The children who read fairy books, or have fairy books read to them, do
not read prefaces, and the parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, who
give fairy books to their daughters, nieces, and cousines, leave
prefaces unread. For whom, then, are prefaces written? When an author
publishes a book ‘out of his own head,’ he writes the preface for his
own pleasure. After reading over his book in print--to make sure that
all the ‘u’s’ are not printed as ‘n’s,’ and all the ‘n’s’ as ‘u’s’ in
the proper names--then the author says, mildly, in his preface, what he
thinks about his own book, and what he means it to prove--if he means
it to prove anything--and why it is not a better book than it is. But,
perhaps, nobody reads prefaces except other authors; and critics, who
hope that they will find enough in the preface to enable them to do
without reading any of the book.
This appears to be the philosophy of prefaces in general, and perhaps
authors might be more daring and candid than they are with advantage,
and write regular criticisms of their own books in their prefaces, for
nobody can be so good a critic of himself as the author--if he has a
sense of humour. If he has not, the less he says in his preface the
better.
These Fairy Books, however, are not written by the Editor, as he has
often explained, ‘out of his own head.’ The stories are taken from
those told by grannies to grandchildren in many countries and in many
languages-- French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Gaelic, Icelandic,
Cherokee, African, Indian, Australian, Slavonic, Eskimo, and what not.
The stories are not literal, or word by word translations, but have
been altered in many ways to make them suitable for children. Much has
been left out in places, and the narrative has been broken up into
conversations, the characters telling each other how matters stand, and
speaking for themselves, as children, and some older people, prefer
them to do. In many tales, fairly cruel and savage deeds are done, and
these have been softened down as much as possible; though it is
impossible, even if it were desirable, to conceal the circumstance that
popular stories were never intended to be tracts and nothing else.
Though they usually take the side of courage and kindness, and the
virtues in general, the old story-tellers admire successful cunning as
much as Homer does in the Odyssey. At least, if the cunning hero,
human or animal, is the weaker, like Odysseus, Brer Rabbit, and many
others, the story-teller sees little in intellect but superior cunning,
by which tiny Jack gets the better of the giants. In the fairy tales
of no country are ‘improper’ incidents common, which is to the credit
of human nature, as they were obviously composed mainly for children.
It is not difficult to get rid of this element when it does occur in
popular tales.
The old puzzle remains a puzzle--why do the stories of the remotest
people so closely resemble each other? Of course, in the immeasurable
past, they have been carried about by conquering races, and learned by
conquering races from vanquished peoples. Slaves carried far from home
brought their stories with them into captivity. Wanderers, travellers,
shipwrecked men, merchants, and wives stolen from alien tribes have
diffused the stories; gipsies and Jews have passed them about; Roman
soldiers of many different races, moved here and there about the
Empire, have trafficked in them. From the remotest days men have been
wanderers, and wherever they went their stories accompanied them. The
slave trade might take a Greek to Persia, a Persian to Greece; an
Egyptian woman to Phoenicia; a Babylonian to Egypt; a Scandinavian
child might be carried with the amber from the Baltic to the Adriatic;
or a Sidonian to Ophir, wherever Ophir may have been; while the
Portuguese may have borne their tales to South Africa, or to Asia, and
thence brought back other tales to Egypt. The stories wandered
wherever the Buddhist missionaries went, and the earliest French
voyageurs told them to the Red Indians. These facts help to account
for the sameness of the stories everywhere; and the uniformity of
human fancy in early societies must be the cause of many other
resemblances.
In this volume there are stories from the natives of Rhodesia,
collected by Mr. Fairbridge, who speaks the native language, and one is
brought by Mr. Cripps from another part of Africa, Uganda. Three tales
from the Punjaub were collected and translated by Major Campbell.
Various savage tales, which needed a good deal of editing, are derived
from the learned pages of the ‘Journal of the Anthropological
Institute.’ With these exceptions, and ‘The Magic Book,’ translated by
Mrs. Pedersen, from ‘Eventyr fra Jylland,’ by Mr. Ewald Tang Kristensen
(Stories from Jutland), all the tales have been done, from various
sources, by Mrs. Lang, who has modified, where it seemed desirable, all
the narratives.