The Lang Fairy Tales
A bonus series featuring Eleanor and Martin reading the classic tales collected in the Fairy Books of Nora and Andrew Lang.
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Scour the web if you will, but you won’t find many pictures of Nora Lang - or Leonora Blanche Alleyne as she was, before she married Andrew Lang, and changed the fairy tale forever.
This is an injustice for, as her husband Andrew said himself, “The fairy books have been almost wholly the work of Mrs. Lang, who has translated and adapted them from the French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and other languages.”​​
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We've begun a project to record performances of all the Lang Fairy Tales, to release them as podcasts in between series of Three Ravens. In part, this is to re-address the perception that Andrew Lang was the sole author of the Fairy Books published between 1889 and 1913.
This task is one that Eleanor has undertaken, because she sees in Nora Lang’s story a form of misogyny that has prevented this remarkable translator, writer, and editor from becoming as renowned as she ought to be.
We all know the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and many other writers, from Charles Perrault to Joseph Jacobs, who completed similar projects. So why not Nora Lang, whose other books, including as an art historian, working for the Royal Academy, or a novelist, who wrote the proto Modernist novel Dissolving Views aged 33, or who translated Alfred Rambaud’s entire History of Russia from French in the 1870s, have been all but forgotten?
Andrew Lang may have been a great Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of
anthropology in his own right, but he was never a fairy tale collector. His own works, including Custom
and Myth (1884), Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887), and The Making of Religion (1898) are all important, though reflect uncomfortable concepts of ‘savage’ peoples. As a classicist and historian, too, he deserves much respect, and as President of the Society for Psychical Research. Likewise his work on the paranormal is fascinating, including his books Of Dreams and Ghosts (1897), Magic and Religion (1901) and The Secret
of the Totem (1905).
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The books themselves are collectors’ items, with first editions and even Folio Society high quality reproductions costing thousands of pounds, if not tens of thousands, in order to buy and own them today.
As the works are out of copyright, it is our pleasure to be revisiting the original texts and giving them afresh airing. In all instances, the tales have only been given the sparest editing to remove racially outdated language.