The Blue Fairy Book
The Andrew Lang's Fairy Book series, Book 1
Andrew Lang
Open Road Media
Fiction, CH Fantasy/Folklore
Themes: Classics, Faeries and Kin, Fairy Tales, Shapeshifters, Witches
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Description
From Red Riding Hood's fateful encounter with the wolf to Beauty's imprisonment with the Beast, from the magic lamp and ring of Aladdin to a prince's encounter with a talking white cat, Andrew Lang collects many traditional stories.
Review
Fairy tales and folk stories embody traditions of storytelling older than civilization, and Lang's Fairy books are classic collections of classic tales. Many, however, read rather stiff and stilted to modern sensibilities, having been filtered and retold through countless tellers and countless cultures before being written down and (often) sanitized with a Christian slant for Lang's audience. One can see fragments of much older stories in recurring themes and seemingly incongruous plot twists and elements, lost bits of symbolism and cultural touchstones. Some are tangibly based on simliar roots; "The Bronze Ring" has clear elements of Aladdin, and other story is a thin reconstruction of the tale of Perseus and Andromeda. After a while, the grandiose descriptions started running together (there are only so many jewel-encrusted palaces and silken brocades and hosts of hundreds or thousands of courtiers and soldiers in gleaming armor one can differentiate), and several stories felt overlong or too short, again reflecting fragments of larger, likely lost oral traditions. Lang also inexplicably includes chapters from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the journey to Lilliput. Most of the other stories were recorded folk tales, composed in ages past, while Swift's work was comparatively recent, written by a known hand, and intended for a clear satiric purpose. It just didn't fit. On the whole, while the works in The Blue Fairy Book reflect important roots of modern storytelling and fantasy tales, inspiring writers and artists even today, I just couldn't really get into them.