The Violet Fairy Book (Large Print)
The stories in this Violet Fairy Book, as in all the others of the series, have been translated out ofthe popular traditional tales in a number of different languages. These stories are as old as anythingthat men have invented. They are narrated by naked savage women to naked savage children. Theyhave been inherited by our earliest civilised ancestors, who really believed that beasts and trees andstones can talk if they choose, and behave kindly or unkindly. The stories are full of the oldest ideasof ages when science did not exist, and magic took the place of science. Anybody who has thecuriosity to read the 'Legendary Australian Tales, ' which Mrs. Langloh Parker has collected from thelips of the Australian savages, will find that these tales are closely akin to our own. Who were thefirst authors of them nobody knows-probably the first men and women. Eve may have told thesetales to amuse Cain and Abel. As people grew more civilised and had kings and queens, princes andprincesses, these exalted persons generally were chosen as heroes and heroines. But originally thecharacters were just 'a man, ' and 'a woman, ' and 'a boy, ' and 'a girl, ' with crowds of beasts, birds, and fishes, all behaving like human beings. When the nobles and other people became rich andeducated, they forgot the old stories, but the country people did not, and handed them down, withchanges at pleasure, from generation to generation. Then learned men collected and printed thecountry people's stories, and these we have translated, to amuse children. Their tastes remain like thetastes of their naked ancestors, thousands of years ago, and they seem to like fairy tales better thanhistory, poetry, geography, or arithmetic, just as grown-up people like novels better than anythin