| Title | : | The Green Fairy Book |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0486214397 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780486214399 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 384 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1892 |
The Green Fairy Book Reviews
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Another collection of fairy tales, this time forty-six ones, varying in length and enjoyment.
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The Blue Bird - 5/5
The Half-Chick - 3/5
The Story Of Caliph Stork - 4/5
The Enchanted Watch - 4/5
Rosanella - 5/5
Sylvain And Jocosa - 4/5
Fairy Gifts - 4/5
Prince Narcissus And The Princess Potentilla - 4/5
Prince Featherhead And The Princess Celandine 4/5
The Three Little Pigs 3/5
Heart Of Ice 3/5
The Enchanted Ring 3/5
The Snuff-Box -4/5
The Golden Blackbird 4/5
The Little Soldier 4/5
The Magic Swan 3/5
The Dirty Shepherdess 4/5
The Enchanted Snake 4/5
Little One-Eye, Little Two-Eyes, And Little Three-Eyes - 4/5
Jorinde And Joringel 4/5
Allerleirauh; Or, The Many-Furred Creature 5/5
The Twelve Huntsmen Spindle, Shuttle, And Needle 4/5
The Crystal Coffin 3/5
The Three Snake-Leaves 3/5
The Riddle Jack 3/5
My Hedgehog 4/5
The Golden Lads 4/5
The White Snake 4/5
The Story Of A Clever Tailor 3/5
The Golden Mermaid 4/5
The War Of The Wolf And The Fox 3/5
The Story Of The Fisherman And His Wife 4/5
The Three Musicians 3/5
The Three Dogs 4/5 -
3 1/2 Stars. Every time I read an Andrew Lang Colored Fairy book I discover new tales I'd never read or heard if before! Although this collection is not as good as some of his other books it's still worth reading if you are a fairy tale geek like I am. I particularly enjoyed some of the lesser known Grimms tales that are in this collection!
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This one took me long enough. I listened to it on Audible and started in mid-2022. I just got around to finishing it, not because I didn't enjoy it but I found it hard to listen aloud to fairy tales. I'd rather just read them. But this was my first Lang and it wet my appetite for more.
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An excellent book that I received for Christmas last week. I was especially excited to get one with all the old illustrations. It's definitely one of the better books in Lang's collection. The illustrations are beautiful and the fanciful descriptions add to the charm.
My favorite stories:
- The Blue Bird
- The Story of Caliph Stork
- Rosanella
- Fairy Gifts (this one's hilarious, and I like that it's a rare princess story without romance)
- Prince Narcissus and the Princess Potentilla
- Heart of Ice
- The Little Soldier (LOVE this one, especially because in this one the princess is evil)
- Puddocky (even though the princes' dad is a real prick)
- Jorinde and Joringel
- The Three Snake-Leaves
My only major complaint is the distribution of the stories. The first half has such a wide variety of collectors represented but the second half has almost exclusively Brothers Grimm stories. I would have preferred a little more variety in the second half, but other than that, the book is great.
There's also an interesting fact about this book: this book was one of the main inspirations for the King's Quest computer game series. King's Quest IV uses the names of two of the fairies (Genesta from Heart of Ice and Lolotte from Prince Vivien and the Princess Placida) for the game's respective good and evil fairies, and the name of the game's princess and queen (Rosella and Valanice) are based on the names of Rosanella and her mother Balanice. I know it's a bit off-topic, but I wanted to point it out -
I had to read a selection of fairytales from this book for class! I will definitely be checking out the rest of these tales. Below is a list of the fairytales I've read with my ratings of each.
Rosanella: 4.25/5 stars
Prince Narcissus and the Princess Potentilla: 4/5 stars
Prince Featherhead and the Princess Celandine: 4/5 stars
The Enchanted Snake: 4/5 stars
Prince Vivien and the Princess Placida: 3/5 stars -
ENGLISH: In his prolog, Lang says that "old people, long, long ago," liked fairy tales because they were like children and believed in witches, talking animals, magic rings that made people invisible, and so forth; but then, "as the world became grown-up," they stopped believing in those things, and fairy tales would have been forgotten, except that grannies remembered them and told them to their grandchildren.
Lang seems to forget that the climax of the belief in witches took place in the seventeenth century in Protestant countries, not "long, long ago." I also doubt that people actually believed in one-eyed giants, such as cyclops Polyphemus, or in the enchantress Circe, that turned people into swine, as Lang maintains.
Another thing Lang says in his prolog is that "there are not many people now, perhaps there are none, who can write really good fairy tales, because they do not believe enough in their own stories." According to Lang, the last authors of good fairy stories were Madame d'Aulnoy and other French authors, two hundred years before his time. Is it possible that he hasn't heard of (or doesn't like) the fairy stories written by Hans Christian Andersen? Not to mention other authors that Lang couldn't have known, such as Tolkien.
Some of the 42 fairy stories Lang has selected for this, his third collection were written by the Brothers Grimm (17 stories) and one by Madame d'Aulnoy: The Blue Bird, the first story in the book. While translating this story, Lang has made a few changes, such as turning the name of the bad, ugly step-sister from Truitonne into Turritella (turning a fish-like name into a gasteropod mollusc), and at the end of the story has her magically converted into an owl, rather than a sow, which in the original French is represented by the word Truie, and jutified by the similarity of the word to the name of the Princess.
Another mistake Lang made in his prolog of this book was announcing that this would be his third and last collection of his "fairy books of many colors." Then he proceeded to publish a total of twelve colored collections.
ESPAÑOL: En el prólogo, Lang dice que a "la gente de hace mucho, mucho tiempo" les gustaban los cuentos de hadas porque eran como niños y creían en brujas, animales que hablan, anillos mágicos que hacen invisibles a quien los lleva, etc. Pero luego, "a medida que el mundo se volvió adulto", dejaron de creer en esas cosas, y los cuentos de hadas habrían sido olvidados, de no ser porque las abuelas los recordaban y se los contaban a sus nietos.
Lang parece olvidar que el punto culminante de la creencia en brujas tuvo lugar en el siglo XVII en los países protestantes, no "hace mucho, mucho tiempo". También dudo de que la gente realmente creyera alguna vez en gigantes con un solo ojo, como el cíclope Polifemo, o en la hechicera Circe, que convertía a los hombres en cerdos, como dice Lang.
Otra cosa que Lang dice en el prólogo es que "ahora no hay muchos autores, tal vez ninguno, que puedan escribir cuentos de hadas realmente buenos, porque no creen bastante en sus propias historias". Según Lang, los últimos autores de buenos cuentos de hadas fueron Madame d'Aulnoy y otros autores franceses, doscientos años antes de su época. ¿Es posible que no haya oído hablar (o que no le gusten) de los cuentos de hadas escritos por Hans Christian Andersen? Sin hablar de otros autores que Lang no pudo conocer, como Tolkien.
Algunos de los 42 cuentos de hadas que Lang ha seleccionado para esta, su tercera colección, fueron escritos por los Hermanos Grimm (17 cuentos) y uno por Madame d'Aulnoy: El Pájaro Azul, el primero del libro. Al traducirlo, Lang ha realizado algunos cambios, como el nombre de la hermanastra mala y fea, que no se llama Truitonne, sino Turritella (lo que convierte un nombre relacionado con un pez en un molusco gasterópodo), y al final del cuento la hace convertir mágicamente en lechuza, en vez de en marrana, que en el francés original está representada por la palabra Truie y justificada por la semejanza de esa palabra con el nombre de la Princesa.
Otro error que cometió Lang en su prólogo de este libro fue anunciar que esta sería la tercera y última colección de sus "cuentos de hadas multicolores". Luego procedió a publicar un total de doce colecciones de cuentos con colores en el título. -
42 tales from around the world, Germany Grimm, France de Caylus, Fenelon, Kletke, D'Aulnoy - The Blue Bird, Sylvain and Jocosa, Prince Narcissus, The Three Little Pigs, the Half-Chick - feature monsters, giants, and more.
What did I think:
first off I want to say that I actually have this as part of a bind up off all of the Color Fairy Books by Andrew Lang as a kindle book, so far of the 12 I'm slowly making my way though it I have only read 3 of them , this one which is book 3 and I listened to this one as a free audio book from loyalbooks.com, and the only other 2 I've read so for is Books 1 ( The Blue Fairy Book) and book 2( The Red Fairy Book) , the stories are from all over the world , can't wait to pick up the next book and see what ones it has. -
This one was front-loaded with a few literary ones I didn't much like. But it has a number I quite like, including some I had forgotten about. The Golden Blackbird I remembered but not The Little Soldier -- which combines plotlines I've seen from other tales, with a bit more sense than I've sometimes seen them -- with a twist I've seen elsewhere and forgot I saw here. We have a whole bunch of less usual Grimms, such as The White Snake and Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle. Seemed to me to be spread out in location a bit, with tales like Russian King Kojata, but I'm not sure, since there were a few far-fetched ones in the earlier versions.
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The tales were fun. Lang makes a big deal about how they were often morality tales. Some of them are morally questionable, but it's still fun to think about it.
The edition I had almost seemed like it had been printed from Gutenberg. And I am a huge fan of Gutenberg, but this edition's illustrations were blurry(and I love that etched Romantic style) and the paragraphs ran together(one lasted a whole page) and I know they weren't like that originally. It would have been better on Gutenberg. -
Hay hơn nhiều so với cuốn
Truyện Cổ Tích Màu Hồng, đơn giản vì các câu chuyện trong "Truyện Cổ Tích Màu Lục" có độ dài hơn, mạch truyện có nhiều "đất" để phát triển phong phú hơn. Các truyện này lại còn được tuyển chọn từ những nguồn vốn đã nổi tiếng trong mảng truyện cổ tích (ví dụ như Truyện cổ Grimm, truyện cổ Pháp...). Nhiều truyện có mô-típ hoàng tử công chúa yêu nhau nhưng phải bị thử thách, mình cực kỳ thích luôn ấy :D Mấy truyện đầu mình đánh giá rất hay, càng về sau thì càng thấy hơi bị đuối tí, nhưng mà mình vẫn rất thích :))) Các bài học làm người được lồng ghép vào các câu chuyện thì phải nói là chuẩn khỏi chê rồi ha ^^ -
The Green Fairy Book contains 42 tales, if I counted correctly. The ones which you will immediately recognize are The Three Little Pigs and The Story of the Three Bears. However, these stories aren't always the way that you remember them. Another one, which was my favorite, was The Fisherman and His Wife. You might recognize this tale, and you might not, but it is about a poor fisherman who catches a flounder who claims to be a prince. He decides to release it but the wife berates him saying he should have asked for a reward in return. He does so the next day, and instead of being happy the wife gets greedy. She keeps demanding more and more, and eventually loses it all. Other interesting and lesser known stories include The Enchanted Snake. which is an Italian fairy tale, and The Riddle, which is a German fairy tale that the Brothers Grimm compiled.
If you are a fan of fairy tales, this series is for you. The books are wonderfully constructed, and the vibrant dust jackets stand out on your shelf and make for a beautiful collection. I hope they will continue to publish these wonderful books until my collection is complete. Judging by the previous release schedule, there should (emphasis on should) be another two put out at the end of this year or beginning of next year, and they would be the Pink and Grey books. Until then, remember that if you like tangible books and want good books like this to continue to be available in print, then you have to support smaller publishers like Hesperus Press. -
I first encountered the Lang collection, often called the Colored Fairy Books because of their titles (Blue, Olive, Crimson, etc.) when I was in elementary school. I enjoyed them because they were so different from the sanitized, prissy princess, modern versions, and I'm happy to see them now available (for very cheap) in Kindle format.
We forget that fairy tales were not originally for children and were not created as vehicles for which to market toys and Happy Meals to toddlers. They were oral entertainment, grisly and cutting social or political commentary more often than not.
For one of the more interesting aspects of fairy tale history, look up "préciosité." The Brothers Grimm are credited with collecting and publishing fairly tales; however,les précieuse is a little-known step in how a group of French noble-women affected the shape of the modern fairy tale and elevated the art of storytelling.
Like any old literature, it's best to read Lang's collections in the context of their times and understand that our 21st century (professed) sensibilities might get a little tweaked from some of the language and prejudices in older literature. Anyone looking for the sweet, slick, happily-ever-after versions where nothing violent or rude ever happens will likely not like this (or any of the older) collections. -
As expected, this installment of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books series is full of timeless stories(though some are more memorable than others), nicely retold by Lang and beautifully illustrated by H.J. Ford. Here are my favorite stories from this collection:
-The Blue Bird
-The Half-Chick
-Rosanella
-Fairy Gifts
-Prince Featherhead and the Princess Celandine
- The Three Little Pigs
-Heart of Ice (this one has a more interesting premise than your typical prince-and-princess fairy tale)
-The Enchanted Ring
-The Magic Swan
-King Kojata
-The Story of the Three Bears(this version is old enough that it features a poorly-behaved little old lady, rather than the now-familiar Goldilocks)
-Prince Vivien and Princess Placida(an unusual prince-and-princess story in which the protagonists actually have to overcome their personal flaws!)
-Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle
-The Story of a Clever Tailor(this one is almost worthy of being on this list based solely on its closing sentence)
-The Golden Mermaid
-The Story of the Fisherman and his Wife(possibly my favorite fairy tale ever!)
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A collection of tales perhaps best taken on small dosis. Andrew Lang's were a landmark of fairy tales for children and still are a wortwhile reading. However, I must admit a certain dissapointment with the Green Fairy book. It wasn't that I was not transported to the lands of the fairies in every tale, but I'm afraid that the telling and the stories became somewhat repetitive from very early on: it just became too obvious who was the fairy, who the princess, who the prince, no matter what disguise/spell they were supposed to be underneath. The choice of tales gets better towards the end, when the choice of Grimm tales dominates. A final note: be warned that this retelling of fairy tales is very much Victorian, in terms of morals.
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I love most of the first several stories. The characters are interesting, plots clever, magic enchanting, humor effective, and endings satisfying:
The Blue Bird
The Story of Caliph Stork
Rosanella
Sylvain and Jocosa
Fairy Gifts
Prince Narcissus
Prince Fickle
Hok Lee and the Dwarfs
Prince Vivien
Others started out holding my interest, but either became muddled or the hero/heroine did something I could not sympathize with (like in the Enchanted Ring, when the hero drowns everyone, or Puddocky, when the dogs and women are drowned as cast offs). -
There is nothing like a fairy tale and Lang’s Green Fairy Book brings together some wonderful stories.
There is the slightly whimsical heroes, the murderous villains, the romantic leads, the fierce protector, the wizened mentor and a stack of other characters. What counts is that good always triumphs no matter how many times the hero is lied, tricked, killed, maimed they will always be fully restored and find true love.
If only life was so -
This book was a gift from my 3rd Grade teacher and I read it over and over through the years. Its since been lost to me, but I can remember spending many hours reading this book. I loved it and if it was in my possession I have no doubt that I would continue reading it. Like Grimm's Fairy Tales, I never tired of this book. Full of delightful stories!!
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Beautiful edition with some of my chidhood fairytales in it.
The illustrations are lovely but for me they are not in the right order: the illustration of a tale sometimes appears some stories later and I really hate this. -
I had a lot of favorites in this one :)
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My favorite Fairy Book so far, with less-familiar stories than the Red and Blue.
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great read aloud, we really enjoyed this one except for three stories that were just bizarro world o_O
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Just really enjoy reading all of these fairy tales :)
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I didn't enjoy this one as much as the Blue and Olive, mainly because it was pretty lengthy and there weren't any I recognized other than a different version of 'The Three Little Pigs'
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My the least favourite collection from Lang so far. Too many french stories that didn't sit well with me. Imagine my relief, whenever German tales were appearing.
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"Whoever dies not believe this story must pay a dollar."
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3.5 stars. It’s so difficult for mw to rate this as a whole because some stories are good and some are just okay. I also don’t assign ratings to the individual stories in the traditional sense.
I finally finished this one after it’s been languishing on my currently reading shelf for over a year. I put it down because I wasn’t feeling it at that time and the story I was on was long and one that I wasn’t enjoying.
Many of these stories contain fairies, and I have to say that the fairies, although they are supposed to be helping, usually seem more like they are meddling and sometimes make things worse, not better. I also didn’t always agree with the punishments given, as sometimes at the end of the stories innocent people were killed when they did nothing wrong. It was kind of hard to deal with the stupidity of the characters sometimes, especially when they were told explicitly what to do or what not to do but they did the opposite instead.
I did enjoy getting to read unfamiliar tales yet being able to find familiar tropes within them. A few reminded me of Cinderella and one reminded me of East of the Sun and West of the Moon from the Blue Fairy Book, which is one of my favorites. I also enjoyed finding new tales that I might want to use as material for my own writing someday, even if I didn’t necessarily like the story and it was more of me thinking of what I would change.
Favorites:
The Blue Bird-This one is probably my favorite of the stories in this book.
King Kojata
Prince Vivien and the Princess Placida
Good:
The Story of Caliph Stork
Sylvain and Jocosa
Fairy Gifts
Prince Narcissus and the Princess Potentilla
The Little Soldier
The Dirty Shepherdess
The Enchanted Snake
The Biter Bit
Prince Fickle and Fair Helena
The Story of Hok Lee and the Dwarfs
Little One-Eye, Little Two-Eyes, and Little Three-Eyes
Jorinde and Joringel
The Twelve Huntsmen
Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle
The Story of a Clever Tailor
The Golden Mermaid
The War of the Wold and the Fox
The Story of the Fisherman and His Wife
Okay:
The Half Chick
Rosanella
Prince Featherhead and the Princess Celandine
The Three Little Pigs
The Enchanted Ring
The Snuff-Box
The Golden Blackbird
The Magic Swan
Puddocky
The Story of the Three Bears
Allerleirauh; or, The Many-Furred Creature
The Crystal Coffin
The Three Snake-Leaves
The Golden Lads
The White Snake
The Three Musicians
The Three Dogs
Didn't like:
The Enchanted Watch
Heart of Ice-This is the story I was reading when I put the book down, and even on a second read it was long and uninteresting so I think it’s probably my least favorite of all the stories in this book.
The Riddle
Jack My Hedgehog -
I enjoyed this more than
The Red Fairy Book, as it has a much greater variety of story structures and plots; there were more surprises than in
The Blue Fairy Book, as it contains far fewer well-known stories, but by the same token, they're less enduring than the true classics because they aren't as good. This book has only two stories that I'd think are among the best known: 'The Three Bears' and 'The Three Little Pigs', both with some interesting aspects that have been more or less forgotten in more recent tellings.
Other stories I found memorable include 'Rosanella', a stand-out love story among many, being both less complicated and more interesting for me than the others; and 'Puddocky', because it starts out as a version of 'Rapunzel' and then turns into 'The White Cat' exactly, except with a toad instead of a cat (each of those stories features in one of the two previous Fairy Books). But most of all I enjoyed the last story in the book, 'The Three Dogs'; it was (almost?) completely new to me, with some appealing ideas that, for a fairytale, made a certain amount of sense!
