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In ...With Fairy Tales For All at the timeless Cabinet of Wonders, a collector of fairy tales blogs about the best:
First of all, let me plug Andrew Lang's Coloured Fairy Books. There are twelve of them, from green to red to lilac and violet and so on, and they are really classic. Though Lang wrote for a living, these were not written by him but edited - by which really we mean collected from other, often foreign, texts and sources - by him, and translated by several other people, most notably his wife, who had a far greater influence on the style of translation and (proof)editing than she was ever given credit for.
As a child, I read every one of these, bound in appropriately colored hard covers, from the public library. These were literature, and I noticed the similarities among stories from different lands. None better, these archetypal tales build the backbone of a fertile imagination.
Wonderfully, the stories are all online -- readable, printable -- at mythfolklore net's Andrew Lang collection:
These pages contain the contents of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books.You can click on the book covers below, or view lists of the fairy tales by Book, Title, and by Andrew Lang's Sources.
The site is also searchable.
Blue Fairy Book (1889)
Red Fairy Book (1890)
Green Fairy Book (1892)
Yellow Fairy Book (1894)
Pink Fairy Book (1897)
Grey Fairy Book (1900)
Violet Fairy Book (1901)
Crimson Fairy Book (1903)
Brown Fairy Book (1904)
Orange Fairy Book (1906)
Olive Fairy Book (1907)
Lilac Fairy Book (1910)
Rose Fairy Book
Here, from the Blue Fairy Book (1889) -- which also contains Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty In Wood, Cinderella. Or The Little Glass Slipper, Aladdin And The Wonderful Lamp, Rumpelstiltzkin, Beauty And The Beast, Master Cat. Or Puss In Boots, Forty Thieves, Hansel And Grettel, Snow-White And Rose-Red, History Of Jack Giant-Killer and many others -- is East Of The Sun And West Of The Moon. It begins,
Once upon a time there was a poor husbandman who had many children and little to give them in the way either of food or clothing. They were all pretty, but the prettiest of all was the youngest daughter, who was so beautiful that there were no bounds to her beauty.So once--it was late on a Thursday evening in autumn, and wild weather outside, terribly dark, and raining so heavily and blowing so hard that the walls of the cottage shook again--they were all sitting together by the fireside, each of them busy with something or other, when suddenly some one rapped three times against the window- pane. The man went out to see what could be the matter, and when he got out there stood a great big white bear.
"Good-evening to you," said the White Bear.
"Good-evening," said the man.
"Will you give me your youngest daughter?" said the White Bear; "if you will, you shall be as rich as you are now poor.
Truly the man would have had no objection to be rich, but he thought to himself: "I must first ask my daughter about this," so he went in and told them that there was a great white bear outside who had faithfully promised to make them all rich if he might but have the youngest daughter....(Continue)
There is no better bedtime reading, at any age.
Sweet dreams, happy new year, and may 2009 see all your wishes come true.
