Fairy Tales

I've always liked fairy tales and stories, preferably in as close to the original version as possible (I firmly believe there is a special pace in hell for the people at Disney responsible for that bastardization of The Little Mermaid).  One of the nice things about the Kindle is free fairy tale book. so I've been reading a story a day.

I discovered Andrew Lang's work with Historical Mysteries.  From there I discovered he'd put out a series of twelve fairy books named for colors.  So far I've read The Lilac Fairy Book (Andrew Lang's Fairy Books) and The Olive Fairy Book (Andrew Lang's Fairy Books).  Lang readily admits he's an aggregator.  He picked the stories often from foreign collections and then had them translated instead of going to traditional oral sources.  He used sources from all over the world so you get a nice variety along with stories you have never heard of before.  I also find it interesting to see the different variations of the stories everyone knows.  So far the free versions lack illustrations but seem to be well formatted.  The are aimed at children, so most gruesomeness has been edited out.

Lang mentioned Popular Tales from the Norse in one introduction, so I decided to check that out.  George Webbe Desant did the translation.  Being all from one country, there's a lot of variations on the same theme, but one of the reasons fairy tales survive is the comforting sense of familiarity.  The first quarter of this is an extraordinarily dull essay.  At least what I read of it was dull.  The themes and structures of the various stories were clear enough without needing a lot of extra explanation.  It's great Webbe wrote it for the scholarly, but for most people it's just so much extra blather keeping you from the actual text of the book.