Orange Fairy Book
The Orange Fairy Book stands as a remarkable artifact of early twentieth-century folklore collection, gathering stories from far beyond the European tradition that dominated Western fairy tale publishing. Andrew Lang and his collaborators drew from sources across the globe: Chinese folk narratives, Japanese legends, Indian morality tales, West African stories, and more, presenting English-speaking readers with tales they had likely never encountered. This breadth was revolutionary in 1907, when most fairy tale collections drew exclusively from Grimm, Perrault, and a handful of European sources. The stories themselves carry the strange, often uncanny quality of tales told in distant courts and village hearths. There are enchanted toads and faithful animals, clever peasants and foolish kings, transformations and testings. But the logic is sometimes alien, the resolutions sometimes abrupt in ways that remind modern readers these are not products of a single literary tradition. The volume captures folklore in its rawer forms, before decades of retelling softened their edges.
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Paul Vinson Brown, Neeru Iyer, jedopi, Kathleen Costa +18 more
![XXXII Ballades in Blue China [1885]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fd3b2n8gj62qnwr.cloudfront.net%2FCOVERS%2Fgutenberg_covers75k%2Febook-51160.png&w=3840&q=75)
