Introduction

The book you are about to open belongs to a tradition so old that no one can say with certainty where it begins. Long before printing, long before literacy was anything other than a specialist’s privilege, human beings gathered in the dark and told each other stories about enchanted forests, impossible tasks, sleeping royalty, and the small and overlooked person who, against every reasonable expectation, prevails. These stories were not considered literature. They were not considered art. They were the furniture of ordinary life, passed from grandmother to grandchild, from traveling merchant to village hearth, from one language to another across borders that the stories themselves never recognized. And then, in the nineteenth century, something remarkable happened: a small number of scholars and writers decided that this furniture was worth preserving, cataloguing, and sharing with the widest possible audience. Andrew Lang was among the most gifted and the most industrious of them, and the collection you hold is one of the finest fruits of his labor.

Lang published the first of his famous color fairy books — the Blue — in 1889, and the volume you are now reading, the second in the series, followed in 1890. Together they would eventually grow into a sequence of twelve books, each named for a color, each drawing on a different constellation of sources, each edited with the same combination of scholarly seriousness and genuine delight in a good story well told. The series made Lang famous in a way that his considerable academic work — his studies of mythology, his contributions to anthropology, his poetry and literary criticism — never quite managed to do. Children loved the books. Parents loved them. And now, more than a century after their first appearance, readers who come to them for the first time still find themselves surprised by how alive the stories feel, how strange and how immediate, how little they have aged.

It would be a mistake to think of Lang simply as a collector who gathered stories and printed them. The work was considerably more complicated than that, and his preface to this volume — which you should read before proceeding to the stories themselves — gives an honest and rather charming account of the collaborative enterprise involved. Lang was the editor and the presiding intelligence, but the actual labor of translation was distributed among a team of contributors: Mrs. Hunt translated from the Norse, Miss Minnie Wright from the French of Madame d’Aulnoy, Mrs. Lang and Miss Bruce from other French sources, and Miss May Sellar, Miss Farquharson, and Miss Blackley from the German. The closing story, the magnificent retelling of the legend of Sigurd, was condensed by Lang himself from William Morris’s prose version of the Volsunga Saga. Lang also acknowledges debts to M. Charles Marelles for French versions of several tales, to M. Henri Carnoy for others, to Lady Frances Balfour for an old text of a famous English story, and to the publishers Smith and Elder for permission to use translations from the Russian by the scholar W. R. S. Ralston.

This collaborative, international character is not a weakness of the collection — it is one of its great strengths. The stories gathered here come from Norway, France, Russia, Germany, Ireland, and the deep well of pan-European oral tradition, and they bring with them the distinct flavors of their origins. A Norwegian tale has a different texture from a French one; a Russian story moves by different logic than a German one. Lang understood this, and he made no attempt to iron out the differences. The result is a book that feels genuinely various, genuinely wide, a book that keeps surprising you even after you think you have taken its measure.

Lang’s own contribution to the shaping of these stories is harder to quantify, and he was characteristically modest about it. He was, by training and temperament, a man of letters in the fullest Victorian sense: a classicist, a folklorist, a literary critic of considerable range and independence, a poet of modest but real gifts. He had read enormously in the comparative mythology of his day, and he brought to his editorial work a sense of the deep patterns underlying the surface variety of fairy tales — the recurring figures of the youngest son, the impossible bride, the helpful animal, the trickster, the witch who is also a kind of mother. He did not impose these patterns on the stories in any heavy-handed way. He simply recognized them, and his recognition gave the selection a coherence that goes beyond mere thematic grouping.

It is also worth noting that Lang was writing for children, or at least for a mixed audience in which children were prominently included, and this shaped his editorial decisions in ways that are sometimes visible and sometimes not. Certain elements of the original tales — violence, sexuality, the casual cruelty that folk tradition often preserves without apology — are softened or omitted. This is not dishonesty; it is a considered editorial choice, and one that Lang made openly. The stories as he presents them are not ethnographic documents. They are literary experiences, shaped for pleasure and for the particular kind of imaginative engagement that the best children’s literature has always demanded. If you want the raw, unmediated versions, they exist, and they are fascinating in their own right. But what Lang offers is something different and something valuable: stories that have been loved into their best possible form.

The most important thing to understand about this collection is that it is not a novel. It does not need to be read from first page to last in a single sustained effort. It is, rather, a treasury — a word that sounds old-fashioned but is exactly right — and treasuries reward a different kind of reading. You can open it anywhere. You can read one story before bed and another a week later. You can follow your mood, choosing the long and elaborate when you have time and appetite for it, the short and sharp when you want something that will be over before you have quite settled into your chair. The book will not punish you for reading it out of order, and it will not reward you less for returning to it again and again over years.

That said, there is something to be gained from reading at least a few of the stories in sequence, because Lang’s arrangement, while not rigidly systematic, is not arbitrary either. He tends to group stories in ways that create quiet resonances — a tale about a princess who dances in secret is followed by one about a princess who sleeps, and both are followed by one about a hero who must travel to the ends of the earth. These adjacencies are not accidents. They invite comparison, and comparison is one of the great pleasures of reading in this tradition. When you notice that the helpful old woman who appears in a Norwegian story is recognizably the same figure as the helpful old woman in a French one, you are touching something real about the way human imagination works, the way it returns again and again to the same deep structures because those structures correspond to something true about experience.

Read slowly. This is advice that applies to almost all good literature, but it applies with particular force here, because the pleasures of these stories are not primarily the pleasures of plot. You will often know, or strongly suspect, how a story will end before you are halfway through it. The youngest of three brothers will succeed where his elders failed. The girl who is kind to the old woman in the forest will be rewarded, and the girl who is unkind will be punished. The hero will find a way through the impossible task. These outcomes are not surprises, and they are not meant to be. The pleasure lies in the how — in the particular texture of the journey, the specific nature of the magical helper, the exact form of the test, the precise quality of the hero’s virtue or the villain’s malice. Read for these details, and you will find that stories you thought you knew become strange and new again.

Pay attention, too, to the moments of strangeness that resist easy interpretation. Fairy tales are not allegories, and the best of them contain images and episodes that do not resolve neatly into meaning. A prince rows a princess across a lake to an underground ballroom where she dances until her shoes are worn through. A girl is transformed into a birch tree and then back again. A man’s death is hidden inside an egg inside a duck inside a chest buried under an oak tree at the bottom of the sea. These images have the quality of dreams — they feel significant without being reducible to a single significance — and the right response to them is not to explain them but to let them work on you. The part of your mind that understands fairy tales is not the analytical part. It is something older and less verbal, and it needs to be given room.

The range of what you will find in these pages is genuinely remarkable. There are stories here that will be familiar to almost any reader — the tale of a girl with hair as black as ebony and skin as white as snow, the story of a girl whose hair is long enough to serve as a ladder, the account of a boy who trades a cow for a handful of beans and finds himself climbing toward the sky. These are among the most durable narratives in the Western tradition, and encountering them here, in versions that are close to the forms in which they circulated before the great nineteenth-century collectors fixed them in print, is a different experience from meeting them in the sanitized picture-book versions that most of us encountered first. They are stranger here, more morally complex, more willing to sit with darkness before arriving at light.

But the collection is at its most exciting, perhaps, in the stories that will be less familiar. The Norwegian tales — Soria Moria Castle, Kari Woodengown, Dapplegrim, The Three Princesses of Whiteland, Farmer Weatherbeard, The Seven Foals, Minnikin — have a quality that is hard to describe but immediately recognizable: a combination of bleakness and warmth, of vast cold landscapes and fierce domestic loyalty, of heroes who are genuinely humble and genuinely brave. These are not the polished courtly tales of the French tradition. They are rougher, more elemental, and in some ways more emotionally direct. The hero of a Norwegian tale does not succeed because he is clever or because he is beautiful; he succeeds because he is kind to the right person at the right moment, and because he does not give up.

The Russian stories — The Death of Koshchei the Deathless, The Norka — bring yet another flavor: a sense of the world as genuinely dangerous, populated by forces that are not merely wicked but cosmically threatening, and a corresponding sense that the hero’s courage must be of a very particular, very stubborn kind. Koshchei the Deathless is one of the great villains of world folklore, a figure whose very name carries a chill, and the story built around him has a grandeur that lifts it well above the ordinary run of adventure tales.

The French contributions, many of them drawn from the elaborate literary fairy tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, are different again: more ornate, more self-consciously literary, more interested in the emotional lives of their characters. Madame d’Aulnoy wrote in the late seventeenth century, and her tales bear the marks of their courtly origin — they are longer, more digressive, more attentive to the nuances of feeling between characters — but they also contain genuine imaginative power, and the best of them, like Graciosa and Percinet and Princess Rosette, have a romantic intensity that is quite unlike anything in the Norse or Russian material.

And then there is the story of Sigurd, which closes the collection and which stands somewhat apart from everything else in it. This is not a fairy tale in the ordinary sense. It is a condensation of one of the great heroic legends of the Norse world, the story of a dragon-slayer and a sleeping warrior-woman and a doom that cannot be escaped, and it has the weight and the darkness of genuine tragedy. Lang was right to include it, and right to place it last. It is the book’s way of reminding you that the tradition from which fairy tales spring is not only a tradition of happy endings — that the same imagination that invented the helpful old woman and the magic ring and the youngest son who wins the princess also invented Sigurd and Brynhild and the Nibelungs, and that these darker stories are part of the same human need to make narrative sense of a world that does not always resolve into justice.