The Violet Fairy Book | Page 3

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THE VIOLET FAIRY BOOK Edited by ANDREW LANG
TO VIOLET MYERS IS DEDICATED THE VIOLET FAIRY BOOK
PREFACE
The Editor takes this opportunity to repeat what he has often said
before, that he is not the author of the stories in the Fairy Books; that he
did not invent them 'out of his own head.' He is accustomed to being
asked, by ladies, 'Have you written anything else except the Fairy
Books?' He is then obliged to explain that he has NOT written the Fairy
Books, but, save these, has written almost everything else, except
hymns, sermons, and dramatic works.
The stories in this Violet Fairy Book, as in all the others of the series,
have been translated out of the popular traditional tales in a number of
different languages. These stories are as old as anything that men have
invented. They are narrated by naked savage women to naked savage
children. They have been inherited by our earliest civilised ancestors,

who really believed that beasts and trees and stones can talk if they
choose, and behave kindly or unkindly. The stories are full of the oldest
ideas of ages when science did not exist, and magic took the place of
science. Anybody who has the curiosity to read the 'Legendary
Australian Tales,' which Mrs. Langloh Parker has collected from the
lips of the Australian savages, will find that these tales are closely akin
to our own. Who were the first authors of them nobody
knows--probably the first men and women. Eve may have told these
tales to amuse Cain and Abel. As people grew more civilised and had
kings and queens, princes and princesses, these exalted persons
generally were chosen as heroes and heroines. But originally the
characters were just 'a man,' and 'a woman,' and 'a boy,' and 'a girl,'
with crowds of beasts, birds, and fishes, all behaving like human beings.
When the nobles and other people became rich and educated, they
forgot the old stories, but the country people did not, and handed them
down, with changes at pleasure, from generation to generation. Then
learned men collected and printed the country people's stories, and
these we have translated, to amuse children. Their tastes remain like the
tastes of their naked ancestors, thousands of years ago, and they seem
to like fairy tales better than history, poetry, geography, or arithmetic,
just as grown-up people like novels better than anything else.
This is the whole truth of the matter. I have said so before, and I say so
again. But nothing will prevent children from thinking that I invented
the stories, or some ladies from being of the same opinion. But who
really invented the stories nobody knows; it is all so long ago, long
before reading and writing were invented. The first of the stories
actually written down, were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, or on
Babylonian cakes of clay, three or four thousand years before our time.
Of the stories in this book, Miss Blackley translated 'Dwarf Long
Nose,' 'The Wonderful Beggars,' 'The Lute Player,' 'Two in a Sack,' and
'The Fish that swam in the Air.' Mr. W. A. Craigie translated from the
Scandinavian, 'Jasper who herded the Hares.' Mrs. Lang did the rest.
Some of the most interesting are from the Roumanion, and three were
previously published in the late Dr. Steere's 'Swahili Tales.' By the

permission of his representatives these three African stories have here
been abridged and simplified for children.
CONTENTS A Tale of the Tontlawald The finest Liar in the World
The Story of three Wonderful Beggars Schippeitaro The Three Princes
and their Beasts The Goat's Ears of the Emperor Trojan The Nine
Pea-hens and the Golden Apples The Lute Player The Grateful Prince
The Child who came from an Egg Stan Bolovan The Two Frogs The
Story of a Gazelle How a