# The Allies' Fairy Book/Introduction

INTRODUCTION
In presenting a selection of the fairy-stories of the Allies we make not the slightest pretence of being logical or historical. We are conscious of all the objections which may be brought against us by the learned, and we do not seek to rebut them. We are perfectly well aware of the fact that variants of the stories we have chosen can be pointed out in the folk-lore of other nations than those with whom we have the happiness to be joined in our great national struggle to preserve the civilization of the world. But we think that the form in which every story we have chosen is told, although perhaps not the essence of the story itself, is characteristic of each particular country, and all that we need say more is that it has amused us to bring together specimens of the folk-lore of the fighting friends of humanity.
We have not forgotten the almost universal distribution of fairy-tales, and the uniformity with which a certain tradition reappears in the legends of one country after another. The “people of peace” have no politics and are ignorant of the elements of patriotism; at all events they own no allegiance to the particular States which they inhabit, and we cannot be sure what part they take in the quarrels and dissensions of mankind. So independent of racial prejudice are these creatures of the supernatural world that the only law they seem to recognize is the primitive one: Be kind to those who are kind to you.
The popular idea of a fairy is bound up with the image of a diminutive woman, dressed in wings and a ballet-skirt, who is small enough to sit among the petals of a full-blown rose, and light enough to be wafted through the air on a wild bird’s wing. Sometimes this being is on a somewhat larger scale, as in W. S. Gilbert’s ​“Bab Ballads,” where an airy fairy madly loves a mortal curate. This type is much encouraged by the traditions of the operatic stage, where she “hangs in arsenic green from a highly impossible tree,” and even by Shakespeare, who ought to know better. As a matter of fact, this species of fairy is unknown to serious folk-lore, and her existence is founded on a misunderstanding, which, according to Skeat, had crept into the English language before “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was written. The little human creatures, in wings and skirts, which Sir Herbert Tree has taught us to think of as all clothed in a delicate shimmer of sunset gold, are really not fairies, but fays. It is pleasant to be able to point to anything, however small, that Shakespeare did not know.
A fairy is, in fact, any supernatural creature of the imagination. It is a being evolved, contrary to the laws of nature, by enchantment. In the correct sense, a hobgoblin or a giant (if large enough) or a mermaid, or even a dragon, is a fairy, and there is no evidence whatever that ballet-skirts are worn in the recesses of the forests of fairyland. Piers the Plowman says in his “Prologue”:
As on a May morning, on Malvern hills.
Me befell a ferly of fairy, methought.
A “ferly” is a wonderful experience; Piers means that he had a strange adventure, which he attributed to “fairy,” that is to say, to enchantment. If he had meant a tiny woman, seated in a bluebell, he would have said an elf or a “fay” a fay being one kind of fairy out of many—but he used “fairy” in its essential and original meaning. This is what we propose to do here, and in collecting fairy-tales from our own stores and those of our Allies, we are so far from confining ourselves to the conventional term that throughout all our volume we shall scarcely find, in Titania’s sense, one venturous fairy.
​Fairy-tales, therefore, must be understood as dealing with irresponsible beings and imaginary adventures which do not rest on any basis of experience or reason or physical possibility whatever. In a story of real life it is important that what is narrated should appear probable, however strange, and should not be in plain contradiction with the laws of nature. But the whole essence of a fairy-tale rests in its impossibility, in its dependence on a mysterious power above all mundane forces, which we call enchantment. We must resign the pride of intellect, and become as little children, before we are capable of accepting a fairy-tale. One thing, for instance, which we are very frequently called upon to believe is that the words which drop from the lips of nice girls turn to diamonds and those from the lips of nasty girls to toads. This cannot be said to be founded upon experience in any country, and yet it is accepted by Norwegians and Kaffirs, and by all the populations between them. That is an example of the attitude of mind which is demanded from those who tell fairy-tales; they must implicitly believe what they report, not in spite of, but because it is impossible. The ancient legend of Cupid and Psyche is a typical fairy-story in this sense.
Modern investigation of the exact meaning of the word “fairy” has considerably modified the views of folk-lorists as to the source of the main branch of these legends, which are found all over the world. It used to be held that fairies were the tradition of an ancient and perhaps pigmy race of human beings. This Sir Walter Scott believed. Andrew Lang perceived that this theory was untenable, and he was divided in his allegiance between the Wizard of the North and truth. Truth prevailed, but he exposes the errors of Scott as politely as if he were explaining to an elderly lady of quality that she had taken his pew in church. Lang also had his theory, which seems to be that Fairyland is a kind of Hades, home of the buried dead, who are permitted to ​leave it at certain times and under certain restrictions, and who squeak and gibber as they flit through the upper atmosphere. According to the best authorities, this kind of fairies is of a mild nature, between man and angel. They were described by Kirk, who wrote “The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies” in 1691, as having “bodies somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud, and best seen in twilight.”
One thing seems to be universally admitted, that these supernatural beings are gentle and pacific. “People of peace” they were called by the ancient Scotch, and they faded away and were unseen during the clash of arms. There is no record of the appearance of fairies upon a battlefield. It is when the hearts of country-folk are hushed and silent that the mysterious voices of goblins are heard calling, at dewfall, from the terraces of the haunted hills. Yet they are not, as it would appear from the most instructed authorities, without a fantastic warfare of their own, nor unprepared with weapons of offence. It is, of course, difficult to find a trustworthy source of information. Not many a man, in these degenerate days, is held worthy of the honour of beholding these creatures with his mortal eyes, nor has had the good luck of Isabel Gowdie, whose confessions are given in Pitcairn’s “Scottish Criminal Trials,” a book beloved by Robert Louis Stevenson. Isabel reports that “as for elf-arrows, the Devil sharps them with his own hand and delivers them to elf-boys, who whittle and dight them with a sharp thing like a packing-needle; but when I was in Elf land, I saw them whittling and dighting them.” What an enviable experience!
“When I was in Elfland!” The sound of the words is music in itself, but unfortunately Isabel Gowdie was called a witch. She did not deny the charge; indeed she gloried in it, and was much surer of the fact than we can be. But in truth a measure of wizardry is essential to the fairy-tale. As we ​have said, the first law of the denizens of these stories is that they shall be superior to the laws of existence, and have the power to tamper with those laws by means of special privileges. There are incantations which have the effect of turning the tangible world topsy-turvy, and there are particular people who are in possession of the formula needful. To make up for this extraordinary privilege, they have to endure the suspicion of the majority who do not boast these powers, and to be subjected to the shame and danger of being condemned as witches and wizards. It is remarkably exhilarating to possess, or even to pretend to possess, a power which renders you superior to other intelligent people, perhaps much more respected than yourself. Nothing connected with the terrible witch-trials of the seventeenth century is more curious than the fact that the accused persons so often believed in the truth of the accusation. They had learned to make a fairy-tale of their lives, and they preferred to die a cruel death rather than descend into the light of common day.
It has been a subject of constant discussion why in so many, indeed in practically all, parts of the world the human race has willingly given itself up to a belief in the vain things of enchantment. No doubt, in the first instance, fear, working upon a complete ignorance of the laws of the natural world, encouraged a timorous and fantastic credulity. In particular, the terror of darkness must always have acted a great part in stimulating and preserving legends. With the fall of night, primitive man loses his self-control, and is ready to accept as fact any terrifying conjecture or surmise. In Western Europe until comparatively recent times the dark was peopled for country-folk with every description of ghost, hag, and hobgoblin; and, in spite of artificial lighting and education, this is still largely the case. How it can be that the character of these nocturnal illusions has been uniformly powerful over the human mind it is difficult ​indeed to say, but it seems to be the fact that similar traditions and alleged phenomena occur in every corner of the globe. The Domovois of the Russians, for instance, who sweep the house and clean the hearth when everybody is asleep, are identical with the Pixies of Devonshire and with numberless other useful, although crotchety, creatures of darkness in countries that seem to have had no possible communication with one another.
The world-wide conviction that our sphere is peopled by creatures of enchantment, beings of supernatural powers and unnatural qualities, has caused many persons of otherwise reasonable habit of mind to argue that these must in some form exist. There is an irrepressible tendency in mankind to believe that where there is smoke there must be fire, and that so much cannot be said without some basis of truth. For example, Kirk, who remains valuable to us not merely as a repository of important legends, but as a man who, in the credulous seventeenth century, was trying to be an honest seeker after truth—Kirk says: “How much is written of Pigmies, Fairies, Nymphs, Syrens, Apparitions, which, tho’ not the tenth part true, yet could not spring out of nothing!” Such solemn, pious men as Richard Baxter, as Samuel Johnson, and as John Wesley have been firmly convinced that though much may be false, yet something must be true in the wonderful tales which are so constantly repeated on lines so consistent in themselves.
The answer that science has to give to this seems to be that there is no limit to the degree in which the mind of honest people is worked upon by illusion. In days when the observation of nature was primitive, people saw, rapidly and timorously, phenomena to which they gave a false interpretation. Perhaps it has not been considered how effective near sight, in an age when that condition was not merely not remedied but not even diagnosed, must have been in the creation of ghosts and other apparitions. But ​Nature herself is always laying traps for mortal credulity. An instance has lately occurred in the knowledge of the present writer. A little girl of four years old, brought up in the country, was walking in the woods, in the middle of a spring afternoon, with her father and mother. The parents determined that they had gone far enough, and turned back, to the displeasure of their little girl, who yet gave no reason for wanting to go on. But some hours later she was asked why she had been so anxious to do so. “Because I might have talked to the fairy,” she answered. “Fairy! What fairy?” “Why, didn’t you see the green fairy dancing at the side of the path?” That happy apparition had certainly not been seen by the parents, but the little girl was so positive that she was taken back to the spot in the wood to prove her mistake to her. “But there she is still! Don’t you see her dancing?” And then the father of the child observed, far down the path, a newly leaved birch-bush, which quivered in the wind, and certainly bore a quite remarkable resemblance to a little lady in a full green skirt. The child had not observed a likeness to a fairy, but had instantly accepted the illusion as a fact, and had seen a fairy. It seems to me probable that this is characteristic of the way in which savages accept natural phenomena as forms of enchantment.
The credit of having been the earliest to set down in literature the wandering folk-tales of Europe is given to the Italian novelist, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, who published his first collection of stories called “Piacevole Notti,” or “Pleasant Nights,” at Venice in 1550. He is thought to have got much of his folk-lore from sailors and travellers who came out of the East, and to this fact is attributed the tinge of Orientalism which marks most of the fairy-tales of Western Europe. Mr. Waters, from whose admirable translation we borrow one story, has introduced the “Notti” to English readers in an essay ​which is full of information. He considers that Straparola’s collection was the principal source from which Perrault and Madame D’Aulnoy took their tales.
It is characteristic of France that when she turned to the folk-tale, she clothed it in consummate literary form. Maury, who wrote a learned work on the Fays of the Middle Ages, observed that the Fairies were propitiated with altars in Roman Gaul. When Christianity came, they retired into the forest of Broceliande, whence, in the middle of the seventeenth century, when French literature was most brilliantly classical, they were brought to court by Madame Coulanges to amuse the ladies at Versailles. But it was a learned academician, Charles Perrault, who deserves the credit of introducing the fairy-tale to French literature, and he did so in 1696, when he published “La Belle au Bois Dormant” in a sort of magazine published at The Hague. This, with other stories, including “Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots” and “Cinderella,” was included a little later in a modest precious volume entitled “Tales of Mother Goose,” which is the “Iliad” of folk-lore. We have chosen for our collection “The Sleeping Beauty,” in the excellent translation of Mr. S. R. Littlewood, and it is well to point out that instead of ending with the release of the Princess from her disenchanted palace, this version goes on to describe what happened after that, in great detail. This is an instance of Perrault’s judgment, far superior in quality to that of his many critics and censors. To close this story where it usually ceases is to destroy its fairy meaning, which seems to depend on the overthrow of the Ogress-Queen, although it is highly probable that two stories had got rolled into one before they reached Perrault. To understand what is essential and what is not in a fairy-story, it is needful to have the heart of a little child. This the learned Perrault possessed, and the less we tamper with his text the wiser we shall be. It is noticeable that the French ​balance of mind and delicate apprehension colour even their fairy-tales, which have not the crudity and violence of other folk-lore; and Lang was happily inspired when he remarked of the French elves that “a little grain of French common sense ballasts these light minions of the Moon.”
The fairy-tales of all nations seem to agree in depending for their effects upon magic and witchcraft. Sir James Frazer and the other mythologists have heaped up evidence to show that man in a primitive condition delights in seven-leagued boots, enchanted cows, caps of darkness, and waters of life and death. Ravens that prophesy, horses that are swifter than light, werwolves, and, above all, malignant witches play a preponderating part in peasant imagination. A difference, however, has been discerned in the manner in which the arts of wizardry are introduced, a difference which doubtless is due to the contrasts of national temperament. In Celtic tales, and especially those of the Western Highlands, all is shadowy, illusive, and dim. This is seen in the enchanting collections of Campbell, where the incidents seem to be drowned in a mist, such as turns, on summer afternoons, the grey of a Hebridean archipelago to purple and violet. On the other hand, the Slav tells his monstrous story of witches’ coffins and magic sticks with the utmost lucidity and calm. “The Russian peasant likes a clear statement of facts,” and he eschews any trace of that mystery and symbolism dear to the Highlander or the Breton. He tells about squealing vampires and fire-birds which live on golden apples in the same plain language with which he describes that he has walked into the town and bought a piece of calico.
It must be remembered that the Slav has an extraordinary gift for telling a story. Ralston, who wandered a great deal over Russia when intellectual intercourse with that country was in its infancy, used to say that the “skazkas,” as the folk-tales are called, gave him the impression, when ​he read them first, that he was back in a Russian village, listening to the professional tale-teller, surrounded by his group of infatuated listeners, while he had only to lift his eyes to see “the wide sweep of the level corn-land, the gloom of the interminable forest, the gleam of the slowly winding river.” The Slav fairy-tales have a transparent simplicity, a straightforwardness of statement which give them a special charm, and it appears that in the original they are told with a lightness and brightness which are very fascinat in g. This, however, must depend in large measure on the skill and art of the teller. The Russian folk-lorists have doubtless been fortunate in the individuals from whom they originally heard the fairy-tales, but much must also be due to the graceful simplicity of their own style. A man who cannot use his own language with delicacy is able to make the most charming story in the world seem dull, and much depends on the art of the reporter.
It has been observed by those who have studied the fairy-tales of Russia that they deal with the doings of a class of supernatural beings quite distinct from those which people the folk-tales of Western and Central Europe. Fifty years ago a charming scholar, who was to Russia almost what Perrault was to France, A. N. Afanasieff, collected in many volumes the popular legends of his country, and displayed to the world the extraordinary wealth of Russian folk-lore. Afanasieff, who lived in Moscow, had wandered over the length and breadth of his native land, collecting these stories, much as Asbjornsen and Moe were doing about the same time in Norway. Ralston, who introduced the Russian fairy-stories to English readers, was a friend of Afanasieff and of my own, and he cultivated the art of telling stories in the manner of a Little Russian village schoolmaster, as he had been taught by Afanasieff. It was a wonderful experience to hear Ralston, who was the tallest of mortal men, and thin to boot, with a very long waving beard, ​spread his hands and snap his fingers as he recited to a spellbound audience the tale of “Koshchei the Deathless” or “The Soldier and the Vampire.” These blood-curdling memories are now forty years old, and belong to a period when all we knew in England of Russian literature was what the gigantic, gentle Ralston, with his beard flowing as he strode along the street, chose to tell us of its wonders.
It was from Ralston that we learned, in those far-off days, of the mythical beings which people the imagination of the Slav races. In spite of the efforts of the Church and the spread of education, nothing can prevent the Ruthenian or Serbian peasant from believing that the woods are full of fauns and elves, the rivers of sprites, and the houses of “lares” or domestic fairies. Noises that foretell death, beneficent gnomes whose task it is to reveal the place of buried treasure, mirrors which give back mystic forms instead of reflections, all the superstitions of the extreme West are repeated in slightly different shape by the soothsayers of the Slavonic peoples. We find in Galicia evidence of second sight which hardly differs even in expression from that of the Highlands of Scotland. But, side by side with these things which seem common to all folk-lore, we find grotesque and mysterious inventions for which no Western equivalent is forthcoming.
When we reach the Japanese tales for children, we meet with singular differences from and interesting resemblances with the western European fairy-story. They had much the same literary fate as the “Tales of Mother Goose,” for, after floating about in the unwritten gossip of country places, they were crystallized into their present form by men of letters in the seventeenth century. The greatest of Japanese novelists, Kiokutei Bakin, who died at a great age in 1848, took a very special interest in these tales, and it is owing to him that they have received the careful study of a succession of Japanese scholars. Aston, the historian of Japanese ​literature, was of opinion that they were not really folk-lore, but that they had definite authors, whose names have not been preserved. We are here in presence of a question similar to that which inquires whether Straparola and Perrault invented or merely reported their famous “contes.” In each case there can be very little doubt that the legend existed, but that a practised author, Italian or French or Japanese, gave it its permanent expression.
The fairy-stories of the Japanese were unknown in the West until 1871, when they were translated by my lamented friend, Mr. A. B. Mitford (afterwards the first Lord Redesdale) in his “ Tales of Old Japan,” now one of the classics of our language. Mr. Mitford could only discover nine of them, printed in little separate pamphlets with stereotyped illustrations, the blocks of which had become so worn that the print was scarcely legible. They had fallen into such disuetude that when Mr. Mitford asked cultivated Japanese whether there were not others of the same kind to be met with, they thought he was poking fun at them, and they were offended. Since then, however, Japanese critics have observed the enthusiastic comments of Bakin, and bibliographers have waked up to the value of these little books, the original editions of which are now highly prized by native collectors. The earliest of these which has been discovered is the story called “The Rat’s Wedding,” of which there is an edition which dates before 1661. The fairy-stories of the Japanese, like their lyrical poems—their “hanka” and their “tanka”—are essentially so brief that we have included three of them in the present collection, using the excellent translation by Lord Redesdale.
In all cases but one we have found little difficulty in choosing examples which seemed to us characteristic of the country concerned and yet suitable for representation. But Belgium has given us a great deal of anxiety. There are not, so far as we have been able to discover, any ​fairy-stories peculiar to Belgian territory, whether Flemish, Walloon, or French. The customary legends of the northwest and centre of Europe are circulated in Belgium, but they adopt no special national character there. They repeat, to excess, the feature which must so often baffle the collector, namely, the extraordinary resemblance to other stories from every portion of the globe. My eminent friend, M. Verhaeren, has indicated to me the tale called “Sire Halewyn,” but this is simply “Bluebeard,” with the addition of sinister and brutal features which make it unsuitable for popular reading. The so-called “Legendes Flamandes” and “Contes Brabanconnes” turn out not to be legends at all, but Rabelaisian “pastiches” of a recent and purely literary kind. But about forty years ago their author, Charles de Coster (1827-1879),who was almost the only Franco-Belgian writer of merit in that dark time, published a volume called “Thyl Ulenspiegel.”
Thyl Ulenspiegel (or Eulenspiegel) was the name of a legendary Teutonic character said to have been born in Brunswick in the thirteenth century. The word is supposed to mean The Owl’s Looking-Glass, but this remains a matter of conjecture. Ulenspiegel’s adventures were told in chap-books, and he became the type of the crafty peasant, the humorous rogue of Central European romance. In Elizabethan times he seems to have been popular even in England, under the name of Owlglass or Howleglas. This story was always popular in the Low Countries, and there are very early Dutch versions of it. Coster lifts this rather vulgar hero, whose name is the source of the French word “espiegle,” to an imaginative sphere, and makes a national Belgian figure of him. His book is full of violent animation and preposterous action, but it is inspired by a patriotism which was never so appropriate as it is to-day. Coster places his adaptation of the story at the period of Spanish oppression which so ​closely prefigured what Belgium is suffering from now, and in his romance Thyl Ulenspiegel is a personification of the soul of Flanders. From Coster’s richly coloured and intensely Flemish extravaganza, which seems alternately inspired by Rubens and by Rabelais, we have extracted an episode of great picturesqueness and high national inspiration, which has been translated for the present volume. We think that it will be welcome among the better-known and more authentic fairy-tales, since it also is a fairy-tale, a dream of the noble patriotism of the Belgian nation as seen reflected in the Owl’s Looking-Glass. “Est-ce qu’on enterre Ulenspiegel, l’esprit, ou Nele, le coeur, de la mere Flandre?” To this question, now a far more poignant one than it was in the days of Charles de Coster, the seven other Allies reply with unanimity: “By the favour of God, no!”
EDMUND GOSSE
August 1916
[Since we went to press, we have received the good news that Rumania has joined the eight Allies. In another edition, we hope to give a specimen of her folk-lore, and (who knows?) of that of some other friendly Power.]