Andrew Lang

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, attitudes toward history and national identity fostered a “romantic” rediscovery of folk and fairy tales. This is the period of the Golden Age of folk and fairy tales, when European folklorists sought to understand and redefine the present through the common tales of the past, and long neglected stories became recognized as cultural treasures.

In this rich collection, distinguished expert of fairy tales Jack Zipes continues his lifelong exploration of the story-telling tradition with a focus on the Golden Age. Included are one hundred eighty-two tales—many available in English for the first time—grouped into eighteen tale types. Zipes provides an engaging general Introduction that discusses the folk and fairy tale tradition, the impact of the Brothers Grimm, and the significance of categorizing tales into various types.

Short introductions to each tale type that discuss its history, characteristics, and variants provide readers with important background information.

Also included are annotations, short biographies of folklorists of the period, and a substantial bibliography.

Eighteen original art works by students of the art department of Anglia Ruskin University not only illustrate the eighteen tale types, but also provide delightful—and sometimes astonishing—21st-century artistic interpretations of them.

In Andrew Lang’s “Realism and Romance,” published in the Contemporary Review in 1887, Lang explained his personal preferences for romance over realism. Anticipating the arguments of J. R. R Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, Lang staunchly supported readers’ rights to their own tastes, particularly if that taste leaned toward “the catawampus of Romance” (693). However, unlike Tolkien and Lewis, Andrew Lang firmly identified the genre of romance with the “boys’ book.” Moreover, the boys’ books romances Lang identifies seem to hold one of two particular approaches to women. On the one hand, the male characters in a romance might approach a single powerful woman with awe. In some Victorian boys’ books such as H. Rider Haggard’s She and Lang and Haggard’s The World’s Desire, women play major, dangerous, and archetypal roles. In She-who-must-be-obeyed, there are foreshadowings both of C. S. Lewis’s Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew and, more positively, of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. On the other hand, when women do not appear in this genre in a place of exalted or supernatural power, they are often excluded entirely. Andrew Lang would write with approval of his favorite boys’ books that “there are no interfering petticoats in the story” (“Stevenson’s” 30).

In this essay, I demonstrate how Lang’s critical fusion of the romance and boys’ book genres affected the reception of The Lord of the Rings. While positive reviewers of Tolkien’s work associated it with the great romances of the past such as The Faerie Queene and Morte d’ Arthur, negative reviewers defined The Lord of the Rings as a boys’ book and classed it with authors such as H. Rider Haggard. Haggard himself preferred to have his works associated with boy readers because he was troubled by the supposedly feminine fiction he saw around him. However, the boys’ book classification, even for Haggard, was always a sort of marketing fiction—it did not represent Haggard’s actual readership. Similarly, the claims by twentieth-century critics that The Lord of the Rings was a boys’ book has affected the way the book has been received and marketed; these claims are particularly damaging if used to pigeonhole Tolkien’s understanding of gender. Although Tolkien’s character of Galadriel very much draws on aspects of Haggard’s Ayesha, Galadriel’s clear superiority as a character demonstrates that Tolkien’s quest romance was moving away from the constructions of gender in Haggard’s boys’ books. Haggard’s influence on Tolkien can better be linked, not to the boys’ book genre, but rather to the two authors’ similar desire for verisimilitude when setting up a mythopoeic story.

Grant Allen (1848-1899) was a well-known populariser of natural history who was widely recognised for his extensive knowledge of science and his ability to refashion complex ideas for general audiences. But his status as a popular writer, coupled with a lack of formal training, placed him at the margins of professional science and impeded his serious scientific ambitions. Although Allen tended to portray fiction-writing as an economic necessity, both contemporary and recent critics have noted stylistic innovations that place him within germinal popular genres of the fin de siècle. This paper aims to show that Allen's contributions to late-Victorian popular literature derive in part from his negotiation of fiction and non-fiction genres. Focusing particularly on his experiments with the short story, it considers how and to what extent he distinguished scientific from literary writing, while revealing his views on plausibility in fiction to be more complex than is typically recognised. Little-studied reviews of Allen's popular fiction suggest the wider contemporary impact of his experimentations. That critics recognised his style as unconventional endorses a reappraisal of his place within developments in late-Victorian popular literature.

Published in 2016 (Johannesburg: Standard Bank), this book is an annotated critical edition, based on the original manuscript, of J. M. Orpen's crucial article "A Glimpse into the Mythology of the Maluti Bushmen" (1874). In addition to the annotated text, it contains contributions by John Wright, Jeremy Hollmann, Jill Weintrobut, Menán du Plessis and Justine Wintjes on different aspects of the text and its context.

This is an essay on the methodological approach in the myth studies of Wen Yiduo (Wen I-to), as he explored the origins of Chinese myths in early literature, especially the Shijing. It considers the possible influence from European myth studies on his work, especially such as Frederick Max Muller and Andrew Lang.

Este trabalho tem três objetivos: apresentar o conto 'The Story of Sigurd' (1890), de Andrew Lang, que nasceu como uma adaptação da tradução da Saga dos Volsungos para o inglês, feita em 1870 por William Morris; propor uma tradução do conto de Lang para o português e, finalmente, discutir alguns pontos da passagem do épico traduzido por Morris para o conto de fadas adaptado por Lang. Inicialmente, o conto é situado no tempo e no contexto dos doze livros compilados por Lang que reúnem estórias de fadas de diversas culturas. 'The Story of Sigurd' é, então, apresentada em seu idioma original, seguida de uma proposta de tradução para o português. Na parte final, o foco é o trabalho empreendido por Lang, que promoveu omissões, transformações e cortes para adequar a saga islandesa ao público infantil.

This essay compares Andrew Lang's and J.R.R. Tolkien's opinions regarding primary belief (religious belief) and secondary belief (literary belief--Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" [Biographia Literaria]) and points out points of overlap. In "On Fairy-stories," which was first given as the 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews, Tolkien attempts to set right a misunderstanding held by many nineteenth-century writers, including Andrew Lang, about the type of faith early creators of fantasy had in their own marvelous stories. Lang had written that early fantasy creators must have believed in the possibility of the marvels they recounted because they were "were much like children in their minds" (Green Fairy Book Preface). Tolkien demurred. Despite this disagreement, a closer analysis of the two men's works shows that both men were peculiarly concerned with the distinction between primary and secondary belief. Andrew Lang's actual beliefs about fairy tales' literary value, children's responses to fairy stories, and contemporary understandings of miracle were closer to Tolkien's than Tolkien knew. When Tolkien reacted negatively to Lang's apparent views of child fairy-story readers and childish credulity in secondary world marvels, as described in Lang's fairy-book prefaces, Tolkien was responding to Lang at his most hasty and inconsistent. Using archival and recently digitized sources on Andrew Lang alongside Verlyn Flieger and Douglas Anderson's Tolkien on Fairy-stories, which includes the manuscripts of Tolkien's "On Fairy-stories," this essay contextualizes Andrew Lang's work, details the extent of his influence on Tolkien, and explains the ways in which Tolkien misinterpreted Lang. However, this essay also points out that this misinterpretation of Lang may only interest Victorianists: as far as the later reception history of the fairy story and the romance goes, Lang's perceived views have been more important than his actual views. For both Lang and Tolkien, however, despite Tolkien's carefulness (in "On Fairy-stories") in working out these questions of genre, and Lang's occasional carelessness, the distinction between primary and secondary belief would remain a lasting challenge.

Margaret Oliphant and Andrew Lang were impressively prolific authors who each engaged the other's periodical criticism and influenced the other's theories of life writing. Their reception history, however, has diverged sharply. While both writers fell out of fashion for much of the twentieth century, Oliphant's autobiography made her of interest to feminists and life writing scholars, while Lang's lack of a definitive biography, supplemented by the over-quotation of a few hostile letters by others, contributed much to his continued caricature. By examining Oliphant and Lang's good-humored sparring in "The Old Saloon" in Blackwood's and "At the Sign of the Ship" in Longman's, as well as the letters about and proofs of Lang's Life of Lockhart (1896), a book which Oliphant critiqued both pre- and post-publication, it becomes possible to reconstruct these two authors' levels of authority as critics and life writers.

"The reader who desires to be hopelessly perplexed, may desert the contemplation of the Fiscal Question, and turn his eyes upon The Mystery of the Clyde. “Popular” this puzzle cannot be, for there is no “demmed demp disagreeable body” in the Mystery. No such object was found in Clyde, near Dumbarton, but a set of odd and inexpensive looking, yet profoundly enigmatic scraps of stone, bone, slate, horn and so forth, were discovered and now repose in a glass case at the National Museum in Queen Street, Edinburgh."

Andrew Lang. Otters and the Moral Sense. First published in The Morning Post on October 6, 1911.
In his short story “Laura” (collected in “Beasts and Super-Beasts”), Saki (H. H. Munro) mentioned otter hounds and otter hunting. In the course of my Saki research, I found this piece by Andrew Lang, and decided to share it as a comment on Saki’s story.

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Although Ruskin's  often-quoted "Of Queens' Gardens" helped define Victorian women's constrained domestic sphere, his richly mythopoetic prose offers an alternative discourse that surprisingly yields the tools to escape fixed categories of gender.  Myth supplies the opportunity for gender subversion not only in that famous essay and in Ruskin's directly mythographic writing (such as ETHICS OF THE DUSTand THE QUEEN OF THE AIR), but also in the works of other nineteenth-century authors, such as Keats, Barrett Browning, D. G. Rossetti, George Eliot, Max Müller, Andrew Lang, and Jane Ellen Harrison.  Besides placing Ruskin's use of myth into historical context, Ruskin's Mythic Queen shows that uses of myth in twentieth-century feminist theory and gender studies continue in Ruskin's vein."