Polish Fairy Tales

These are not the polished tales of courts and castles. These are the stories Polish and White Russian peasants told each other in dim farmhouses and winter longhouses, stories that may reach back to the very beginnings of Slavic oral tradition. A.J. Gliński collected them directly from the lips of country people in the eastern provinces of Poland in 1862, setting them down as close to their living voice as translation would allow. The repetitions that charmed original audiences remain, now abbreviated, and the rhyming prose that marked the old ballads still pulses beneath the prose. These are longer than the familiar Brothers Grimm tales, and stranger. Magic here has a different logic, one that belongs to a world where the boundary between human and animal, living and dead, was far more permeable. The similarities to German, Celtic, and even Indian folklore are striking, revealing the deep currents that flow beneath the local stream of any nation's imagination. For readers willing to enter this older narrative world, the rewards are substantial: these are tales that have survived because they meant something essential to the people who told them.