This page discusses Lang’s criticism and scholarship about the fairy tale and the wonder tale. For the color fairy book collections and other children’s writing associated with Lang, go here. For the table of contents of all the twelve color fairy books, go here.)
Depending on the capaciousness of definitions, a number of Lang’s writings could fit under the heading of fairy tale/wonder tale scholarship, and Lang frequently alludes to fairy tales and wonder genres in his other writing. Researchers with access to university libraries are advised to consult the editions of Lang’s selected writings, with their introductions and notes, including The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Selected Writings of Andrew Lang (edited by Andrew Teverson, Alexandra Warwick, and Leigh Wilson, 2 vols.) and The Selected Writings of Andrew Lang (Routledge 2017, 3 vols.), edited by Tom Hubbard for articles that may fit their own research but which may not be listed below. Andrew Teverson’s The Selected Children’s Fictions, Folk Tales and Fairy Tales of Andrew Lang (Edinburgh UP, 2021), likewise contains an extremely helpful introduction—and reprints the otherwise difficult-to-access April 1863 article Lang wrote for the St Andrews University Magazine at the age of nineteen, alongside Lang’s own fairy stories, The Princess Nobody, The Gold of Farnilee, Prince Prigio, Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia, and three of Lang’s retellings: “The Terrible Head” (Blue Fairy Book), “The Story of Sigurd” (Red Fairy Book), and “The Fleece of Gold” (Tales of Troy and Greece).
As can be seen below, Lang’s work on the fairy tale ranges from the innovative, insightful, and erudite to the slapdash armchair-anthropology introduction, often written at someone else’s request. When dealing with works from non-European cultures, even in his attempts to praise and value and publicize such work, his language can range from outdated, insensitive, and patronizing to extremely offensive. Many scholars have written on these topics, including Naithani Sadhana (The Story-time of the British Empire 62, 116–17), Sara Hines (“Collecting the Empire”), and Andrew Teverson (The Fairy Tale World 7–10). Selected useful scholarship is included in the secondary-source bibliography below Lang’s work, and the full bibliography may be consulted for other useful resources. (I do not, for instance, include Lang biographies or some of the essays on folklore, individual stories from the fairy books, or work that is predominantly focused on another author with only some reference to Lang.)
Lang’s Fairy Tale and Wonder Tale Scholarship and Commentary
- “Scottish Nursery Tales.” St Andrews University Magazine, April 1863, reprinted in Andrew Teverson’s The Selected Children’s Fictions, Folk Tales and Fairy Tales of Andrew Lang, Edinburgh UP, 2021, pp. 45–55.
- “Mythology and Fairy Tales.” Fortnightly Review, vol. 19 O.S./13 N.S., May 1873, pp. 618–31.
- “The Folklore of France.” Folk-Lore Record, vol. 1, 1878, pp. 99–117.
- Custom and Myth. Longmans, 1884. (The 1910 new impression, with a 1904 introduction, is available here.)
- “Household Tales; Their Origin, Diffusion, and Relations to the Higher Myths.” Introduction to Margaret Hunt’s Grimm’s Household Tales (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884).
- Introduction to Lang’s edition of Perrault’s Popular Tales. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888, vii–cxv.
- Introduction to the Large-Paper Edition of the Blue Fairy Book. Longmans, 1889.
- “New Guinea Folklore.” Introduction to From My Verandah in New Guinea: Sketches and Traditions, by Hugh Hastings Romilly. David Nutt, 1889, pp. xv–xxvi.
- Introduction to Marion Rolfe Cox’s Cinderella; three hundred and forty-five variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o’Rushes. The Folklore Society. David Nutt, 1892, vii–xxiii.
- “Cinderella and the Diffusion of Tales.” Folk-Lore, vol. 4, no. 4, December 1893, pp. 413–32. Reprinted in Tom Hubbard’s The Selected Writings of Andrew Lang, vol. 2, pp. 57–68.
- Introduction to his edition of The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies: A Study in Folk-Lore & Psychical Research. The Text by Robert Kirk, M. A., Minister of Aberfoyle, A.D. 1691. The Comment by Andrew Lang, M.A. A.D. 1893, David Nutt, 1893.
- Introduction to Australian Legendary Tales, edited by K. Langloh Parker, David Nutt, 1894 [linked edition is 1896]).
- “Literary Fairy Tales.” Introduction to Frederik van Eeden’s Little Johannes. William Heinemann, 1895.
- Introduction to More Australian Legendary Tales. David Nutt, 1898.
- Introduction to Folk stories of Southern Nigeria, Longmans, Green, 1910.
Lang’s articles on or related to the fairy tale also appear in the Academy, The Athenaeum, The Daily News, Fraser’s, Illustrated London News, Longman’s, The Morning Post, The Nineteenth Century, and The Saturday Review.
(Please let me know if you would advocate for the inclusion above of another essay or book that I may have missed. Note that I have left out all the fairy book prefaces, but they are easily available on other pages.)
Selected Bibliography of Scholarship Related to Andrew Lang and the Fairy Tale/Wonder Genre
Day, Andrea. “‘Almost wholly the work of Mrs. Lang’: Nora Lang, Literary Labour, and the Fairy Books.” Women’s Writing 26:4 (2017): 400-420. Taylor and Francis Online. DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2017.1371938.
Dorson, Richard M. “Andrew Lang’s Folklore Interests As Revealed In ‘At The Sign Of The Ship’.” Western Folklore 11 (1952): 1-19. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 28 Dec. 2016.
—. The British Folklorists: A History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968.
Flieger, Verlyn, and Douglas A. Anderson, eds. Tolkien On Fairy-stories. London: HarperCollins, 2008. (Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories” was originally given as the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture at St Andrews; the essay was revised heavily for publication. Flieger and Anderson have included Tolkien’s earlier drafts in their edition, including a number of additional paragraphs discussing Lang and Scotland.)
Green, Roger Lancelyn. “Andrew Lang and the Fairy Tale.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 20, no. 79 July 1944, pp. 227–31. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/509104. (Roger Lancelyn Green’s 1944 B.Litt thesis on Andrew Lang (revised extensively into the 1946 biography above) was written under D. Nicoll Smith and J.R.R. Tolkien’s supervision. Tolkien did not pass the thesis initially in 1943 but sent it back to Green for revisions because he ‘wanted to know more about the Fairies!’ [Scull & Hammond II.352])
Jacobs, Joseph. “Andrew Lang as Man of Letters and Folk-Lorist.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 26, no. 102, Oct.–Dec. 1913, pp. 367-72.
Garth, John. “Revealed: Tolkien’s 1939 Lecture on Fairy-stories.” Journal of Inklings Studies vol. 15, no. 2 , 2025, pp. 234–69. https://doi.org/10.3366/ink.2025.0270. (While this lecture focuses mainly on Tolkien’s manuscript of “On Fairy-stories” and the report in the St Andrews Citizen its attention to the publication history of the Andrew Lang lectures, and what Tolkien said of Lang at the St Andrews lecture–as opposed to the published version–makes it worthy of inclusion here.)
Hillard, Molly Clark. Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians. Ohio State UP, 2014.
—. “Trysting Genres: Andrew Lang’s Fairy Tale Methodologies.” Romanticism And Victorianism On The Net, vol. 64, 2013, https://doi.org/10.7202/1025670ar.
Hines, Sara M. “Collecting the Empire: Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, 1889–1910.” Marvels and Tales 24.1 (2010): 39–56. Project Muse. https://doi.org/10.1353/mat.2010.a384529.
—. “Narrating Scotland: Andrew Lang’s Coloured Fairy Book Collection, The Gold Of Fairnilee , And ‘A Creelfull Of Celtic Stories’.” Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkins. Boston, MA: Leiden UP/Brill, 2012, pp. 207-226.
—. “‘To Children and Others’: Audience, Advertising, and the Reception of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books (1889–1910).” The Land of Story-Books: Scottish Children’s Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century. Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2019, pp. 378–401. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/book/66039.
Lau, Kimberly J. Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale. Wayne State University Press, 2024.
Luckhurst, Roger. “Knowledge, Belief and the Supernatural at the Imperial Margin.” The Victorian Supernatural, Nicola Bown (ed. and introd.), et al., Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 197-216.
Montenyohl, Eric Lawrence. Andrew Lang And The Fairy Tale. 1986. Indiana University, PhD dissertation.
Schroeder, Sharin. “Genre Problems: Andrew Lang and J.R.R. Tolkien on (Fairy) Stories and (Literary) Belief.” Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy. Ed. Michael Partridge and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson. Hampden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2018. 149–79.
Smol, Anna. “The ‘Savage’ and the ‘Civilized’: Andrew Lang’s Representation of the Child and the Translation of Folklore.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 121.4 (Winter 1996): 177–83. Project Muse. 3 July 2012.
Teverson, Andrew. “Introduction: The fairy tale and the world.” The Fairy Tale World, edited by Andrew Teverson, Routledge , 2019, pp. 1–14.
—. “The Fairy-tale Collections of Andrew Lang and Joseph Jacobs: Identity, Nation, Empire.” Gramarye, vol. 9, pp. 7–17.
Toussaint, Benjamine. “A strong Scotch accent of the mind”: Le nationalisme romantique dans les contes d’artiste de George MacDonald et Andrew Lang [“A strong Scotch accent of the mind” : Romantic Nationalism in George MacDonald and Andrew Lang literary fairytales.] L’Oiseau Bleu, no. 6, Janvier 2024, pp. 1–19. https://revueloiseaubleu.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/B.-Toussaint-2.pdf. Accessed 21 Nov. 2024.
Wingfield, Chris, and Chris Gosden. “An Imperialist Folklore? Establishing the Folk-lore Society in London. Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkins. Boston, MA: Leiden UP/Brill, 2012, pp. 255–74.
Yoshino, Yuki. “Writing the Borders: Fairies and Ambivalent National Identity in Andrew Lang‘s the Gold of Fairnilee.” The Enclave of My Nation: Cross-Currents in Irish and Scottish Studies, Shane (ed.) Alcobia-Murphy and Margaret (ed. and introd.) Maxwell, AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies and Contributions, 2008, pp. 227–41.
This page was updated on 13 March 2026.
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