Description
Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, or Andrew Lang's 'Coloured' Fairy Books, constitute a twelve-book series of fairy-tale collections. Although Lang did not collect the stories himself from the oral tradition, the extent of his sources — who had collected them originally (with the notable exception of Madame d'Aulnoy) — made them an immensely influential collection, especially as he used foreign-language sources, giving many of these tales their first appearance in English.
As acknowledged in the prefaces, although Lang made most of the selections, his wife and other translators did a large portion of the translating and telling of the actual stories. The Blue Fairy Book assembles a wide range of tales, with seven from the Brothers Grimm, five from Madame d'Aulnoy, three from the Arabian Nights, and four Norse stories, among other sources.