“As to whether there are really any fairies or not, that is a difficult question. Professor Huxley thinks there are none. The Editor never saw any himself, but he knows several people who have seen them — in the Highlands — and heard their music.”
Andrew Lang, preface to The Yellow Fairy Book.
Andrew Lang (1844 - 1912), the editor of many volumes of fairy tales, each named after a colour, grew up in the Scottish borders. His biographer, Roger Lancelyn Green (himself a great collector of myths and legends) believes that “Old Nancy”, the Lang’s nurse, would more than half have believed the stories of ghosts and fairies, of Whuppity Stoorie and Red Etin, which she told by the nursery fire. Lang himself later recalled how he would meet other boys and “swap fairy stories”.
At school, he fell in love with the Odyssey of Homer, which contains several fairy-type stories (the witch Circe and the one-eyed giant, the Cyclops). Later on, as an Oxford Classics don, he would publish distingished prose translations of both the Odyssey and the Iliad of Homer.
He left his secure position at Merton College Oxford to marry and to become a London based Journalist. He also wrote poetry. But it is as a collector of stories that he is best remembered. And Storynory is indeed indebted to Lang for the wealth of (now out-of-copy-right) material that he has left behind.
Fairy Stories had fallen out of fashion when he published them in 1890s. The Victorian vogue in children’s literature had been for moralising realism, such as “Tom Brown’s School Days” (wonderfully sent-up by George MacDonald Fraser in the “Flashman” romps).
Lang’s many Fairy books became instant classics. He constantly insisted that he was “not the author of the tales” - only the editor - but his style is apparent on every page, even when he has credited translators from German and Danish. His sentences are quite complicated, but beautifully balanced - a feature which makes them delightful to be read aloud by a skilled actress like Natasha. We have edited out only the occasional archaic or long word here and there, and they seem immediately understandable to a modern young audience.
Lang did not attempt to shield young ears from the realities of life and death in fairyland. He is not quite true to his word when he promises in “The Pink Fairy Book” that “Courage, youth, beauty, kindness, have many trials, but they are always win the battle; while witches, giants, unfreindly cruel people are always on the losing end.” “Little Red Riding Hood” ends abruptly with the heronine being eaten up by the Wolf.
We baulk at the violence of some of his stories. In “Maiden Bright-Eye”, the wicked sister is put into a barrel with spikes around it and dragged off by six wild horses. Other stories are surprisingly explicit. In “Ebsen and the Witch” , eleven brothers are well attended to by the witch, “and when they went to bed, each of them got one of the hag’s daughters.” This is not at all what we had expected from Victorian children’s literature.
Fortunately, there is an abundant supply of stories in Lang’s books where the “scaryness” is well within the confines of what children can enjoy. Children like being frightened…. just a bit.
In other respects, Lang is in tune with modern tastes, particularly in his internationalism. Victorian Britain was very outward looking, and Lang has collected stories from all over the world.
“Here, then, are fancies brought from all quarters: we see that black, white, and yellow peoples are fond of just the same kinds of adventures,” he writes in the Pink Fairy Book.
We in Storynory agree with that. In fact we have been amazed to see sites linking to us in Japanese and Chinese, not to mention many European languages. Myths and fairy stories touch a universal core of the human spirit. In fact, I rather suspect that we have a few grown-up listeners secretly tuning into our stories on their iPods. Who is going to know that you aren’t listening to some cool dude wrapper on the train into work?
Links: Wikipedia, Myth Folk Law, Andrew Lang on Amazon.Com
