience, he covered the world fairly well in each volume. Although The Blue Fairy Book ventured only as far afield as Asia Minor, The Yellow Fairy Book five years later presented three American Indian tales and one of the two Chinese tales in the series, as well as tales from Europe. The Brown Fairy Book of 1904 balanced its American Indian and African—both northern and southern—with Scandinavian, French, and Spanish tales. Where five countries had been represented in the first book of the series, from The Yellow Fairy Book of 1894 through The Orange Fairy Book of 1906 the number of countries represented averaged ten.

Lang was not the author of the Fairy Books; what therefore was his function? His prefaces bear witness to the fact that many had worked at retelling the stories—his wife, May Kendall, and a host of women who worked as translators of exotic languages and thus were particularly qualified to work on the tales. Lang identified the sources, worked with the illustrators—H. J. Ford, G. P. Jacomb Hood, and Lancelot Speed—and provided the reputation that made the series acceptable. [Roger Lancelyn] Green noted that, when The Blue Fairy Book first appeared, the trend in children's literature had been toward the realistic child's novel. "It would be no exaggeration to say that Lang was entirely responsible for this change in public taste . . . [from realism to fairy tale]," he stated.

There were three criteria by which Lang assessed the tales he chose. First, he had certain ideas about how a tale should be constructed, having written several literary fairy tales himself. He looked at these much as an artist might evaluate his materials—the clay or oil from which forms may emerge. Second, he was familiar with the changes tales undergo through the centuries. He knew, and deplored, the technique of substituting a tinsel fairy for the traditional deus ex machina, as had been done in the French tales. Last, he felt that children should not be submitted to boredom or shoddy scholarship. Children enjoyed the toughness of folktales, "for children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy," as [G. K.] Chesterton put it. Moreover he knew it was not the children who read prefaces, but adults who looked on childhood through a scrim of nostalgia. The versions of folktales Lang chose were given to children in a straightforward manner while disguising his scholarship as best he might in the reassuring prefaces.

Yet the scholarship is there. His anthropological studies created in him a strong awareness of basic plots and themes. Distortion of these themes would invalidate the transmission of the tale. After all, it was a tale, a piece of fiction, and overly scientific handling of the material could do as much harm as the French emendations did to theirs. Lang sought out a method by which the literary quality would be preserved and enhanced while at the same time the true text of the tale would be transmitted. In oral literature, the "text" does not have to match the same words to the same symbols as long as the concept is understood.

Eleanor De Selms Langstaff, Andrew Lang (Boston: Twayne, 1978), pp. 139-40.

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Jan Susina (essay date April 2003)

SOURCE: Susina, Jan. "'Like the Fragments of Coloured Glass in a Kaleidoscope': Andrew Lang Mixes Up Richard Doyle's In Fairyland." Marvels and Tales 17, no. 1 (April 2003): 100-19.

[In the following essay, Susina examines the relationship of Lang's literary fairy tale The Princess Nobody to In Fairyland, a Victorian collection of fairy stories illustrated by Richard Doyle.]

George Cruikshank's comic, black-and-white illustrations to Edgar Taylor's German Popular Stories (1823-26), the first English translation of Grimms' fairy tales, are considered pivotal in making fairy tales an acceptable form of children's literature. The fairy tale and its companion literary form, the kunstmärchen, quickly became popular, and, one could argue, the folk tale and the literary fairy tale became the dominant forms of children's literature in England during the second half of the nineteenth century. "What Children Like to Read," the poll conducted in 1898 by the Pall Mall Gazette to form a list of books best suited for ten-year-old children, concluded, "the most obvious point is the victory of the fairy tale" (1). Innovative nineteenth-century illustrators and book designers skillfully moved beyond the crude chapbook artists of the eighteenth century and, in doing so, helped the literary-fairy-tale form reach prominence among both children and adult Victorian audiences. Along with the triumph of the fairy tale, the Victorian age ushered in one of the great periods of book illustration. Nineteenth-century Britain was simultaneously a golden age of children's literature and a period of innovative book design, with the two fields frequently united. In The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914 Gordon Ray created a list of "One Hundred Outstanding Illustrated Books Published in England between 1790 and 1914," and ten percent of the texts mentioned are children's books (313-35).

The greatest illustrated Victorian book of fairies is Richard Doyle's In Fairyland: A Series of Pictures from the Elf-World (1870). His illustrations provide a fanciful, personal, exuberant fairy world that is still the visual reference point for contemporary images of fairies. Doyle's sixteen large color plates, engraved and printed by Edmund Evans, one of the most accomplished printers of the era, are stunning. In Sing a Song for Sixpence: The English Picture Book Tradition and Randolph Caldecott, Brian Alderson has called In Fairyland "one of the most majestic examples of trade colour-printing in the Victorian times" (105), and the art historian Jeremy Maas in Victorian Painting considers In Fairyland to be "the loveliest colour plate book of the Victorian age" (155). The book historian John Harthan, in The History of the Illustrated Book, considers In Fairyland "the most magical of Victorian fairy books" (198), while the book collector Eric Quayle simply calls it "one of the finest books ever produced for children" (41).

Doyle's In Fairyland illustrations are complete in themselves and should be understood as part of the Victorian narrative-art movement.¹ Nevertheless, publishers have consistently felt the need to couple Doyle's illustrations with a verbal text, beginning with Richard Allingham's poem "A Forest in Fairyland" in 1870, and continuing with Andrew Lang's fairy tale Princess Nobody in 1884. But neither the poem or the fairy tale, which was written specifically around Doyle's illustrations, do justice to these spectacular images. Considerable tension remains between the text and illustration, with the prose detracting from rather than adding to the illustrations. Doyle's illustrations stand alone as a powerful visual statement that resists verbal attempts to control them or render them into a coherent narrative. Like Doyle's fairies, his resilient illustrations to In Fairyland have the ability to break free and transcend the text.

Andrew Lang, the authoritative Victorian folklorist and champion of fairy tales, seems the ideal writer to provide a frame for Doyle's idiosyncratic, yet enduring images.² Even Lang fell under the spell of Doyle's artful, but artificial magic and was willing to suspend his scholarly approach to folklore for the pleasures of Doyle's version of the fairy world in composing Princess Nobody. The results highlight the tension between text and image and the split between Lang's scholarly knowledge of the structure and elements of a fairy tale and Doyle's fanciful vision of fairies that owes as much to Victorian pantomime and the ballet as to traditional folklore.

Doyle's career as a book illustrator can be seen as one long preparation for the illustration of In Fairyland. Writing in The Morning Chronicle on December 26, 1845, William Thackeray reviewed a series of Christmas books, including The Fairy Ring (1846), a new translation of Grimms' fairy tales by John Edward Taylor, a relative of Edgar Taylor, the first English translator of the Grimms. Although Thackeray mildly praised Taylor's translation, what captured his fancy and earned his praise were the clever illustrations by the young Richard Doyle, or as he was better known, Dicky Doyle. Thackeray enthusiastically wrote: "We read every now and then in these legends of certain princes and princesses who are carried away by the little people for a while and kept in fairy land. This must have been surely Mr. Doyle's case, and he must have had the advantage of pencil and paper during his banishment. If any man knows the people and country, he does" ("Christmas Books" 98).

Thackeray became one of Doyle's closest companions and a strong promoter of his artwork. The two men worked together on the staff of Punch. Doyle designed the Punch cover, which first appeared in January 1849 and remained unchanged until 1956. The image featured Punch and his dog Toby surrounded by a swirl of fairies.

Doyle quickly advanced among the ranks of Punch artists and within a year shared the weekly political cartoon with John Leech. During his seven years on the Punch staff (1843-50), Doyle produced about a third of the big cartoons for the journal, in addition to numerous small comic initials and insert drawings as well as drawings for the annual Punch Almanack (Engen 52). He resigned from Punch because of the magazine's harsh anti-Catholic stance; he subsequently worked as a book illustrator and painter. His departure opened up a position on Punch for John Tenniel, whose cartoons in the journal helped secure him the assignment as illustrator of Lewis Carroll's two Alice books. While he was at Punch, Doyle also illustrated several popular books, including three of Charles Dickens's Christmas books: The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), and The Battle of Life (1846). He also illustrated Thackeray's Christmas book Rebecca and Rowena (1849) and his novel The Newcomes (1854). But it was fairies and fantasy that were Doyle's field of expertise, and many of the books he illustrated prominently featured fairies. These included Anthony R. Montalba's fairy tale collection Fairy Tales of All Nations (1849); fairy tales such as The Story of Jack and the Giants (1850); J. R. Planché's An Old Fairy Tale Told Anew in Picture and Verse (1865); and literary fairy tales such as Mark Lemon's The Enchanted Doll (1850), John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River (1851), and E. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen's Higgledy-Piggledy (1876).

Doyle's best work appeared during the Victorian vogue of fairy painting which lasted from 1840 to 1870. Christopher Wood, in Fairies in Victorian Art, considers Doyle along with Robert Huskisson and John Anster Fitzgerald as the three major Victorian painters specializing in fairies (16). Many Everett Millais—painted at least one fairy painting. Painters associated with fairies—such as Noel Paton, or the infamous and mentally troubled Richard Dadd—only painted a few fairy paintings. Although the subject matter is frequently similar, Doyle's book illustrations were far more popular than his paintings. The watercolor The Fairy Tree, which is reproduced in Victorian Fairy Painting (133), features a young Doyle gazing at tree covered with nearly two hundred figures and is remarkably similar to the richly detailed plate 4, The Triumphal March of the Elf-King, of In Fairyland.

By the 1860s, Doyle's work, along with that of other self-taught artists, such as Leech and Cruikshank, seemed to be passé and crude and was being replaced by the more academically trained Sixties School of Illustration. Joseph Pennell, in Modern Illustration (1895), wrote "that among artists and people of any artistic appreciation, it is generally admitted by this time that the greatest bulk of the works of 'Phiz,' Cruickshank [sic], Doyle, and even many of Leech's designs are simply rubbish" (83). Forrest Reid's Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties (1928) failed to even mention Doyle. In 1867 when Tenniel had refused to work with Lewis Carroll, the writer was searching for another illustrator for Through the Looking-Glass. Carroll considered using Doyle on Tenniel's recommendation and even visited him to discuss the possibility In a letter dated May 19, 1868, written to Mrs. Louisa MacDonald, the wife of George MacDonald, the well-known fantasy writer, Carroll expressed disappointment in Doyle's illustration: "Doyle isn't good enough (look at any of his later pictures) and Arthur Hughes has not, so far as I know, any turn for grotesque" (Cohen, Letters I: 120). Given the author's and illustrator's fascination with fairies, a Looking-Glass illustrated by Doyle would have been a fascinating text. Although Richard Doyle never illustrated a book by Carroll, his brother Charles did illustrate Jean Jambon's Our Trip to Blunderland (1877), one of the more clever and certainly one of the most graphically innovative of the many imitations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

In Fairyland (1870) was published in time for the 1869 Christmas season, but dated 1870. It is an immense book with the page size of 14 7/8 × 10 7/8 inches to amply display Doyle's sixteen colored plates, which were printed on wood blocks by Edmund Evans. The book is immense, both in its physical size and in its influence. More than those of any other book, its illustrations helped to define the Victorian iconography of fairies, which still dominates our contemporary imagery of the fairy world. Through borrowings by other artists and by the frequent republication of its illustrations in various forms, In Fairyland remains the visual archetype of fairies.³ In a note to the English translation of Bettina Hurlimann's Three Centuries of Children's Books in Europe, Brian Alderson suggests that much of the imagery of the flower fairies found in the popular Flower Fairy Books, illustrated by Cicely Mary Barker, owe a great debt to In Fairyland (207). Doyle's fairy illustrations consistently resisted verbal attempts to limit them. Like his fairies, Doyle's illustrations manage to break free and transcend the text.

Discussing Doyle's In Fairyland illustrations, the distinguished twentieth-century picture-book illustrator Maurice Sendak has said: "Well, what are you going to say about Doyle? He's probably the best of them all. He's sensational. He has all the accouterments of the Victorian illustrator—the girls look right, for example—but he's one of the better draftsmen, he had the cleverest mind, the most gorgeous sense of color, and a fantastic imagination. . . . He is just one of the super artists, and you don't have to know what it is he's doing. It doesn't have to be spelled out, it really doesn't. The fact that it works and that it conveys itself instantly to you—that's what illustration is all about" ("Dialogue" xvii).

Alan Morley has observed that when scholars refer to Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane, and Kate Greenaway as the triumvirate of golden age children illustrators, they underestimate the importance and skill of Doyle (83). While these illustrators all worked closely with Edmund Evans, Percy Muir in Victorian Illustrated Books argues that of all the books that Evans printed, In Fairyland was his stunning achievement and one of the high points of Victorian illustration (102), it was also one of the most elaborate books that Evans produced, requiring eight to twelve colors, each printed on a separate wood block. Gordon Ray agrees with Muir's assessment and included In Fairyland as one the top one hundred illustrated books published in England in the nineteenth century (Illustrator 315). Brian Alderson, in Sing a Song forSixpence, considers In Fairyland "a triumph of graphic craftsmanship" (267) and adds, "There can be little doubt that Doyle had it in him to become the great picture-book artist of the nineteenth century" (68).

But several events prevented this. Doyle came from a family of artists and was primarily self-taught by his father, John Doyle, a political cartoonist.⁴ Doyle's difficulty at meeting deadlines, as suggested by the Dalziel Brothers in their memoirs (Alderson 69), caused difficulties for both his printers and publishers. The most extreme example was the eighteen illustrations of Sleeping Beauty that Doyle was commissioned to do for the Dalziels in 1850 that were only completed in 1865 for J. R. Planché's An Old Fairy Tale Told Anew in Pictures and Verse. While Doyle developed his visual skill early in life, the consistency and repetition of his artistic style helped to date Doyle's work and make it seem repetitive.

Doyle began In Fairyland in 1868, shortly after his father died. The book began as pencil-and-ink drawings, which were transferred to watercolors. Initially he conceived it as a fairy album of his favorite figures, and he planned to call the series "Fairyland—Pictures from the World of Fairies, Elves & Goblins, Dwarfs, Sprites" (Engen 155). When the drawings were submitted to Longmans, the publisher felt that the series of illustrations needed an accompanying text to connect the images in a more cohesive manner. Richard Allingham was contacted in July 1869 by Longmans on the recommendation of Tom Taylor to write a set of verses to accompany Doyle's fairy drawings. A friend of Alfred Lord Tennyson as well as of several Pre-Raphaelite artists and writers, Allingham had gained some popularity as a fairy poet with the publication "The Fairies," which first appeared in his collection The Music Master (1855) where the poem was illustrated by Arthur Hughes. He recorded in his diary while writing "A Forest in Fairyland": "A job of this kind likes me not, yet I accepted the offer, and have found some pleasure in trying, chiefly during rambles in the Forest, to bring the unconnected designs within the compass of a little story in dialogue with some lyrics intersperse. Both artist and publisher have left me entirely to myself in the matter, and it remains to be seen how they will like 'Prince Brightkin'" (199-200).

Allingham's long narrative poem for In Fairyland tells the story of the courtship of Prince Brightkin who wins the love of "the lovely lady of Elfin Mere" (Doyle, In Fairyland 19) over three other suitors during the course of a day in Fairyland. After its publication, Allingham expressed his disappointment with In Fairyland, calling it "a muddle, no consultation having been made or proposed between artist and poet. The former (in a huff probably) has put his own prose description to the pictures" (Allingham 201). Doyle felt if a narrative was needed for his illustrations, he was more qualified to provide it than Allingham. Bryan Holme reports that contemporary reviewers were also unimpressed with Allingham's poem and asked "Did he look at Dicky's pictures, or was he so carried away with his own rhyming that he quite forgot?" (Doyle 1979 7). In Fairyland was financially successful, even at the high price of a guinea and a half—which suggested it was being marketed primarily as an art book rather than a children's book—and went into a second edition in 1875.

Perhaps unsatisfied with Allingham's poem, Charles Longman asked Andrew Lang if he might be able to compose a prose fairy tale using Doyle's illustrations in 1884, a year after Doyle's death. More than any other author of the late Victorian period, Lang helped to popularize the fairy tale as appropriate reading material for children. An astonishingly productive man of letters, even by Victorian standards, Lang influenced children's literature in two important ways: as the editor of the immensely popular twelve-volume, color fairy-book series begun with the publication of The Blue Fairy Book (1889), and as the author of five literary fairy tales for children. In the "Preface" to The Grey Fairy Book (1900), Lang suggested that fairy tales are essentially composed of "a certain number of incidents," that can then be shaken "into many various combinations of incidents, like the fragments of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope" (vii). He added that, "Probably the possible combinations, like musical combinations, are not unlimited in number" (vii). This description, which he wrote six years after his revision of In Fairyland, seems the closest that Lang came to describing his composition process for The Princess Nobody: A Tale of Fairy Land (1884), which he based on the details of Doyle's illustrations.

It is surprising that Doyle's fanciful fairy illustrations would have such a strong appeal for such a serious folklorist as Lang. While Doyle sought inspiration from pioneering scholarly works on folklore, such as Thomas Keightley's Fairy Mythology (1828) and Thomas Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of South of Ireland (1825), his detailed and imaginative book illustrations are more part of the Victorian literary and artistic fairylore than of traditional folklore.

His fairies are closer in spirit to those found in literary fairy tales or pantomime than to those found in traditional folktales. Like most fairy artists of the period, Doyle based his images on literary sources, and the most common sources for English artists and illustrators were William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and the "Queen Mab" speech from Romeo and Juliet (Jackson 39). Doyle's fairy painting The Enchanted Fairy Tree (1845), reproduced in Victorian Fairy Painting (Martineau 128), is based on The Tempest and was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1868 shortly before he began work on the In Fairyland illustrations. Doyle's illustrations are what Richard Dorson would later term "fakelore" rather than folklore. In particular, plate 13 of In Fairyland, which Doyle captioned The Fairy Queen Takes an Airy Drive (24), would irritate many folklorists. The plate's artificiality is perhaps the reason Lang did not use it in creating Princess Nobody, despite its artistic charm.

Lang's extensive cut-and-paste-and-rearrange approach to composing literary fairy tales is fairly unorthodox. In discussing the art of the picture book, Maurice Sendak has suggested that "an illustration is an enlargement, an interpretation of the text" (Lanes 109) and that as an illustrator, "you are always serving the words" (Lanes 110). Sendak adds that in the texts he illustrated as well as in the composition of his own picture books, he always considers the words first, and doesn't initially consider the images ("Conversation" 176). Frequently in illustrated texts, the visual is subordinated to the verbal, which is reversed in In Fairyland. Gillian Avery notes that Juliana Ewing wrote several short stories around preexisting German woodcuts, including "Dandelion Clocks" and "Our Lord," although no other children's text is "so elaborate as Lang's contrivance of this story to fit some fifty illustrations by Richard Doyle" (9). Lang's inverted writing process, in which the prose follows the illustrations, seems well suited for Doyle's images which Rodney Engen describes as "jig-saw like compositions" (143). Lang's reappropriation and reordering of Doyle's illustrations into a new text were done a hundred years before Donald Bartheleme's The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine (1971) and other postmodern literary fairy tales, which involve a self-conscious reordering of previous images and characters from children's literature.

Lang was a tireless recycler of preexisting material, and Princess Nobody is a typical example of his tendency to reuse previous material. Princess Nobody was the first of five literary fairy tales that Lang wrote and significantly the only one that he chose not to include in his My Own Fairy Book (1896), the anthology of literary fairy tales that he mentioned were "made up altogether in his own head" (vii).⁵ Indeed Lang could point to his study of fairy tales to confirm his passion for reusing material. In his "Introduction" to Margaret Hunt's translation of Grimms' Household Tales (1884), published in the same year as Princess Nobody, Lang argues: "In the first place the incidents, plots, and characters of the tales are, in every Aryan country, almost identical. . . . everywhere there is the story about the wife who is forced by some mysterious cause to leave her husband, or of the husband driven from his wife, a story which sometimes ends in the reunion of the pair. The coincidences of this kind are very numerous, and it soon becomes plain that most Aryan household tales are the common possession of the peoples which speak an Aryan language. It is also manifest that the tales consist of but few incidents, grouped together in a kaleidoscopic variety of arrangements" (257). The plot of In Fairyland is that of a wife who is forced to leave her husband once he discovers her name, but is reunited by the help of the fairies. In addition to using this well-established plot in In Fairyland, he would also reuse the metaphor of the elements of fairy tales, like the glass of a kaleidoscope, in his "Preface" to The Grey Fairy Book (1900), six years later.

In his "Introduction" to the English translation by Clara Bell of Frederik Van Eeden's Dutch literary fairy tales Little Johannes (1895), which Lang uses as a history of the literary fairy tale, he writes: "There may possibly be critics or rather there are certain to be critics, who will deny that the modern and literary fairy tale is a legitimate genre, or a proper theme of discussion. The Folklorist is not unnaturally jealous of what, in some degrees, looks like Folk-lore" (xvi). But to this strict folklorist approach, Lang adds: "There is very little real danger of this result. I speak, however, not without sympathy, there was a time when I regarded all contes except contes populaires as frivolous and vexatious. This, however, is the fanaticism of pedantry" (xvi).

Lang maintains that one could be a serious folklorist, as he was, and still enjoy literary or modern fairy tales, such as Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, or Doyle's illustrations to In Fairyland. Lang could embrace both genres, much to the irritation of his fellow members of the Folk-Lore Society, of which he served as president in 1888 and 1889 as well as serving on its executive council. This attitude justified Lang's inclusion of both folktales and literary fairy tales in his anthologies, such as The Blue Fairy Book.

To any would-be author of literary fairy tales, Lang subsequently warns in the preface to The Lilac Fairy Book (1910), "They think that to write a new fairy tale is easy work. They are mistaken; the thing is impossible. Nobody can write a new fairy tale; you can only mix up and dress up the old, old stories and put the characters into new dresses" (viii). Here Lang seems to be indirectly commenting on his composition of Princess Nobody : in order to construct his own fairy tale, he manipulated Doyle's previously published sixteen full-color plates, by rearranging them, cutting them up, and omitting others to create a different pattern for his new fairy tale. As in the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, Lang combines elements from the fairy tale formula, but the lasting impression of Princess Nobody is not the plot, but the swirl of colorful images that Doyle's illustrations provide. The story functions as a map to the illustrations. Even in their distorted form, Doyle's illustrations overpower Lang's text.

Lang tried a variety of techniques in reusing Doyle's original plates. In some cases, he simply included the entire plate from In Fairyland, as is the case with plate 2, The Fairy Prince in Love (2); plate 14, An Elfin Dance by Night (26); and plate 16, Asleep in the Moonlight (30). Other plates, such as the previously mentioned plate 13, The Fairy Queen Takes an Airy Drive (24), Lang omitted completely. Usually Lang only used sections of a plate, especially if it contained multiple images. For instance, in the case of plate 5, three of the four images were used, but A Dancing Butterfly (8) was omitted. The reverse happens with plate 12 in that only one of the three images, Intruder (22), was used by Lang.

Lang frequently took a large plate, such as plate 4, Triumphal March of the Elf-King (6), and cut it up and placed the various sections on different pages to illustrate his story. Plate 4 is the most extreme example in that Lang divides the one large plate into nine separate drawings. While all of Doyle's illustrations in In Fairyland are in color, after dividing them, Lang often only reproduced them in sepia. The dwarf on the frog who makes the offer of a child to the king and queen first appears in color in plate 10, Water-Lillies and Water Fairies (18), in In Fairyland, but in Princess Nobody he appears in sepia (19), although Lang's text mentioned that he is wearing "a red cap, and a red cloak, riding a green Frog" (16). Even when Doyle provided three images on a single plate that are intended to read sequentially—as he does in plate 8, A Little Play, In Three Acts, (14)—Lang rearranges them. Doyle captioned plate 8 This Is a Little Play in Three Acts: Scene: A Toadstool. Characters: A Sentimental Elf and a Wayward Fairy (14). Doyle provided individual captions for each of the three images: "Enter; an Elf in Search of a Fairy," which is followed by "He Finds Her; and This Is the Consequence," and concluding with "She Runs Away, and This Is His Condition" (14). In Princess Nobody, Lang reorders the series so that the third and final image from plate 8 appears first (44), followed by Rejected, an image from plate 9 (50), followed by the first image from plate 8 (51), and concluding with the second image from plate 9 (52). This reordering dramatically reverses Doyle's little play from a tragedy to a comedy.

Lang used the majority of Doyle's In Fairyland illustrations; he only omitted five images. The images are reconstructed in such a way that they become almost new illustrations for the fairy tale. None of Allingham's poem "A Forest in Fairy Land" is retained in Princess Nobody, although Lang composed two poems that frame his fairy tale. The "Ballade of Dedication" acknowledges and praises Doyle's illustration (7), and the concluding poem "Erant Ohm Rex Quidam Et Regina" situates Princess Nobody in the literary fairy tradition of the French fairy court (55).

Lang uses the characters and details present in Doyle's illustrations as well, relying on established folktale motifs to construct Princess Nobody. In ten passages in his three-chapter fairy tale, Lang specifically draws the readers' attention to Doyle's illustration, as in the opening page where he writes, "Here you may see all the Fairies making themselves merry at a picnic on a fuchsia, and an angry little Dwarf climbing up the stalk" (Princess Nobody 9), which is an image taken from plate 15, Feasting and Fun among the Fuschia (In Fairyland 28). Lang's narrative method of addressing the illustrations within his text is reminiscent of the authorial asides in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in which the narrator writes, "(If you don't know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture)" (81), only Lang uses the device much more frequently.

What Lang lacks in originality as an author in Princess Nobody is compensated by his clever eye for detail in reusing Doyle's illustrations. In his fairy tale, the king and queen of the kingdom next to Fairy Land are childless, but desire a baby. A dwarf riding a frog overhears their request and grants it under the condition that he is given "NIENTE" in return (Princess Nobody 11). The king mistakenly assumes that he is obligated to give nothing in return, "niente" being the Italian term for "nothing," as the text of Princess Nobody explains (14). Arriving home from the war between the Ghosts and the Giants, the king learns that he and the queen do have a baby girl who was christened "Niente," or "Nothing" in his absence. When Niente is fourteen, the Dwarf returns to make his claims. The Queen of the Water Fairies, who is the girl's godmother, cannot reverse the promise, but she can make the princess vanish instead. The king and queen offer to hold a tournament and promise to give their daughter in marriage to the prince who can find her and bring her home. The ugly Prince Comical, who has a kind heart through the assistance of various animal helpers—a Daddy Long Legs, a Black Beetle, and Blue Bird—is able to locate Niente in Mushroom Land. The Queen of Mushroom Land transforms the ugly Prince Comical into handsome Prince Charming so that his features are not a hindrance to the courtship. The transformation of Prince Comical into Prince Charming is a neat trick on Lang's part in that it allows him to use two different Doyle figures as the hero of his tale. The transformation of Prince Comical into Prince Charming also reproduces the plot device of the transformation scene in Christmas pantomimes, the popular Victorian family entertainment, which often used fairy tales as the narrative frame for the play. The transformation scene of pantomimes involved elaborate costume changes and special effects. Lang recognized that Doyle's illustrations to In Fairyland, with their highly elaborate and theatrical stylizing, borrow from the pantomime tradition.

Lang provides a final complication for the lovers. Niente refuses to tell Charming her name, for according to fairy law, it must never be mentioned, or she will vanish again. The curious Charming overhears his wife singing her real name, which turns out to be Gwendoline, while she thinks he is asleep. Because her name has been discovered, Niente vanishes for a second time, and Charming returns to his former Comical self. Thanks to the intervention of a final animal helper, the bat, who is the favorite of Puck, sees to it that Oberon and Titania (Princess Nobody 46-47) are able to make things right and reunite the lovers.

Once Comical and Niente are reunited, their kiss across a mushroom leads to the final transformation, and the two lovers become the new king and queen of the land next to Fairy Land. Lang concludes his fairy tale "journeys end in lovers meetings and so do Stories" (Princess Nobody 52). Lang quotes Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: "Journeys end in lovers meeting / Every wise man's son doth know" (II, iii, 46), which brilliantly completes the circle and unites the two primary influences of Princess Nobody : William Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring and Richard Doyle's In Fairyland.

Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring featured the description on the title page of "A Fireside Pantomime for Great and Small Children" (vi). It was Lang's favorite fairy tale and the model for Princess Nobody. Lang frequently recommended The Rose and the Ring to his readers, as he did in the "Preface" to The Yellow Fairy Book (1894), in which he concludes his introduction with: "The editor cannot say 'good-bye' without advising them, as they pursue their studies, to read The Rose and the Ring, by the late Mr. Thackeray, with pictures by the author. This book he thinks quite indispensable in every children's library, and parents should be urged to purchase it at the first opportunity, as without it no education is complete" (xiii).

There is an important and frequently overlooked connection between Doyle and The Rose and the Ring. In 1853, Thackeray, because of his ill health, had reluctantly assigned the illustration of his novel The Newcomes to Doyle, and as Gordon Ray suggests, "thereby gave up the part of the work from which he derived the most pleasure" (Introduction v). Not only did Doyle illustrate The Newcomes, but he was the model for one of the major characters, J. J. Ridley, a fairy painter. The frontispiece of the first volume of Thackeray's The Newcomes features Doyle's illustration J. J. in Dreamland (1), which features the artist surrounded by the hallow of fairies. John Harvey, in Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators, has noted the similarities between Doyle and J. J. Ridley, an artist who achieved modest success by exhibiting the fairy painting Oberon and Titania at the Royal Academy (95). Ridley provides the moral counterpoint to the novel's protagonist, Clive Newcome (95). At the same time that Thackeray was deprived of the pleasure of illustrating The Newcomes, he was living in Rome with his two daughters, Amy and Minny; he had the idea of celebrating Twelfth Night with a party complete with a cake and drawings of the traditional Twelfth-Night characters. Discovering that the local shops did not stock Twelfth-Night figures, Thackeray writes in the "Prelude" to The Rose and the Ring that he drew his own funny painted pictures of the King, the Queen, the Lover, the Lady, the Dandy the Captain and so on—with which our young ones are wont to recreate themselves at this festive time" (v). Twelfth Night, or Epiphany, is usually celebrated on January 6 and honors the arrival of the Magi with gifts. It is a folk tradition that concludes the twelve days of Christmas with a rowdy festival of eating and drinking. The event was Catholic in background and disliked by extreme Protestants who attempted to end its extravagant celebrations. After the Twelfth-Night party, Thackeray found his drawings and decided to create a story around the preexisting illustrations (Ray, Introduction vi). One of his daughters' friends, Edith Story, was recovering from illness and unable to attend the Twelfth-Night party, so Thackeray visited her and began composing the story that would eventually became The Rose and The Ring. Ten years after the publication of The Rose and the Ring, Doyle published a drawing titled The Rose and the Ring, which features Thackeray reading his fairy tale to Edith Story (Ray Introduction vii). In composing Princess Nobody Lang used not only Thackeray's fairy tale as his model, but Thackeray's process of creating a story around pre-existing visual images. It seems clear that Lang had Thackeray's own form of composition in mind when he created Princess Nobody out of Doyle's In Fairyland illustrations. Princess Nobody can be read as an elaborate homage to Lang's favorite literary fairy tale.

Princess Nobody was the least successful of Lang's literary fairy tales and only went through one edition. When compiling his fairy tales for My Own Fairy Book (1896), Lang chose not to include it, perhaps sensing that the tale owed more to Doyle's illustrations than his own prose. After cutting apart, rearranging the order, and removing the color from Doyle's masterpiece, as Lang did with Princess Nobody, perhaps no greater indignities could be inflicted on the illustrations. However Roger Lancelyn Green, the biographer of Andrew Lang, argued that Princess Nobody was "so good that it can stand alone without the pictures which inspired it, or at least gave Lang the pretext of writing it" (60). Green subsequently republished Princess Nobody without Doyle's illustrations, but included three dull illustrations by E. H. Shepard, in his collection Modern Fairy Stories (1955). Gillian Avery also chose to reprint Princess Nobody without illustrations in The Gold of Fairnilee and Other Stories by Andrew Lang (1967). Avery maintained that "the text stands well by itself, uncluttered by the Doyle decoration which I myself find repetitious and fussy" (9-10). In a similar fashion, Jack Zipes's Victorian Fairy Tales (1987) features a color illustration from In Fairyland on the front cover of the collection, but when he reprinted Princess Nobody, only five of Doyle's illustrations in black and white were included. Still that is an improvement over Peter Hunt's Children's Literature: An Anthology, 1801-1902 (2001), which also features an illustration from In Fairyland on the front cover, but doesn't include Princess Nobody in the collection. Doyle's brilliant illustrations, which are the inspiration from which Lang created Princess Nobody, have, in several cases, been replaced by Lang's ingenious, but flimsy text.

But there has been a renewed interest in Victorian fairy painting following the popular Victorian Fairy Painting exhibition organized in 1998 by the University of Iowa Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts London. Two scholarly studies, Jane Martineau's Victorian Fairy Painting (1997) and Christopher Wood's Fairies in Victorian Art (2000), have been published on the subject, and both volumes prominently feature Doyle and his illustrations. Dover Publications has recently reprinted A Tale of Fairyland (The Princess Nobody) (2000) which includes Princess Nobody and the plates from In Fairyland that Lang did not use in his tale. The Dover republication joins four other reprints of In Fairyland illustrations, the first edited by Cary Wilkins (1977), followed by Bryan Holme's edition (1979), which includes both Lang's fairy tale and Allingham's poem as well as Doyle's illustrations. The most accurate reproduction of In Fairyland and the only reproduction in its original format is part of the facsimile editions from the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books printed by Holp Shuppan Publishers of Tokyo in 1981. The most accurate reproduction of Princess Nobody appears in Jonathan Cott's Victorian Color Picture Books (1983), which was published as volume seven of the eight volume Master-works of Children's Literature published by Stonehill Publishing. These various republications of Doyle's In Fairyland images suggest that a modest Doyle revival is underway

The illustrations of In Fairyland transcend any author's attempts to control them, be it the captions by Doyle, Allingham's poem, Lang's fairy tale, or various editors' attempts to abridge them. Doyle's landmark book illustrations combine the Victorian interest in narrative paintings with the fascination for the fairy world. His brilliant series of illustrations anticipates the increasing importance of the visual in the contemporary culture and form a significant transitional text that bridges the gap from Victorian narrative painting to contemporary wordless picture books.

While Doyle is also a fairy painter, his more successful images remain his book illustrations. His images thrive within the structure, sequence, and pacing of a book, which is more ambitious than a single narrative painting, and anticipates the popularity of the wordless picture book. Doyle's In Fairyland remains a triumph of the visual.

Notes

1. Other Victorian narrative art paintings include William Powell Frith's sweeping Derby Day (1858) and The Railway Station (1862); Augustus Egg's three-part painting Post and Present (1858); and sequential print illustrations such as George Cruikshank's The Bottle (1848) or The Drunkard's Children (1847).

2. After earning a first-class rank in the Classics at Oxford, Lang moved to London and rapidly established himself as the leading spokesman for the anthropological school of folklore, building on the pioneering work of Edward B. Tylor in anthropology. Lang's essay "Mythology and Fairy Tales," published in the May 1873 issue of the Fortnightly Review, successfully refuted Max Müller's claims of solar mythology and "the disease of language" as an explanation for a common source of myth and fairy tale. Through his many publications and his work with the Folk-Lore Society, Lang established himself as one of the leading Victorian folkiorists of the day. He promoted his theory that fairy tales evolved in various cultures as the result of societies undergoing the same process of cultural evolution in works such as Custom and Myth (1884) and Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1887) and contributed the entry on "Tales" to the eleventh edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) where he acknowledged the importance of cultural diffusion in the transmission of fairy tales.

3. Two recent volumes that reprint Doyle's illustrations are Fairyland in Art and Poetry (2001), an anthology of fairy poetry edited by William Lach for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which uses only Doyle's illustrations, and Lori Eisenkraft-Palazzola's Faeries: Doorways to the Enchanted Realm (1999), a coffee-table study of fairies, which features Doyle's illustrations on the cover and the frontispiece. Reproductions of Doyle's In Fairyland illustrations can also be found on calendars, post cards, coffee mugs, baby bibs, and countless other non-book items that confirm their popularity.

4. John Doyle's "Political Sketches" appeared under the initials H. B. The Doyles were a large artistic family of five brothers and two sisters who were trained at home in art by the father. James Doyle tried his hand as a historical painter, but found more success with his Historical Baronage of England (1866). Henry Doyle also worked as a painter and illustrator, but eventually beame the director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Charles Altamont Doyle—father of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes detective series—had some success as both a painter and a book illustrator, but suffered a mental breakdown and was admitted to the Monrose Royal Lunatic Asylum. There Charles, like his more successful brother Dicky Doyle, continued to paint fairies. Charles Doyle's diary was discovered and published as Doyle Diary (1978); his illustrations provide an eerie nightmare version that mirrors the more light-hearted fairy world created by his brother Dicky.

5. Of his four other literary fairy tales, Lang's The Gold of Fairnilee (1888) owes the most to folk tradition. It is set on the Scottish borders and involves an child who is stolen away by the fairies. His other three comic fairy tales—Prince Prigio (1889) and Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia (1893) and Tales of the Fairy Court (1906)—all borrow heavily from the fairy-court tradition established by Marie Catherine d'Aulnoy. Gordon Browne illustrated Prince Prigio and Prince Ricardo, while A. A. Dixon illustrated Tales of the Fairy Court. In Lang's literary fairy tales, the illustrations are clearly secondary to the text and add little to the tone of the books, unlike In Fairyland where the illustrations dominate Lang's text.

Works Cited

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TITLE COMMENTARY

THE BLUE FAIRY BOOK (1889; REVISED EDITION, 1975)

Judith Woolf (review date 2 April 1976)

SOURCE: Woolf, Judith. "Mirrors of Our Existence." Times Literary Supplement, no. 3864 (2 April 1976): 396.

These external regions, what do we fill them with
Except reflections, the escapades of death,
Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?

Wallace Stevens, speaking, in his Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, of the human need for fictions which will at once mirror and transcend the facts of our mortal existence, turns naturally to a fairy tale for his example. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his essay On Fairy-Stories, speaks of the "piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through", and he quotes the climax of The Black Bull of Norroway in the version chosen by Andrew Lang for his Blue Fairy Book :

Seven long years I served for thee,
The glassy hill I clamb for thee,
The bluidy shirt I wrang for thee,
And wilt thou not wauken and turn to me?
"He heard and turned to her."
(Tolkien's italics)

Powerful stuff; and it is perhaps understandable that Brian Alderson, in his new edition of the Blue Fairy Book, seems a little nervous of his task. The blurb assures us that both Mr Alderson and his illustrator, John Lawrence, have been at pains "to maintain the flavour of the original work". Some of the changes made seem positively to improve the flavour. It is delightful to be told that Little Thumb's father managed to "have so many children in so little a time . . . because his wife went nimbly about her business, and never brought fewer than two at a birth", or to be given the recipe for the sauce Robert with which the Ogress Queen-mother planned to eat the Sleeping Beauty's children. The substitution of Dasent's translations of the Norse folk-tales, admired by Lang, for those of Mrs Alfred Hunt is a change that speaks for itself:

"Ah!" said the Prince, "you're none of you worth a straw: you can't wash. Why there, outside sits a beggar lassie. I'll be bound she knows how to wash better than the whole lot of you. COME IN, LASSIE!" he shouted.

Well, in she came.

"Can you wash this shirt clean lassie, you?" said he.

Other changes are perhaps less happy. It is disconcerting to find Prince Hyacinth, who has vanished from the beginning of the book, reappearing in the middle as Prince Dorus. The boy who wanted to learn to shudder—"It's probably an art quite beyond me"—desires instead to be given the shivers—"It's something I just can't do." The prime minister's son, in The Bronze Ring, is branded on the backside instead of the back, but in exchange, since every age has its unmentionable subjects, "the wicked 'Juif' remains shielded under the guise of magician" although the "hideous Negroes" are for some reason allowed to remain.

This edition would be well worth having for John Lawrence's vivid and witty illustrations alone. Sticklers for authenticity, however, can get the complete Lang spectrum, unchanged and unabridged, from Dover Publications.

Alison Uttley's Fairy Tales seem slender when put alongside Lang's folk-tales, but their slenderness is part of their charm. Miss Uttley has an eye which sees best when very close to the ground and although these stories contain no character to rival the immortal Sam Pig, they have a loving attention to small details.

The cobbler had made a pair of high boots of scarlet leather, with wooden heels and square toes tipped with brass, and brass eyelet holes. The bootlaces were cornstalks plaited in a string, and tied with corn tassels.

Ann Strugnell, in her equally detailed illustrations, excels at portraying invisible creatures and powers—a grandfather escaping from his clock or a girl embraced by the wind.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (review date April 1979)

SOURCE: Review of The Blue Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, re-edited by Brian Alderson, illustrated by Faith Jacques. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 32, no. 8 (April 1979): 140.

One of the first three volumes in new versions (the others are The Red Fairy Book, illustrated by Faith Jacques, and The Green Fairy Book, illustrated by Antony Maitland) of Lang's color series, [The Blue Fairy Book ] has been revised by an eminent British folklore scholar [Brian Alderson] to be closer to original versions, since Lang was adapting for children of the Victorian era. Alderson has not simplified the writing; indeed, it is often more difficult: in the beginning of the story of Jack the Giant-Killer, for example, Lang's Jack "was a boy of bold temper and (who) took delight in hearing or reading of conjurers, giants and fairies." Alderson says "He was brisk and of a ready lively wit, so that whatever he could not perform by force and strength he completed by ingenious wit and policy." Alderson also consolidates material so that the new version often has longer and heavier blocks of print. In the story of Jack there are a considerable number of changes, primarily the reinstatement of material; in other tales there are comparatively few alterations. In appended notes, the editor explains the reasons for his changes in texts, describes Lang's sources, and discusses the versions adopted. Also included is a reprint of Lang's introduction to the 1889 edition. The black and white illustrations have an appropriately antique air, varying in degrees of the macabre and the romantic to suit the tale being illustrated.

THE RED FAIRY BOOK (1890; REVISED EDITION, 1976)

Edward Blishen (review date June 1977)

SOURCE: Blishen, Edward. "Jock of the Bushveld." Books and Bookmen 22, no. 9 (June 1977): 66-8.

The library of the school I went to was up among the turrets of the original Tudor building—the floors so unsteady that it was like borrowing books on board a sinking ship. The new edition of The Red Fairy Book reminds me that we had, in that library, Lang's collections of all colours: that, c. 1930, no ten-year-old boy looked askance at another for borrowing them: and that they seemed curiously natural denizens of that ancient building. . . . This is the second Brian Alderson has re-edited—[The Blue Fairy Book ] came in 1975, and [The Green Fairy Book ] is to follow. Not easy to do without harm—to rejig, according to the taste of another age and another editor, a volume that owed some of its original force to its being Lang's peculiar harvest, and of its time (1890). Mr Alderson has been very discreet. The changes include an alteration in the order of the stories and the dropping of four of the feebler of them; and the replacement of Lang's preferred translations of the Norse tales with earlier versions. It's striking how many of the best stories here come from among the lesser-known fairy tales. Striking, also, how statements of the value of these 'novels for the nursery', as Lang charmingly calls them, rested on a belief that they'd outlive the enormities of Science. Modest steam was then the villain. 'These will be heard', Lang wrote, 'when the steam whistle is silent'. Mr Alderson catches Thackeray at it, too. 'The world', Thackeray thundered, 'will be a dull world some hundreds of years hence, when Fancy shall be dead, and ruthless Science (that has no more bowels than a steam-engine) has killed her'. Given the splendid new illustrations by Faith Jacques, one has to say this is a pretty reasonably-priced volume.

THE GREEN FAIRY BOOK (1892; REVISED EDITION, 1978)

T. A. Shippey (review date 7 July 1978)

SOURCE: Shippey, T. A. "Authorized Versions." Times Literary Supplement, no. 3979 (7 July 1978): 768.

Andrew Lang's 1892 preface to the Green Fairy Book grates on modern sensibilities almost with every line. It makes the patronizing assumption that fairy-tales are for children, or for adults mimicking childhood. It points morals overtly, and old-fashioned ones at that, like the utility of pluck. It contains a vein of whimsy which relies on adult comprehension of childish incomprehension, telling you not to fear the monster because "He has been turned into stone, and you may see his remains in museums". How many fond mammas, one wonders, giggled at the tinies' confusion of magic dragons with scientific dinosaurs? And could the mammas have done it without a certain security in their own mental categories which has since all but disappeared? Certainly most people now would wince at Lang's unthinking assumption of the higher culture of nineteenth-century Europe, signalled by his assertion that "men were much like children in their minds, long ago", and that this was why they "believed that witches could turn people into beasts, that beasts could speak, that magic rings could make their owners invisible". What Lang thought but did not say was that tale-tellers were admirable but evolutionarily backward, while their fantasy was only a naive and hopelessly mistaken realism.

Not much could be calculated to irritate the late twentieth-century reader more. But two things that might are inaccuracy and bowdlerism, and Lang (with his team of lady translators) managed both quite easily, attributing stories in wayward fashion, and cutting them about for all too evident reasons. "There was once a fisherman and his wife, who lived together in a pisspot right by the sea. . . ." So starts "Von dem Fischer un syner Fru" in Grimm—but not in Lang's Green Fairy Book. "La Pouilleuse", similarly, means "the girl with lice"; but in 1892 it was "The Dirty Shepherdess". As for "Hans mein Igel", in the Grimms' version the hedgehog-boy rubs the wicked princess with his prickles "bis sie ganz blutig war". But there is no blood in Lang, not, one feels because of the cruelty (to which he had no theoretical objection), but because of the sexual suggestiveness. The most altered story of all, oddly enough, is the native "Three Litle Pigs", where Lang cut out not only the hair on my chinny-chin-chin, but also the house of straw and the house of furze. These became mud and cabbage respectively, quite clearly so that Lang could reprove the childish sins of dirtiness and greed beneath porcine masks, and also so that he could suggest even more strongly than the original tale did that the first two little pigs' mishaps were their own silly fault. It's not just in Thomas Hardy that character is fate. But this propagandist note feels quite alien to the luck-ethic of most fairytales, dominated as they are by idle younger sons who outstrip their shrewd, respectable brothers.

In these circumstances it is only natural that Brian Alderson should re-edit and retranslate the Lang anthologies, working as he does from a conviction that his "prime duty" is to the original tales, that these deserve to be brought from obscurity and presented in "authentic" and "authoritative" form. On his side he has every modern sentiment from veneration for accuracy to faith in plain speech; and he has done his work with great scrupulosity, mining his way through layers and layers of tale-transmission, and providing the stories with explanatory notes and helpful comparative appendixes. And yet one might, perhaps perversely, feel a doubt. No one should object to a bit of "tampering" with Lang's texts, for this is no more than a case of the biter bit (another traditional motif). But does the quest for vulgar origins not lead to a sort of self-delusion to which modern readers are much more vulnerable than Victorian ones—namely, the belief that if you try you can shed knowledge and return to uncomplicated responses? "Ee", "Ay", "Aw", "Nay", "Nah", ejaculate the characters in Brian Alderson's "Fisherman and His Wife", and of course the Northernisms correspond very well to the Low German dialect of the original and its runs of "Ach", "I", "Ne", "Na" and so on. Still, we don't say things like that. Pretending we do is part of the popular middle-class sport of boasting about plebeian ancestors. In the flight from superior irony one can easily fall down the hole of hearty folksiness. Anyway, haven't fairy-tales always been retold in the teller's normal speech, the way Lang's ladies wrote them? Should we bother about fidelity to so-called "originals"? And isn't there something odd about an "authoritative" fairy tale?

These reflections do not really come round to supporting Andrew Lang after all, but they do suggest that in the matter of fairy-tales pieties are still involved much more than one might expect. And one of the charms of Lang's "colour" anthologies is exactly that they are heterogeneous, much more so than the Grimms' collection, and very much more so than, say, Afanasev's Russian one. So as you read through you can be amused by the recurrence of motifs—the sudden wish, the animal donor, the false return—beneath the different surfaces of French galanterie, German abruptness, or good old English lack of consequence. Variations in self-awareness should not be ruled out (any more than cruelties or vulgarisms) through preconceived notions of what a fairy-tale ought to be. I wish, in short, that Mr. Alderson had brought back to his story the courtly protest of the Comte de Caylus's king to the great club-wielding Enchanter—"Vous ne chassez pas dans les règles!" But I am grateful to him, just the same, for letting it get as far as the notes.

Neil Philip (review date 20 October 1978)

SOURCE: Philip, Neil. "Mony Hiddous Rumbill." Times Educational Supplement, no. 3303 (20 October 1978): 25.

The British Isles are particularly rich in fairy traditions and stories, and a large number of these are related and placed in context in The Vanishing People [by Katherine M. Brigg], an authoritative and stimulating guide to the origins, habitat, appearance, social customs, local peculiarities and outstanding characters of the British fairies, with occasional reference to other European traditions. Many writers on folklore clip and deform their material to fit their theories, just as Cinderella's sisters in many versions of the story pinch and cut their feet to fit her slippers; but Dr Briggs, one of our foremost folklore scholars, is always careful to avoid this trap. Ambiguity and contradiction are necessary and welcome attributes of a living tradition.

Because The Vanishing People is a collection of essays on different aspects of fairy lore, there is some inevitable duplication of illustrative material. All of it, however, is of the highest quality, and grips the imagination in even the shortest extracts. Few will easily forget the Fairy Rade which passed by Bessie Dunlop in the sixteenth century "with mony hiddous rumbill", or the chilling cry of the malevolent mermaid, cheated of her prey, the Laird of Lorntie, by the quick-wittedness of his servant:

Lorntie, Lorntie,
Were it na your man,
I had gart your heart's bluid
Skirl in my pan.

Those who wish to pursue the British fairy tradition will find all they need in the bibliography and chapter notes.

Andrew Lang was a folklorist of similar stature to Katherine Briggs, and the authority of his name, combined with a happy choice of title, made The Blue Fairy Book of 1889 an instant success, the first of its kind for many years. It was followed by 24 further volumes with tempting multi-coloured titles, of which 12 were Fairy Books. Brian Alderson is at present reediting the Fairy Books—and to rather more stringent standards than Lang's own.

The Green Fairy Book was the third of the series, and while it is perhaps not the most interesting of the collections it contains a number of well-known stories ("The Three Little Pigs", "The Three Bears", "Jorinde and Joringel") and an equal number of little-known tales which deserve a wider circulation. Alderson's Green Fairy Book is primarily a reading edition, but it has been extensively revised and rearranged in accordance with the editorial method established for the new editions of the Blue and the Red. Full notes on all changes are included at the end.

Lang's attitude to the Fairy Books was a curious one: he lent his name to the enterprise, and supervised the contents of each collection, but much of the actual work devolved on his wife and numerous genteel lady assistants. In his introductions Lang often sounded almost dismissive of the whole project. However, it cannot be doubted that the fundamental eclecticism of the books was Lang's idea, nor that it was his taste for the ornate stories of the Cabinet des Fées and the burlesque tradition which developed from it which determined the inclusion of the literary confections of Madame D'Aulnoy and the Comte de Caylus alongside genuine folk tales.

Lang's editing of the Green Fairy Book was so slapdash that he attributed four tales from other sources to the Grimms, and the laconic "From the Chinese" at the end of the weak "Hok Lee", which Alderson omits, may be assumed to cover a multitude of sins. Alderson also omits three tales by the Comte de Caylus, although he leaves four to retain the balance of Lang's collection. Sometimes Lang's debased texts are important to our modern appreciation of the tale, and Alderson recognizes this by printing Lang's "Three Little Pigs" as an appendix while using Halliwell's in the text.

Most of the stories have been emended in the cause of authenticity by comparison with Lang's sources, and there are new translations, by Alderson, of "The Clever Little Tailor" and "The Fisherman and His Wife". The latter, which was merely comic in Lang, is uproariously, side-splittingly funny in Alderson. Translated from the Pomeranian Low German of the original into North-country dialect, the story is a forceful reminder of the oral nature of much of the book's contents; it cries out to be read aloud. The fisherman and his wife are at last domiciled in the traditional pisspot, rather than the usual polite "ditch" or "pigsty" (Lang had "a little hut"), and the wife is allowed her final blasphemous wish to be like "the good Lord himself".

Anthony Maitland's new illustrations miss the dark mystery of Henry Justice Ford's pre-Raphaelite originals, but have a wit and delicacy which alter our reaction to the tales as subtly and effectively as do the sensitive and intelligent editorial changes.

THE YELLOW FAIRY BOOK (1894; REVISED EDITION, 1980)

Ruth M. McConnell (review date January 1981)

SOURCE: McConnell, Ruth M. Review of The Yellow Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, re-edited by Brian Alderson, illustrated by Erik Blegvad. School Library Journal 27, no. 5 (January 1981): 62.

Gr. 4 Up—The noted British editor [Brian Alderson] has revised a fourth in Lang's series of Color Fairy books [The Yellow Fairy Book ] with typical concern for textual sources and faithful translation. Four tales were deleted as "highly artificial" or contrived ("The Invisible Prince"; "Alphege"; "The Glass Axe"; "The Wizard King"), still leaving a record 44. There are 12 new translations (including all but one of the ten Andersen tales, with the aid of Blegvad) and minor changes in 19 others. Good notes expand the brief source notations of the 1894 original. The editor says no source could be traced for two of the three American Indian stories included; both are in Bierhorst's Fire Plume (Dial, 1969) as "Sheem" and "White Stone Canoe," so doubtless could be checked through H. R. Schoolcraft's works. Blegvad gives a youthful and European flavor to the numerous sketches that illustrate these predominantly Northern European tales.

THE NURSERY RHYME BOOK (1897)

Times Literary Supplement (review date 8 December 1972)

SOURCE: Review of The Nursery Rhyme Book, edited by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Leslie Brooke. Times Literary Supplement, no. 3692 (8 December 1972): 1498.

Andrew Lang's twelve wonderful collections of fairy tales, gathered from all over the world, have been available for some years in Dover's elegant and sturdy series of paperbacked facsimiles of the original editions. Now, Dover have reproduced Andrew Lang's Nursery Rhyme Book, first published by Warne in 1897. This is a splendid collection in its own right, halfway between the Opies' standard work of scholarship and Kathleen Lines's collection, Lavender's Blue, with its lovely illustrations by Harold Jones. Andrew Lang's choice is divided into sections—historical (When good King Arthur ruled this land), literal and scholastic (Tell tale, tit), tales (There was a crooked man), proverbs, songs, riddles, lullabies, games, and so on. And the 100 or so black and white drawings, typically matter-of-fact-fantastic, are by Leslie Brooke, of Johnny Crow's Garden.The Nursery Rhyme Book is available in England from Constable at £1—remarkably good value.

THE PINK FAIRY BOOK (1897; REVISED EDITION, 1982)

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (review date December 1982)

SOURCE: Review of The Pink Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, re-edited by Brian Alderson, illustrated by Colin McNaughton. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 36, no. 4 (December 1982): 71-2.

In this new edition of a classic anthology [The Pink Fairy Book ], Alderson has cut some stories, has edited or translated others, and has provided notes that explain his changes or give background information. The black and white illustrations are distinctive for their wit, dramatic sense, and texture. Alderson has succeeded admirably in his goal of making the tales more palatable for a contemporary audience rather than for the Victorian readers who were Lang's audience, and he has done so without oversimplifying the language or sacrificing the narrative flow.

Neil Philip (review date 18 March 1983)

SOURCE: Philip, Neil. "Naming Demons." Times Educational Supplement, no. 3481 (18 March 1983): 33.

Andrew Lang's coloured fairy books, eclectically compiled and erratically edited, have helped children name the demons of their imagination for nearly a hundred years. To continue to do so for another hundred they needed exactly what Brian Alderson has provided: pruning of the few weak literary stories inserted in each volume; retranslating to catch more truly the flavour of originals which as often as not were already translations before Lang's helpers got to them; and reshaping to transmit the sound of the voice not the scratch of the pen. All this could scarcely be done better than it has been here. If occasional phrases in Lang's text were more resonant (I prefer, for instance, Lang's "with all the pleasure in life" to Alderson's "Why ever not?"), most of the changes are decided improvements. Lang's Andersen texts were Englished by Miss Alma Alleyne from German translations; Alderson has gone back to the Danish to provide something much more sprightly. Take the opening of "The Snowman": Miss Alleyne's sedate "How astonishingly cold it is! My body is cracking all over!" becomes Alderson's infectiously vivid, "I'm all of a crackle inside with this scrumptious cold!"

The Pink Fairy Book, besides several Andersen tales, among them his masterpiece "The Snow Queen", includes traditional stories from all over the world, demonstrating for Lang "that black, white, and yellow peoples are fond of just the same kinds of adventures". The best are the Danish and Swedish stories translated for Lang by W A Craigie: they are rich both in terror and laughter. Those from Japan, including the famous tale of Uraschimataro who, like Oisin, returns from enchantment to discover his parents dead and his country changed beyond recognition, are not, perhaps, very convincingly Japanese; for want of a better solution, Alderson has left them as they were. But the African tales, which in Lang were stilted and odd, have been transformed by Jay Heale into impudent, hilarious, rude delights.

The illustrator of this edition, [Colin] McNaughton, takes his key from these comic fables rather than from the majesties of "The Snow Queen" or the horrors of "The Princess in the Coffin", though he provides for this latter story an appropriately menacing headpiece. His comic vignettes give the book a warm, inviting air: a far cry from the ferocious and richly sensual pictures drawn by H J Ford for the 1897 edition. The few drawings in which McNaughton makes use of his predecessor's work serve only to sharpen the contrast, which is essentially one between decoration and illustration.

But McNaughton's pictures, if they cannot match Ford's in range or intensity, have a pungent wit which suits the more homely atmosphere of these new texts, leading us to the cottage, not the study. Peter Richardson's illustrations in black and white and colour for Peter Carter's new translation of 30 of Grimm's Fairy Tales take us into Disneyland. Hansel and Gretel become wide-eyed little waifs; the brave little tailor looks like Pinocchio; Snow White and Rose Red are as sweet as sugar candy. This is, I suppose, one way of illustrating Grimm; its limitations are made apparent by a quick glance at Maurice Sendak's spine-tingling pictures in Segal's The Juniper Tree. Richardson's efforts do, however, prepare us for Carter's loose, unsatisfactory translations. By novelistic expansion, often of a whimsical nature, Carter manages to blur completely the clean lines of the tales, deadening and muffling their impact. Take "Rumpelstiltskin", surely one of the most threatening and dis-comforting of all stories. At a key moment, Rumpelstiltskin comes to collect the child which was promised him. The mother begs him to take anything but the baby, but he replies (in, for instance, Alderson's translation), "No, a living thing is dearer to me than all the treasures of the world". This highly ambiguous and menacing statement becomes in Carter, "No, I want the baby. You must keep your promise." This is because, "I am lonely, too and no woman will ever marry me so that I shall never have a child of my own unless I take this." At the end we are reminded that "still, you know, it was sad for the dwarf who wanted to have a child of his own to love and care for." Carter's sentimentalized translations have neither the familiarity of Taylor's, the alertness of Alderson's, the crispness of Segal's nor the solidity of Mannheim's; children encountering Grimm in this version will be playing with toy grenades, not live explosive.

Ruth Ratcliff, who retells her German Tales and Legends from childhood memories of her storytelling nurse, is the author as Ruth Michaelis-Jena of an authoritative biography of the brothers Grimm, and herself a translator of Grimm tales. The stories in this little book are gentle, safe fairy legends, sometimes charming, sometimes coy, never threatening. She has remembered them all her life; other children may do the same, though more likely if they are reworked in the tones of a familiar voice than if they are encountered just as printed.

TALES OF TROY AND GREECE (1907)

Mary Hoffman (review date 24 November 1978)

SOURCE: Hoffman, Mary. "Exploits of the Gods." Times Educational Supplement, no. 3308 (24 November 1978):40.

It's a brave man who retells Homer, even though Andrew Lang's act of daring [in Tales of Troy and Greece ] was at the beginning of the century and he is now as impervious to criticism as his mighty model. Criticisms there must be, for the version is eccentric in the telling and avuncular in tone. "You must be told how they lived", he says in the second chapter. Nymphs are consistently referred to as "a sort of fairy" and Ulysses and his men are "driven into Fairyland" for 10 years soon after the Greek victory at Troy.

The bulk of the book is about Ulysses, the Trojan War seen from his part in it as well as the matter of the Odyssey. Lang uses the Roman name throughout, saying firmly "the name was changed into Ulysses and we shall call him Ulysses", while leaving Zeus, Aphrodite and the other gods in their Greek forms. The gods themselves are played down, perhaps in imitation of Bowdler. It may not be necessary to revive the question of Ulysses' paternity, though writers later than Homer thought he was the son of Sisyphus, not Laertes. But to refer to Helen as the daughter of Tyndarus (sic) is either to be Podsnappishly zealous about the young readers' innocence or stolidly to ignore one of Zeus's more notorious extramarital adventures. It also leaves Lang with an anomalous nickname of Helen's to explain, so he says that she was called "The daughter of the swan" because of the whiteness of her breast! The judgment of Paris, which would appear the sine qua non of the whole boiling, is mysteriously omitted.

Andrew Lang is an experienced storyteller and appropriately dedicates this collection to another, Rider Haggard. He collaborated with Haggard on a fantasy called The World's Desire, in which Ulysses and Helen were eventually united. Like Haggard, Lang can tell a good yarn which means he can pace his material and create memorable scenes. But for an introducer to the stories of Troy and Greece he has worn less well than Roger Lancelyn Green. In spite of charming vase-style drawings by Edward Bawden, there is a touch of fustian about this collection which might not enchant young readers.

THE CHRONICLES OF PANTOUFLIA: PRINCE PRIGIO AND PRINCE RICARDO OF PANTOUFLIA (1943; REVISED EDITION, 1981)

Dorothy Rogers (review date 11 May 1981)

SOURCE: Rogers, Dorothy. "Wit and Magic in a Mythical World." Christian Science Monitor 73, no. 116 (11 May 1981): B5.

And lo, a collection of whimsical and enchanting stories appeared from the quill of Andrew Lang. The Chronicles of Pantouflia records many traditions and events of that mythical kingdom (which at one time was somewhere near the Danube River). Since the author had limited access to the Historical Papers of the kingdom, he confines himself to relating legends about Prince Prigio and his son, Ricardo.

Ostensibly written for young people, these recitals of capricious adventure are enjoyable on two levels: Adult readers' eyes will twinkle at the dry British humor. Moreover, Mr. Lang's writings are washed in his quite erudite knowledge of folklore, myths, and history.

In the first grouping of stories the good fairies give Prigio many wondrous gifts at his christening; one horrid fairy saddles him with the curse of being too clever. The queen is much too sensible to believe in sprites or accept the kingdom's historical accounts of the wee folk and magic, so she tosses the dozen-plus bewitching items in a locked turret. While growing up, too-clever Prigio is a smug know-it-all. Devoid of empathy or imagination, he alienates everyone. But one day he discovers the magical items that enable him to accomplish astounding feats such as conjuring metamorphoses and restoring iced knights in armor to life. As the story develops he mends his earlier shortcomings, wins his lady, cloaks his excessive cleverness, and treats others with consideration.

The second grouping, Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia: Being the Adventures of Prince Prigio's Son, offers a different twist. Even in Pantouflia, parents occasionally err in making life too easy for their offspring. So immersed is Ricardo in using magical gifts to solve dilemmas that he neglects skill development and personal talents. Rather than tending to his humdrum duties and his geography and mathematics studies. Ricardo dashes and darts from one exciting exploit to another until his father decides to teach him a lesson.

The moral in the series, though charmingly diffused, is clear: Successful living requires a balance of diligence, pragmatic skills, learning, and the enriching joy of fantasy and a cultivated imagination.

Mr. Lang adroitly captures the essence of 18th-century syntax so the stories ripple from description to dialogue and back with rarely a burble in the cadence. He impishly slips in delightful jabs, pricks, and satirical remarks on the foibles of human nature, especially kingly ways. In all likelihood, Mr. Lang will probably claim that his fantasy folk revealed their own tales. But experts who enjoy dissecting the writings of others, finding esoteric allusions, double foreshadowings, and items of similar ilk, will find themselves in Elysian fields.

Jeanne Titherington's mystical black-and-white drawings have beautifully captured the tenor of the text.

Publishers Weekly (review date 21 August 1981)

SOURCE: Review of The Chronicles of Pantouflia: Prince Prigio and Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia, by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Jeanne Titherington. Publishers Weekly 220, no. 8 (21 August 1981): 55.

The works of the genius Lang have been enthralling readers since the late 19th century and here, for today's children, are two treats in one volume. This edition [The Chronicles of Pantouflia ] combines two of the author's novels, first the woeful and merry life of Prince Prigio. His mother, queen of Pantouflia, refuses to invite the fairies to the prince's christening; she doesn't believe in fairies. So Prigio is doomed to be more clever than anyone else, thus making himself extremely unpopular, even with his father. Prigio redeems himself after many a trial and becomes king in his turn, wed to the lovely Rosalinde. His problem then becomes their son Ricardo, not half clever enough, much too fond of swashbuckling. Titherington bows as an illustrator with the grand pencil drawings that accompany the tales.

Patricia Dooley (review date November 1981)

SOURCE: Dooley, Patricia. Review of The Chronicles of Pantouflia: Prince Prigio and Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia, by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Jeanne Titherington. School Library Journal 28, no. 3 (November 1981): 94.

Gr. 4-6—[The Chronicles of Pantouflia collects t]wo "art" fairy tales originally published in 1889. In the first, Prince Prigio, so clever that he is insufferable (a "prig"), falls in love, wins his bride and learns not to seem so clever. In the second, Prigio's son Ricardo appears to have just the opposite problem. So fond of adventures that he completely neglects both books and the girl who loves him, and so dependent upon magical aids (cap of darkness, sword of sharpness, etc.) that he hasn't developed self-reliance, Ricardo gets—less successfully—reformed. The second tale lacks the satisfying shape of the first, and its unity of theme, but both are amusing and gracefully written. Their many "insider" allusions to fairy-tale conventions and to other tales make them ideal for readers suffering from Prigio-like cleverness and an insatiable thirst for new stories. Lang also indulges in some witticisms and allusions aimed at adult readers. This handsome new edition is embellished by restrained (but suitably clever) black-and-white drawings that manage not to compete with the text but to make it seem both modern and mysterious.

AB Bookman's Weekly (review date 16 November 1981)

SOURCE: Review of The Chronicles of Pantouflia: Prince Prigio and Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia, by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Jeanne Titherington. AB Bookman's Weekly (16 November 1981): 3443.

Godine has entered the realm of children's book publishing this season with a number of delightful selections finely printed and beautifully illustrated. The Chronicles of Pantouflia is Godine's edition of Lang's popular tale about the unfortunate Prince Prigio, doomed to always be smarter than everyone else. Lang published Prince Prigio in 1889 and Prince Ricardo —the story of Prigio's son—in 1893. The two tales were published together as The Chronicles of Pantouflia in 1932.

Children will treasure this attractive rendition of Prince Prigio's woes as he realizes that intelligence alone cannot make him happy; as he struggles to regain the friends his conceit has cost him; and as he guides his adventurous son Ricardo to a balance between constant action at the expense of reading and a repetition of his own mistake.

Alan Hollinghurst (review date 23 July 1982)

SOURCE: Hollinghurst, Alan. "The Problems of the Gifted Child." Times Literary Supplement, no. 4138 (23 July 1982): 795.

The Chronicles of Pantouflia combine two books, the story of Prince Prigio (1889) and the adventures of his son, Prince Ricardo (1893); both antedate The Blue Fairy Book of 1899, the first in Andrew Lang's great spectrum of anthologies of children's stories. But they reveal already an imagination steeped in fairy literature, and adding to that tradition with considerable sophistication. The stories repeatedly take their bearings by literary cross-reference. Some of these would be appreciated by children: the king of Pantouflia is the grandson of Cinderella and includes Madame La Belle au Bois-Dormant among his ancestors; Prince Prigio is given the whole battery of fairy gifts—seven-league boots, flying carpets, wishing caps and so on. On the other hand Prince Ricardo is saved by a weapon-salve described by Sir Kenelm Digby, and his tale has elements drawn from Scott and Ariosto as well as the Gawain poet and others; the tale of the Yellow Dwarf recounted here awaits its proper placement, anthologized in The Blue Fairy Book six years later. Pantouflia, we may assume, is not only a country but, as its name suggests, a state of slippered ease, bookish, witty and even cynical in its handling of the stuff of children's fiction.

The best idea in the book is one which specially allows for this intellectual approach. At his christening Prince Prigio receives from a fairy the gift of being "too clever". As a result Prigio is always precociously right, correcting his own tutors, and spending his spare time in such pursuits as translating Egyptian hieroglyphs into French poetry. But as he soon learns, cleverness has to be concealed if one is to be liked; and if one falls in love then a belief in the impossibles of the fairy world will replace the reliance on "horrid, useless facts". To impress the daughter of the English ambassador he undertakes daring exploits and brings her the head of the salamandrine Fire-drake, which he has cleverly provoked into battle with the icy Remora, a dismaying creature with a head an inch high and a mile wide.

The battle between the two is an emblem of the Chronicles ' concern with balancing the intellect and the heart, the material and the passionate. Prince Ricardo in the second book is the opposite of his father, spoilt by fairy books and easy victories secured by the fairy gifts. We sustain Lang's fairies, like Barrie's, with the applause which expresses our belief, at the same time as we see that to rely on fairies too much would be to turn irresponsibly away from the world. Ricardo is corrected by the substitution of ordinary boots, cap and carpet for the magic ones, though saved from the worse scrapes in which this lands him by Princess Jaqueline, a sorceress who turns herself into various insects to sting his adversaries. This story is far more convoluted and referential than that of Prigio, and is both denser in incident and more facetious in treatment; its pleasantest caprice is perhaps the mass conversion of the Incas to the Lutheran Church. There is also the amiably belligerent Giant-Who-Does-Not Know-When-He-Has-Had-Enough, a figure derived from the Green Man and disastrously disserved (as are all the episodes) by the simplistic illustrations of Jeanne Titherington, in several shades of grey, which recast this droll and superior book in a limbo drained of significance and render its knowingness as a fatuous naïveté.

FIFTY FAVOURITE FAIRY TALES (1963)

Neil Philip (review date 10 February 1984)

SOURCE: Philip, Neil. "Magical Powers." Times Educational Supplement, no. 3528 (10 February 1984): 29.

The New Golden Land Anthology is a handsome, fat book packed with stories, poems and pictures children will enjoy. Published under its own steam, as Judith Elkin's lucky dip, it would have provoked cries of pleasure and approval. Passed off as The Golden Land, it causes dismay. For despite its virtues, where this edition differs from its predecessor it is in almost every respect inferior. The only major exception is Vanessa Julian-Ottie's delicate line drawings, which replace the cruder work of Gillian Conway.

It is not that the new material is bad: indeed, stories by Jan Mark, Joan Aiken and Philippa Pearce set a standard rarely matched in James Reeves's original 1958 volume. But such choices radically alter the tone of the book; they seem to me to be made in defiance of Reeves, not in collusion with him. This is especially true of the poetry: out go Graves, Herrick, Ben Jonson, Christina Rossetti, traditional verse; in come Spike Milligan, Michael Rosen, Ogden Nash, Kit Wright, Patrick Barrington. It may be enjoyable; it is not The Golden Land. Because Reeves's book was more than just a collection of stories and verses, however carefully arranged (and Judith Elkin has grouped her choices with considerable care): it was a spell cast upon parents and children, a spell to nurture the imagination.

Reeves chose with great tenderness work which would come most alive when it was shared, and shared repeatedly. His book had an intimate air, so that each child, each parent must have felt the collection a private inheritance. Judith Elkin's changes have turned the book into its opposite: a public, classroom affair, a matter of common knowledge. I think Jan Mark's story "The Coronation Mob" just about perfect: but I would avidly swop it here for "The Flying Postman", "Father Sparrow's Tug of War" or "The Cory Who Longed for Honey". Where such stories in the original book gave the child listener a conspiratorial feeling, the finger-wagging moral tales about personal hygiene scattered through this edition may make him or her feel conspired against.

How much editors may tamper with classic anthologies of the past is a tricky question. No doubt many who grew up on Lang's Coloured Fairy Books are aghast at the changes wrought in the new Kestrel editions by Brian Alderson's stricter editorial hand. Yet the very first paragraph of the Bodley Head Fifty Favourite Fairy Tales, admirably selected from the Lang series by Kathleen Lines and alertly illustrated by Margery Gill, shows how sorely the Alderson re-fit was needed. The story is Andersen's "Blockhead-Hans". In the Lines text, the old squire "had two sons who thought themselves so clever, that if they had known only half of what they did know, it would have been quite enough"; in Alderson's Yellow Fairy Book they are simply "too clever by half". But though Kathleen Lines recognized the need to "make the narrative less rough" in some of Lang's more "ragged" versions of tales, it was not her task in this selection, made in 1963, to revise his texts: it would have been an impertinence. And for all their awkward edges, these texts have served well enough for nearly a hundred years. The explanation lies in the strength of the stories: any child with this book on the bedside shelf will prove for him or herself the truth of James Reeves's assertion, "there is nothing which can take the place of literature in its power to give a growing child permanent possession of a magical character."

THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES (1966)

Publishers Weekly (review date 24 October 1980)

SOURCE: Review of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, retold by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Adrienne Adams. Publishers Weekly 218, no. 17 (24 October 1980): 50.

Honored illustrator [Adrienne] Adams created the delicate, richly hued paintings for Lang's version of the French fairy tale [The Twelve Dancing Princesses ], a recital exuding mystery and romance. Michael, a poor cowherd, is jeered at for his dreamy ways, called the Star Gazer by fellow villagers. With the help of the magic Golden Lady, however, Michael discovers the secret that keeps 12 princesses dancing the nights away when he goes to work as a gardener at the castle of the Duke de Beloeil, the girls' father. In the manner of all such tales, this one ends with the breaking of an evil spell and everyone living happily ever after. This inexpensive edition should be a best-seller. It is firmly bound and the ravishing pictures have been perfectly reproduced, as they were in the hardcover originally published in 1966 and reissued several times since.

ALADDIN AND THE WONDERFUL LAMP (1981)

Denise M. Wilms (review date 1 January 1982)

SOURCE: Wilms, Denise M. Review of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, retold by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Errol Le Cain. Booklist 78, no. 9 (1 January 1982): 598.

Gr. 2-3. Lots of deep, brooding color and extensive rococo ornamentation fit both [Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp ]'s Middle Eastern setting and its undertones of evil and foreboding. Le Cain's genie of the lamp is a thoroughly startling creature, black-skinned and muscular, with riveting eyes and the pointed ears of a devil of old, though in fact evil is not the genie's intent. The pictures dominate the book thanks to the large page size and the drama projected by form and color. But the story's text has strength, too, being measured in tone and medievally flavored, with sprinkles of archaic phrasing. It's an effective, elegant interpretation that might prompt interest in other tales from The Arabian Nights.

Patricia Dooley (review date February 1982)

SOURCE: Dooley, Patricia. Review of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, retold by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Errol Le Cain. School Library Journal 28, no. 6 (February 1982): 67-8.

Gr. 2 Up—Le Cain's splendid full-page paintings, touched with gold, complement the oriental richness of the famous tale [Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp ]. At least some young readers will surely acquire a taste for the art of the Persian miniature from these opulent pages. Le Cain's penchant for pattern makes him an adept interpreter of the Persian style, but he also plays with the conventions, breaking the frame, using a reflecting pool to exaggerate the symmetry of a composition, turning the procession of 80 slaves into a nearly abstract design. At the same time, however, the illustrations remain faithful to the narrative, conveying the immense size of the genie, the delicate beauty of the princess, the sumptuous surroundings of the court. Lang's direct retelling and Le Cain's 14 lavish pictures make this a book for a thousand and one nights.

THE RAINBOW FAIRY BOOK (1993)

Karen James (review date October 1993)

SOURCE: James, Karen. Review of The Rainbow Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Michael Hague. School Library Journal 39, no. 10 (October 1993): 144.

Gr. 3 Up—Thirty-one stories from Lang's various color fairy-tale books have been brought together in this lavishly produced volume [The Rainbow Fairy Book ]. With a few exceptions, the selections are the best known European fairy tales, such as "Little Red Riding Hood," "The Three Pigs," and "Cinderella." The watercolor illustrations look as if Hague has tried to re-create the appearance of a fairy-tale anthology from an earlier era. The success is mixed. The colors are dense and have a peculiar garish yet blurred quality. The pencil drawings are more enticing and lively. They are skillfully done with a light and airy touch which, nevertheless, makes the most of the grotesqueries of the tales. The stories are readily available in single volumes or other collections, and the illustrations are not exciting enough to justify a first purchase. The effect of the whole is of a coffee-table book for children.

Janice Del Negro (review date 1 November 1993)

SOURCE: Del Negro, Janice. Review of The Rainbow Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Michael Hague. Booklist 90, no. 5 (1 November 1993): 517.

Gr. 4-6, younger for reading aloud. These 31 folktales and fairy tales [The Rainbow Fairy Book ] were selected by artist Hague from Lang's Colored Fairy Books. Included are many of the more traditional tales from Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Perrault—among them, "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," "Rumpelstiltskin," and "Cinderella." Hague also gives a nod toward cultural inclusiveness, incorporating such tales as "The Snake Prince" from India, "The Hero Makoma" from Zimbabwe, and "Hok Lee and the Dwarfs" from China. The majority of the tales can easily be located in other collections, but they won't be so easily found grouped together as they are in this fine book. Hague has a real talent for recalling the feeling of the old masters who illustrated children's books, and he surpasses himself here with 23 full-color plates and 41 black-and-white pencil drawings. The juxtaposition of well-known and lesser-known tales with such handsome artwork results in a strong anthology that will have a multitude of uses.

A WORLD OF FAIRY TALES (1994)

Donna L. Scanlon (review date August 1994)

SOURCE: Scanlon, Donna L. Review of A World of Fairy Tales, edited by Andrew Lang, re-edited by Neil Philip, illustrated by Henry Justice Ford. School Library Journal 40, no. 8 (August 1994): 164.

Gr. 4 Up—Culled from Lang's 12 "color" fairy tale books, this remarkable collection [A World of Fairy Tales ] features the full-color paintings and line drawings from the originals and covers a wide geographic range. An introduction provides background on Lang and the 24 tales, as well as good source notes for each one. The language is poetic and may prove challenging to some readers, but it does offer a rich source of vivid imagery. Ford's illustrations demonstrate the Pre-Raphaelite influence on his work and are so consistent with the tales that text and art form an integrated whole. The Rainbow Fairy Book (Morrow, 1993), illustrated by Michael Hague, is a comparable anthology. While it has more stories (31), they are more familiar ones, including "Hansel and Gretel," "Rapunzel," and "Cinderella." Only two are duplicated. Hague's volume has a similar introduction and a bibliography that gives early sources but does not indicate which book each story comes from. Librarians would be justified in purchasing both.

Hazel Rochman (review date 1 September 1994)

SOURCE: Rochman, Hazel. Review of A World of Fairy Tales, edited by Andrew Lang, re-edited by Neil Philip, illustrated by Henry Justice Ford. Booklist 91, no. 1 (1 September 1994): 38.

Gr. 4-7, younger for reading aloud. This collection of 24 great fairy tales [A World of Fairy Tales ] from 16 different countries—Iceland to Zimbabwe, Turkey to Japan—has been selected by folklorist Philip from Lang's Colored Fairy Books. Unlike other Lang collections, such as the Rainbow Fairy Book (1993), newly illustrated by Michael Hague, this volume contains the original lush romantic paintings and line drawings by Henry Justice Ford. And, unlike Hague, Philip deliberately excludes the well-known stories, such as "Cinderella" and "Rumpelstiltskin," choosing instead a rich collection of world stories that will be new to many readers. They're amazing stories, beautifully told, drawing the reader in as they've always done from the first sentence. The book is handsomely designed for reading alone or for sharing in classroom, library, and home, with thick paper and clear type. In brief notes at the back, Philip gives a few facts about sources and points out some common tale types and motifs. These tales endure not because of role models or messages but because they're great stories. The universals of heroes and monsters and perilous journeys are presented in all their wonderful particularity and variety. As Philip points out in his brief introduction, "Once upon a time" is now.

THE FLYING SHIP (1995)

Kirkus Reviews (review date 1 July 1995)

SOURCE: Review of The Flying Ship, retold by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Dennis McDermott. Kirkus Reviews 43, no. 13 (1 July 1995): 948.

Aided by a platoon of magically talented companions found along the road, a simpleton has little trouble wresting the hand of a princess away from the grip of her reluctant father in [The Flying Ship, ] this illustrated edition of a story from The Yellow Fairy Book. McDermott's elaborate, golden-toned paintings have an antique flavor, with figures in rich medieval dress and affected poses; the princess, a mere child, stands coyly by until the wedding feast, and is last seen gazing rapturously into her new bridegroom's confused face. The pictures, though superficially appealing, are not as lyrical as Uri Shulevitz's Caldecott winners in Arthur Ransome's Fool of the World and the Flying Ship (1968), yet capture the tale's mildly comic air nicely, mostly in eyes and facial features. It's just not enough reason to give this rendition preference.

Publishers Weekly (review date 7 August 1995)

SOURCE: Review of The Flying Ship, retold by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Dennis McDermott. Publishers Weekly 242, no. 32 (7 August 1995): 460.

A simpleton sets out to win the hand of a princess in this classic Russian fairy tale [The Flying Ship ]. When the king promises to wed his daughter to "whoever should build a ship that could fly," a dim fellow tries his luck and, after his kindness to a little old man, he stumbles upon just such a vehicle. He meets a handful of travelers en route to the king's court, and invites them aboard; their extraordinary skills and possessions later help him fulfill the seemingly impossible tasks the king demands of the would-be groom. Although the captivating painting on the cover raise expectations for McDermott's (Oom Ra-zoom) work, the art as a whole is wan compared with Christopher Denise's stately The Foot of the World and the Flying Ship (1994) or Uri Shulevitz's sprightly 1968 Caldecott-winning rendition. McDermott's large-scale illustrations incorporate some whimsical touches and a palette that glows gently, but they often take on an overly precious quality—particularly in the depiction of the hero and his soon-to-be bride, neither of whom appears to be any older than 10. Ages 7-up.

Heide Piehler (review date September 1995)

SOURCE: Piehler, Heide. Review of The Flying Ship, retold by Andrew Lang, illustrated by Dennis McDermott. School Library Journal 41, no. 9 (September 1995): 195.

K-Gr. 3—This Russian folktale [The Flying Ship ] recounts the offbeat adventures of a kindhearted simpleton and his attempts to win the hand of a beautiful princess. He soars in a magical flying ship, gathering a crew of eccentric characters along the way. All of them eventually use their unique and often comical talents to help their peculiar, yet determined, captain claim his royal bride. The text is taken from Andrew Lang's The Yellow Fairy Book (Dover, 1966), and includes a few minor spelling changes. Unfortunately, the watercolor-and-pencil illustrations do not reflect the earthy humor of the tale. Many of the page-and-a-half spreads are static, and the rosy-cheeked, round-eyed men, women, and children resemble cartoon figures. Overall, the soft colors and romanticized landscapes create a saccharine quality that is incompatible with the spirit of the story. Those in need of "The Flying Ship" should turn to The Yellow Fairy Book.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Davidson, Ellis. "Folklore and Myth." In Theories of Myth from Ancient Israel and Greece to Freud, Jung, Campbell, and Levi-Strauss—Vol. 2: Anthropology, Folklore, and Myth, edited by Robert A. Segal, pp. 95-109. New York, N.Y.: Garland, 1996.

Discusses theories of folklore and myth by Andrew Lang, Joseph Eddy Fontenrose, and Friedrich Max Müller.

Gad, Irene. "'Beauty and the Beast' and 'The Wonderful Sheep'—The Couple in Fairy Tales: When Father's Daughter Meets Mother's Son." In Psyche's Stories: Modern Jungian Interpretations of Fairy Tales, Vol. 1, pp. 27-48. Wilmette, Ill.: Chiron, 1991.

Analysis of Lang's adaptations of "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Wonderful Sheep" in terms of Carl Jung's theory of the cultural archetype.

Langstaff, Eleanor De Selms. Andrew Lang. Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1978, 176 p.

Introductory overview of Lang's life and career.

Levin, Martin. "For Children of Any Age." Globe and Mail (1 December 2001): D32-D34.

Offers a positive assessment of The Blue Fairy Book.

Matthews, Marilyn L. "'The Snow Queen': An Interpretation." In Psyche's Stories: Modern Jungian Interpretations of Fairy Tales, Vol. 2, pp. 79-92. Willmette, Ill.: Chiron, 1992.

Critical examination of Lang's adaptation of "The Snow Queen."

Moss, Anita. "Crime and Punishment—or Development—in Fairy Tales and Fantasy." Mythlore 8, no. 1 (spring 1981): 26-8.

Compares Lang's The Gold of Fairnilee with Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, and "Hänsel und Gretel," adapted by the Brothers Grimm.

Sherbo, Arthur. "The Ethics of Reprinting: Thomas Mosher vs. Andrew Lang." New England Quarterly 64, no. 1 (March 1991): 100-12.

Discussion of the ethical questions raised by Lang's approach to collecting and adapting traditional folktales.

Smol, Anna. "The 'Savage' and the 'Civilized': Andrew Lang's Representation of the Child and the Translation of Folklore." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 21, no. 4 (winter 1996-1997): 177-83.

Analysis of Lang's portrayal of aspects of civilization and childhood in The Blue Fairy Book.

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Additional coverage of Lang's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 114, 137; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 85; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 98, 141, 184; Literature Resource Center ; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Eds. 1, 2; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers ; Something about the Author, Vol. 16; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 16; and Writers for Children.

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