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| pic courtesy amazon.co.uk |
Compiled and edited by Gill Davies
Published by Worth Press Ltd.
Ages 8+
Imagine a book that has one mesmerised as soon as one picks it up. Makes one forget that one is not a child anymore. One that makes you want to just sit with it and read and read and read. The moment I picked this book up at the bookstore, I knew I could not let it go.
Wanting to read a bit before buying, I scanned a few pages and came upon this poem-
Moonlight Magic
In the fairy woods when the moonlight glows
The animals twirl, each up on their toes;
Fox fiddles a merry and magical tune
As the animals dance in the light of the moon.
All around they skip, like the pixies do,
Dreaming of wishes bound to come true
Bear bounces and laughs, the hares leap high,
Till stars grow dim and the dawn is nigh...
Then home they go, paws dimpling grass
Like dewdrops gleam like bubbles of glass.
-Anon.
I was enchanted. This was lovely! It felt like the other side of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are". So much similar, yet so much dissimilar. The light to its dark. The day to its night. Even if this was something that happened by moonlight. We had to have this book. It was a collectible.
Appealing to children and adults alike, the book is a smorgasbord of fairy tales from all over the world, with snippets of trivia in the margins - European, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, African, Australian, Russian, Aborigine...you name it.
There are tales as old as the Arabian nights, tales re-told from mythology and folklore. There are tales as new as those from J.K.Rowling's Tales of Beedle the Bard.
There are tantalising excerpts from magical books like The Wizard of Oz, Gulliver's Travels, Lewis Caroll's Alice books, E. Nesbit's The Phoenix and the Carpet, Kipling's Just So Stories, The Princess and the Goblin, even Shakespeare.
We also have the usual suspects like Hans Christian Anderson, the Grimm brothers, Charles Perrault, and Andrew Lang. As also magical poetry by the likes of Edward Lear, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Shakespeare, and that tantalising poet - Anonymous, and many more.
Think that is a long list? Just the contents of this 766 page book runs into 16 pages. We also have an extensive bibliography for those interested in more reading, short biographies of all the authors and illustrators (the illustrations alone are worth picking up the book for- each tale comes with the original illustrations it was first published with) featured.
For those interested in the evolution of the fairytale, there is a detailed timeline of fairytales and folktales through history, from all continents - right from the ancient Sumerian epic tale of Gilgamesh c. 2000 BCE to Harry Potter. As also links from that modern magic wand- the internet.
As the editor says in an afterword: "So here is a book to treasure...through its pages the reader can discover how ancient folk tales and legends developed, changed and spread - and how in their re-telling they became the familiar stories we know today." Not just another anthology.
This, as Choxbox would put it, are fairy tales at their best, before Disney meddled with them. Maybe that's just our opinion, of course, with most people knowing their fairy tales only through the Disney looking-glass. Then that's their loss, IMO.
A and I have been dipping into it at all through the vacation. Perfect for bed-time reading.
Do check out this lovely trailer of the movie Fairy Tale :A true story based on an actual incident from Cottingley that took place in 1917. Two girls happened to take photographs that were said to be of fairies. There was quite a bit of interest generated, that brought even big names like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini to investigate. It remained an unsolved puzzle for many years, until the girls, now in their sixties, admitted that it had been a prank that had gone out of hand and many claim it is evidence of the existence of fairies. I don't know what to think, but the movie seems lively. Completely non-Disney! Do click to watch. Would love to get my hands on it.
Crossposted at Saffrontree.
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