The Pink Fairy Book – Andrew Lang
With “The Pink Fairy Book” Mr. Lang has exhausted the primary colors without coming to an end of his store of fairytales. This time he has gone further afield, though without finding much that is new. Japan yields a few; and other sources which we do not remember in the earlier books have been drawn upon. Generally, however, it is from the folklore of European nations, and from that most admirable of story-tellers, Hans Christian Andersen, that we get the best things. It is true that, as Mr. Lang remarks, Andersen ” wants to ‘ point a moral’ as well as “adorn a tale,” whereas the true fairy-story should not have any more intelligible moral than that it is a great virtue to be the youngest son of three, and a still greater to be the youngest of seven. Not the less, however, is it true that, on the whole, these stories are on the side of goodness and kindness. It is difficult to make a choice among these good things. But perhaps, ” How the Hermit Helped to Win the King’s Daughter,” is as good as any. Among the few outlandish stories, “Wischimataro and the Turtle ” may be mentioned.
The Pink Fairy Book
Format: Paperback.
The Pink Fairy Book.
ISBN: 9783849673031.
Available at amazon.com and other venues.
Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books (from Wikipedia):
Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books are a series of twenty-five collections of true and fictional stories for children, published between 1889 and 1913. The best known books of the series are the twelve collections of fairy tales, known as Andrew Lang’s “Coloured” Fairy Books or Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books of Many Colors. In all, the volumes feature 798 stories, besides the 153 poems in The Blue Poetry Book.
Andrew Lang (1844–1912) was a Scots poet, novelist, and literary critic. As acknowledged in the prefaces, although Lang himself made most of the selections, his wife and other translators did a large portion of the translating and retelling of the actual stories. Four of the later volumes (from 1908 to 1912) were published as by “Mrs. Lang”.
According to Anita Silvey, “The irony of Lang’s life and work is that although he wrote for a profession—literary criticism; fiction; poems; books and articles on anthropology, mythology, history, and travel … he is best recognized for the works he did not write.”
The twelve Coloured Fairy Books were illustrated by H. J. Ford (Henry Justice Ford), the first two volumes shared with G. P. Jacomb-Hood and Lancelot Speed respectively, the sequels alone. Several other volumes were illustrated by Ford.
(The text of the last section was taken from a Wikipedia entry and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)
Publisher’s Note: This book is printed and distributed by Createspace a DBA of On-Demand Publishing LLC and is typically not available anywhere else than in stores owned and operated by Amazon or Createspace.