Andrew Lang

All people in the world tell nursery tales to their children, and the stories are apt to be like each other everywhere. A child who has read the Blue and Red and Yellow Fairy Books will nd some old friends with new faces in the Pink Fairy Book. Courage, youth, beauty, kindness, have many trials, but they always win the battle; while witches, giants, unfriendly cruel people, are on the losing hand. So it ought to be, and so, on the whole, it is and will be; and that is all the moral of fairy tales. We cannot all be young, alas! and pretty, and strong; but nothing prevents us from being kind, and no kind man, woman, or beast or bird, ever comes to anything but good in these oldest fables of the world.

Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books or Andrew Lang’s “Coloured” Fairy Books constitute a twelve-book series of fairy tale collections. Al- though Andrew Lang did not collect the stories himself from the oral tradition, the extent of his sources, who had collected them originally (with the notable exception of Madame d’Aulnoy), made them an immensely in uential collection, especially as he used foreign-language sources, giving many of these tales their rst appearance in English. As acknowledged in the prefaces, al- though Lang himself made most of the selections, his wife and other translators did a large portion of the translating and telling of the actual stories.