The Olive Fairy Book

From the highlands of Armenia to the courts of India, from Danish castles to Sudanese deserts, Andrew Lang assembled a collection that spans continents and centuries of storytelling tradition. The Olive Fairy Book gathers twenty-nine tales of transformation, courage, and impossible quests: a prince transformed into a white fox, a knight saved by a soup made of nine snakes, a princess who flies every night to fairyland, a hero who can understand the speech of animals. These are not the familiar tales of Grimm or Perrault. They are stranger, wilder, drawn from oral traditions that had never been set down in English. Lang prefaced the collection with his own journey through these stories, and his enthusiasm pulses through every page. Fifty illustrations accompany the tales, rendered in the delicate style of early twentieth-century book art. What makes this volume special is not merely its rarity or its scope, but the sense of encountering something genuinely other: stories that operate by different logic, that reward different virtues, that strange and luminous readers of all ages who are willing to follow a hero into the unknown.