The Yellow Fairy Book
1894
The great Victorian compiler Andrew Lang gathered tales from six continents and gave them colors - this is the yellow one, and it contains some of the strangest, most beautiful stories ever told. Forty-eight tales from Russia, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, Iceland, and Native American traditions sit alongside work by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Here you will find talking animals making cunning deals, princesses hidden in plain sight, magic that comes in three wishes or three tasks, and servants who outwit kings. Some stories are gentle. Others cut deeper - because the best fairy tales always had teeth. These are not the softened versions that became Disney films. They are the originals, with all their original power: to frighten, to teach, to transform. A century and a quarter later, they still work that magic on anyone who reads them. For children ready for real wonder, and for adults who want to remember what the world looked like when it was full of enchantment.
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“Again, if there are really no fairies, why do people believe in them, all over the world? The ancient Greeks believed, so did the old Egyptians, and the Hindoos, and the Red Indians, and is it likely, if there are no fairies, that so many different peoples would have seen and heard them?””
— Andrew Lang
“Letters from the first were planned to guide us into Fairy Land.””
— Andrew Lang
“The Hunter then looked about him, saying, 'If only I had something to eat! I am so hungry, and it will go badly with me in the future, for I see here not an apple or pear or fruit of any kind”
— Andrew Lang
“Nothing tastes better than what one eats by oneself.””
— Andrew Lang
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