My kids & I love this book, but more because they are older and it is for satirical & dark comedy reasons. The stories are often non-nonsensical and have the strangest little rabbit trails in the stories. The author collected these from all different countries and had them transcribed to English in the late 1890s. He was an author & critic, but ironically is best known for these collections of tales he edited.
Be warned that the absurdities aside, you should either edit out or discuss with your children the bigotry much more accepted in the 1890s. Little bits here & there jump out of nowhere & it offers a good discussion point for older children, but it could plant seeds of rotten fruit into younger minds.
Here are some of the more absurd or unacceptable lessons gleaned from this book:
1. Beautiful = Good & Ugly = Evil (unless the person was enchanted to look that way, then go by their original looks.)
2. If a polar bear knocks at your door, answer it and if he asks, give him your youngest daughter for financial rewards
3. Sometimes animals surprise characters by being able to talk... even surprising other talking animals.
4. A dwarf (I.e. little person) always is evil & ugly
5. Good can do anything ethically questionable as long as it is to a bad person (i.e. ugly or dwarf). In today's lingo it would be called "Beauty's privilege"
6. A good prince will still be sad at the death of his mother even if she is an ogres your father married for money & after failing to cook up your wife (sleeping beauty) & 2 children, dies in a cauldron of poisonous reptiles & amphibians you just stopped her from throwing said wife & children along with the cook & his family into.
7. You will be rewarded for shooting an eagle
8. The safest place to store jewelry while sleeping is in your mouth, unless you snore (which means you're also ugly & bad)
9. Get your own princess by chopping off a cat's head.
10. Children are disposable. If you run short on money, abandon your children in the woods & make sure they can't find their way back. When they eventually do, they'll bring you tons of riches while you sat on your bum & did nothing.
11. People can still overhear you even if you climb inside an oven to tell it your secrets.
12. If someone tells you to avoid something like open a door or closet, be sure to do that exact thing. You'll end up beautiful, wealthy, & married to someone also beautiful.
13. If you fail by trying the same approach two times and you only have one chance left, try exactly the same thing again.
14. Even if an ogres insists on eating a human, just substitute a farm animal and she can't tell the difference.
15. Every female protagonist worth a fairy tale must be "the most beautiful creature on the earth".
16. Being black decreases your value as a person
... It's a little raw, but I could go on.
Some favorite stories:
"The Tale of a Youth Who Set Out to Find What Fear Was"
"The Bronze Ring" <=self-edit black sailors being inferior to white
"The White Cat"
"The Wonderful Sheep" & "The Yellow Dwarf" just for their suddenly tragic endings
"East of the Sun and West of the Moon" is best played for friends as it tragically repeats the same lines over & over again until you want to explode. Nothing makes you feel better than having other people suffer the same way.
So why do I give it 4 of 5 stars?
1. The stories often lack a coherent storyline or are the concatenation of several story-lines in a mash-up. It's an MST3K sort of thing.
2. It is pretty black & white how absurd its biases are and therefore is easier to discuss with children that are old enough. It is tougher to discuss the way Disney & other children's media will display the same messages, but more subtly:
- Focus on beauty & the distortion of it... particularly in women
- Discounting intelligence in women or other races white males
- The degrading of other cultures or peoples by playing up stereotypes or placing characters in subservient positions
- The laziness of dealing with good & evil by killing off the antagonists
- Rationalizing doing wrong: break your marriage vows & have your spouse tortured, maimed, & killed so you can marry the pretty one
- Children know better than parents / parents are clueless fools
3. The stories often surprised me with the cleverness or just the sudden turns the plot would take.
4. Sudden "God in the machine" endings: hmmm, let's suddenly declare a character is an ogre or ogres to tie up loose ends (like disposing a spouse when you want to marry someone else)
5. The round-about way people go about things and the effects because they don't actually communicate: the "Three's Company" debacles.
6. I'm attracted to dark humor / satire... even more so if it wasn't intended.
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From the Publisher
It is almost impossible to envision what childhood would be like without the enchanting world of fairyland.
Andrew Lang (1844 – 1912)
He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales.
- Scottish poet
- novelist
- literary critic
- contributor to the field of anthropology
The first volume in Andrew Lang's fairy tale series
Featuring 37 of the finest stories from around the world, most of them old favorites including:
Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, The Arabian Nights, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, Puss and Boots and many others.
Includes 138 original black-and-white illustrations
About the author
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I hate the fact this book came in terrible shape and listed as new. Someone cut the binding at the top of the book and the cover has numerous scratches with a bent corner. The only thing good about it is it has all the stories. Terrible buy.
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