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.