Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang was the last great Victorian polymath — a man who wrote with equal authority on fairy tales and Homeric scholarship, on totemism and cricket, on psychical research and the history of Scotland, and whose twelve Colour Fairy Books (1889–1910) became the most beloved and most influential collections of fairy tales in the English language, shaping the childhood reading of generations of English-speaking children and preserving folk tales from every corner of the world in adaptations that remain in print after more than a century. He was also a poet, a novelist, a journalist, a translator, a historian, and a controversialist of formidable energy, producing over 200 books in a career that encompassed virtually every department of Victorian literary and intellectual life.

St Andrews and Oxford

Lang was born in Selkirk in the Scottish Borders in 1844 and educated at the Edinburgh Academy, the University of St Andrews, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was elected a Fellow of Merton College in 1868. He was a brilliant classical scholar — he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry — but chose journalism over the academic life, moving to London in 1875 and becoming one of the most prolific and most versatile journalists of the period, contributing to the Daily News, the Saturday Review, Longman’s Magazine (which he edited from 1882 to 1905), and virtually every other serious periodical of the age.

The Colour Fairy Books

Lang’s enduring fame rests on the twelve Colour Fairy Books, published by Longmans, Green between 1889 and 1910: The Blue Fairy Book (1889), The Red Fairy Book (1890), The Green Fairy Book (1892), The Yellow Fairy Book (1894), The Pink Fairy Book (1897), The Grey Fairy Book (1900), The Violet Fairy Book (1901), The Crimson Fairy Book (1903), The Brown Fairy Book (1904), The Orange Fairy Book (1906), The Olive Fairy Book (1907), and The Lilac Fairy Book (1910).

The collections drew on folk tales from all over the world — from the Brothers Grimm and Perrault, certainly, but also from Scandinavian, Russian, Japanese, Indian, Arabian, African, Native American, and Pacific Island sources. Lang did not collect the tales himself in the field; he and his wife Leonora Blanche Alleyne, who did most of the actual translation and adaptation, worked from published sources in multiple languages. The result was the most cosmopolitan collection of fairy tales ever assembled, presented in clear, readable English prose that made the stories accessible to Victorian children without sacrificing their narrative power.

The Anthropological Work

Lang’s scholarly work on mythology and religion was, in his own time, at least as important as his fairy tale collections. Custom and Myth (1884) and Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887) challenged the dominant solar-mythology theory of Max Müller, which interpreted myths as corrupted descriptions of natural phenomena (particularly the sun). Lang argued instead that myths originated in the actual beliefs and customs of primitive peoples — in animism, totemism, and ancestor worship — and that similar myths appeared in unrelated cultures because human minds working on similar experiences produced similar explanations.

The Making of Religion (1898) was Lang’s most controversial work — he argued, against the evolutionary anthropologists, that the concept of a supreme being (a “High God”) was present in many primitive religions and could not be explained as a late development from animism. This argument anticipated later developments in the anthropology of religion but was poorly received at the time.

Homer

Lang was a distinguished Homeric scholar. His prose translations of the Odyssey (1879, with S.H. Butcher) and the Iliad (1883, with Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers) were the standard English prose versions for decades. His critical works on Homer — Homer and the Epic (1893) and Homer and His Age (1906) — defended the essential unity of the Homeric poems against the “separatist” school that argued for multiple authors.

Collecting Lang

The twelve Colour Fairy Books (Longmans, Green, 1889–1910) are the primary collecting target — first editions in the publisher’s decorated cloth bindings, with illustrations by H.J. Ford, are highly sought. The Blue Fairy Book (1889) is the most valuable as the first in the series. Complete sets of all twelve in first edition are rare and command substantial prices. Lang’s scholarly works — Custom and Myth (1884), Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887) — are collected by specialists. His Homer translations (Macmillan, 1879 and 1883) are important classical texts.