Fairy Tales, Volume 2 (of 2)

THE OPEN ROAD LIBRARY
“Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me.”
THE OPEN ROAD LIBRARY OF JUVENILE LITERATURE
FAIRY TALES
COMPILED AND EDITED BY MARION FLORENCE LANSING M.A. VOL. II ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLES COPELAND
GINN AND COMPANY BOSTON · NEW YORK CHICAGO · LONDON
Copyright, 1908, by MARION FLORENCE LANSING
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
78.6
The division of Fairy Tales into two volumes was rather for the sake of keeping the books small and of uniform size in the series, “The Open Road Library,” than because there was any difference in the age of children addressed. Some of the best stories have been reserved for this book.
The atmosphere of these tales is healthful, and their tone, while not in most cases didactic, is distinctly moral and uplifting. In a simple and direct way right is rewarded and wrong is discountenanced; the thief among the six brothers has to be the palest star in the Pleiades. The grotesque and horrible have been introduced only where they are so exaggerated that no sane child would fail to appreciate their extravagance. Cruel stepmothers are a tradition of fairy lore, but tales of cruel brothers and sisters do not appear in these volumes.
We have discriminated between these fairy tales and stories of a more heroic nature, which lay claim to having actually happened in some stated place. Tales like “Jack the Giant Killer” and “Tom Thumb,” in which this saga element is predominant, have been carried forward into a succeeding volume, Tales of Old England . As in the last pages of the Rhymes and Stories a few of the simplest fairy tales were introduced, so this book leads from the supernatural of the fairy tale to the heroic of the saga.