An eclectic and exotic collection of children’s fairy tales, including Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story “The Snow-Queen.”
Spanning the globe, the stories within The Pink Fairy Book explore the oral and written traditions of Japan, Scandinavia, Russia, Greece, Spain, Germany, and Sicily, with tales of dragons, princesses, mermaids, hermits, witches, and wives.
Wide-ranging in scope, this volume includes the best English translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow-Queen,” “The Goblin and the Grocer, “The Flying Trunk,” and “The Fir Tree,” as well as “The House in the Wood” and “The Two Brothers,” both collected by the Brothers Grimm. The collection also features “Urashimataro and the Turtle,” “The Princess in the Chest,” “The Water of Life,” “The Wounded Lion,” “The Merry Wives,” and many other legends.
“The old favorite series on which most of us were brought up—and our parents before us . . . Andrew Lang and his associates managed to break the stranglehold of the pious sentimentality handed out to children by collecting—from all over the world—fairy tales of all people, and bringing out the volumes we all know and love.” —Kirkus Reviews
Andrew Lang (1844–1912) was a Scottish scholar and writer, best known for his folklore and mythological tales. After college, he moved to London and began working as a journalist. He began collecting fairytales and folklore stories for his first collection, The Blue Fairy Book. The Fairy Books contained hundreds of pages of folklore stories, which Lang edited while his wife helped translate. Receiving acclaim, the books totaled in 427 stories combined in twelve collections. Lang also produced his own original writing, including novels, literary criticism, and poetry, but his work did not attain the same literary recognition.