As Lang’s contributions to the Saturday Review were generally anonymous, it is difficult to compile an accurate list of them, as scholars must rely on reprintings of Lang’s Saturday Review writings or on extant letters where Lang refers to particular articles.
The Curran Index identifies over thirty of Lang’s Saturday Review articles. As the site has recently been updated and reorganized, Lang’s Saturday Review contributions have been intermingled with his contributions to the Academy, Athenaeum, and Punch on the Curran Index (with 238 Andrew Lang results listed as of the end of 2023). For the moment, I usually include only the Saturday Review titles and dates below. Clicking into any article title attributed to Andrew Lang in the Curran Index will allow researchers to see more information and the evidence for the article’s attribution to Lang.
- Octave Feuillet (Saturday Review, 23 May 1874)
- Lady Hetty. (Saturday Review vol. 39, 27 Mar. 1875, pp. 417–18)
- The Origin of Rank (Saturday Review, 10 Mar. 1877)
- Popular Tales in Homer (Saturday Review, 28 July 1877)
- Ghosts in Medieval Sermons (Saturday Review, 9 June 1877)
- The Lessons of Bookstalls (Saturday Review, 9 Feb. 1878)
- Scotch Folklore (Saturday Review, 9 Nov. 1878)
- Stevenson’s Edinburgh (Saturday Review, 25 Jan. 1879)
- Literary Quarrels (Saturday Review, 15. Nov. 1879)
- The Book-Stealer (Saturday Review, 23 Oct. 1880)
- Primitive Boycotting (Saturday Review, 12 Mar. 1881)
- Aryan Oddities (Saturday Review, 23 Apr. 1881)
- Virginibus Puerisque [by Robert Louis Stevenson] (Saturday Review, 23 Apr. 1881)
- Mythology Among the Hottentots (Saturday Review vol. 53, 7 Jan. 1882, pp. 11–12.)
- The Bull-Roarer (Saturday Review, 13 May 1882)
- Vice Versa (Saturday Review, 15 July 1882)
- The Seamy Side of Greek Religion (Saturday Review, 23 Dec. 1882)
- Mano (Saturday Review, 8 Sep. 1883)
- The Myth of Kirke (Saturday Review, 10 Nov. 1883)
- Snake Dances, Moqui and Greek (Saturday Review, 18 Oct. 1884)
- King Solomon’s Mines (Saturday Review, 10 Oct. 1885)
- At the Sign of the Lyre (Saturday Review, 14 Nov. 1885)
- Stevenson’s New Story [Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde] (Saturday Review, 9 Jan. 1886)
- The Shelley Society (Saturday Review, 13 Mar. 1886)
- Strange Tale of Marot (Saturday Review, 11 June 1887)
- The Masque of Man’s Wickedness (Saturday Review, 23 July 1887)
- Poetry for Music-Halls (Saturday Review, 21 Jan. 1888)
- Persons from Porlock (Saturday Review, 8 Dec. 1888)
- Kipling’s Stories (Saturday Review, 10 Aug. 1889)
- Allan Quatermain’s Revenge (Saturday Review, 22 Feb. 1890)
- Irish Popular Tales (Saturday Review, 12 Apr. 1890)
- English Folk-Tales, Review of Joseph Jacob’s English Fairy Tales, Saturday Review 8 Nov. 1890, pp. 537–38. Jacobs identifies Lang–though not by name–in his preface: “as to using tales in Lowand Scotch, whereat a Saturday Reviewer, whose identity and fatherland were not difficult to guess, was so shocked. . .” (ix). From this, I also base my claim that Lang wrote the 7 Oct. 1893 and 13 Oct. 1893 articles related to More English Fairy Tales in the Daily News (both on 4–5) and the review of More English Fairy Tales below (14 Oct. 1893.
- More English Fairy Tales, Review of Joseph Jacobs’s Book, Saturday Review 14 Oct. 1893, p. 446–47.
From the content of each (but as yet with no direct factual evidence), it seems possible that Lang may have also written the following (among his many other unidentified contributions):
- The Origin of Popular Tales (Saturday Review, vol. 46, 7 Dec. 1878, pp. 714–715. The themes and interest in totemism and the relation between myth and fairy tales are present. The article begins, “So many fairy tales are probably being told to children in the hours between early dusk and candle-lighting, that older people may naturally ask themselves, ‘Who were the first authors of the nursery lore of the world?’ If any one pauses for a moment to reflect, in the recital of the commonest stories–such as ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ or the ‘Black Bull o’ Norroway,’ or ‘Cinderella’–he will find himself in a world of fancies which are none the less wild because they have become familiar. . . .” [714])
- Who Told the First Fairy Tales? (Saturday Review, vol. 47, 8 Mar. 1879, pp. 295–96. This article does have Lang’s signature style and reflects the views he had propounded in “Mythology and Fairy Tales”: “People still cling to the opinion that popular tales (by which we mean tales distributed all over the whole earth, and most familiar to the least educated and least progressive classes) are the débris of the priestly and poetical mythologies” [295]).
- Kaffir Folk-lore (Saturday Review, vol. 53, 10 June 1882, 735–37; the article, reviewing George M’Call Theal’s book of the same name, shows Lang’s traditional interest in commonalities among European and other global folktales, along with Lang’s typical style.)
- Seamy Side of the Vedic Religion (Saturday Review, vol. 55, 24 Feb. 1883, pp. 234–35). The author begins with “Some time ago we sketched the seamy side of Greek religion. . . . It may seem almost blasphemous to say that the Vedas have their seamy side; but truths even more painful, if possible, than this must be faced in the sacred interests of science” [234]. The earlier article is attributed to Lang. The article also immediately engages with Max Müller’s ideas.)
- Red Indian Folklore (Saturday Review, vol. 58, 22 Nov. 1884, pp. 669–70. The article reviews C. G. Leland’s The Algonquin Legends of New England and A. S. Gatschet’s A Migration Legend of the Creek Indians; it shows Lang’s interest in the diffusion of folklore and has many similarities in style with other Lang articles.)
- Twilight Gods (Saturday Review, vol. 66, 1 Sep. 1888, pp. 273–74). The article reviews La Nature des Dieux: Etudes de Mythologie Gréco-Latine, by Charles Ploix. The style is signature Lang: “[Ploix] is of the school that believes that all the gods and goddesses . . . are anthropomorphized forms of natural phenomena. But, while one scholar of this kind will regard Athene as the thunder-cloud and the lightning, while another thinks that Psyche is the moon . . . while they quarrel as to whether Achilles is earth, water, fire, dark, or light, M. Ploix maintains that almost every Latin or Greek divinity was the twilight—the twilight of morning or evening” [273]).
The Saturday Review full text for the years Lang was writing is available in Proquest’s British Periodicals I & II. Lang’s review of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was also available at the British Library’s Discovering Literature site before the cyberattack; perhaps it will be available again in the future.
If you read French, you might also consult the French translations of various Lang articles from the Saturday Review. (See the Collected Journalism page.)
Return to the list of periodicals to which Lang contributed.
This page was last updated on 29 Dec. 2023.
The Andrew Lang Site 