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    The New Blue Fairy Book Part 3: Fairy Tales 13 to 18
    The New Blue Fairy Book Part 3: Fairy Tales 13 to 18
    The New Blue Fairy Book Part 3: Fairy Tales 13 to 18
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    The New Blue Fairy Book Part 3: Fairy Tales 13 to 18

    By Laird Stevens

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    About this ebook

    This book contains six of the eighteen fairy tales from Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book (1889). The stories have been rewritten sentence by sentence to make them accessible to 21st century American children. The 6 stories include Rumpelstiltzkin, The Tale of a Youth who set out to Learn what Fear was, Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper, The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots, The White Cat, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
    The great beauty of Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book, originally published in 1889, is that it brought together many different fairy tale traditions. There are stories written by Charles Perrault and Mme d’Aulnoy, collected by the Grimm brothers and Asbjornsen and Moe, and translated from the Arabian Nights. It is a very rich collection of fairy tales.
    However, the stories are written in a language that is outdated and in places inaccessible to modern American children (and even their parents). To remedy this problem, I have thoroughly edited half of the stories contained in Lang`s book, keeping the stories as intact as possible, while revising every sentence so the stories can once again be read with pleasure by children.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLaird Stevens
    Release dateOct 18, 2014
    ISBN9780993959004
    The New Blue Fairy Book Part 3: Fairy Tales 13 to 18
    Author

    Laird Stevens

    THEMATIC BIO Laird Stevens My life–at least, the part of it that I still carry with me today–began with music. My father played the piano by ear. He played, and I wrapped myself in the sound. He was my earliest God. One evening, when my mother put me to bed, she said that I would soon begin piano lessons, and the thought was so electric that I stayed awake until morning. Seven years later, my beautiful world–impossibly intricate, and shamelessly cerebral–was destroyed in a flood of hormones. There were a few survivors, but the shadow of sex was on them all. To make sex pretty, I called it “love” (as I had been trained to do), but it wasn’t love, and it didn’t become anything like love until a few years later. Certainly, it had to do with love, but the walk from sex to love was long and difficult to understand. After that, there was literature. At fifteen or sixteen, I developed an incomprehensible thirst for other people’s stories. My story, which was both new and exciting, was not yet connected to anything else. Reading Dickens and Dostoevski and D.H. Lawrence, I found a place to fit in. And then, finally, there was philosophy. Descartes showed me that nothing I knew was certain. At sixteen, it was easy to agree. I knew that music and love were guiding my life. I didn’t even presume to ask why. I knew that if I ever made sense of my life, it would be in terms of the stories that I now read compulsively. But after reading Descartes, I started caring about something quite different. I started caring more about questions than I did about answers. I would get my answers in due time, once I started asking the right questions. And the right questions were the ones that cut deepest into my belief system, the belief system that I, like Descartes, had patched together uncritically from childhood to the present. Much later (I was twenty-two at the time), I was reading Plato and discovered what he called “the divine madnesses.” These were things that we did that made us feel like Gods. But, and this was an insurmountable ‘but,’ we were not Gods, and could never do these things unless we had the help of the Gods. The four divine madnesses were music, love, poetry and philosophy. Music was possible only if a God took over our bodies and wrote it for us. The same was true of poetry. Love (and I had no trouble believing this) was a gift of madness from the Gods, and so–unparadoxically–was philosophy: the reasoning of a God was simply madness to a person unpossessed. So said Plato, at any rate. But whatever issues you may have with Plato, remember that no one since has had any better ideas. We still talk about how musicians and poets are “inspired” when they write: they breathe something in, and this allows them to create. Science has nothing useful to say about love, and I have no good answer to the question, “Where do ideas come from?” They gallop into my consciousness like wild things, and if I manage to catch the good ones and let the bad ones go, my day is nothing less than extraordinary. My commitment to the idea of divine madness varies, but it is the most useful one I have ever found when it comes to defining my own life. It is one that I would recommend everyone try on for size.

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      Book preview

      The New Blue Fairy Book Part 3 - Laird Stevens

      The New Blue Fairy Book

      Part 3: Fairy Tales 13 to 18

      Edited by Laird Stevens

      The New Blue Fairy Book Part 3: Fairy Tales 13 to 18

      Edited by Laird Stevens

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Copyright 2014 by Laird Stevens

      eBook edition ISBN: 978-0-9939590-0-4

      Preface

      The great beauty of Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book, originally published in 1889, is that it brought together many different fairy tale traditions. There are stories written by Charles Perrault and Mme d’Aulnoy, collected by the Grimm brothers and Asbjornsen and Moe, and translated from the Arabian Nights. It is a very rich collection of fairy tales.

      However, the stories are written in a language that is outdated and in places inaccessible to modern American children (and even their parents). To remedy this problem, I have thoroughly edited half of the stories contained in Lang`s book, keeping the stories as intact as possible, while revising every sentence so the stories can once again be read with pleasure by children.

      Table of Contents

      Rumpelstiltzkin

      The Tale of a Youth who Set out to Learn what Fear was

      Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper

      The Master Cat; or, Puss in Boots

      The White Cat

      Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

      RUMPELSTILTZKIN

      There once was a miller who was so poor he had trouble feeding his family. But even though he had something much better than money–he had a very beautiful daughter–he found his poverty embarrassing. He would often pretend to be rich, because he found the truth so ugly. One day, he happened to be talking to the king, and to make himself seem important, he told a ridiculous lie.

      My daughter has an amazing talent, the miller boasted. She can take ordinary straw and spin it into gold!

      Is that a fact? said the king. Your daughter can spin straw into gold.

      The miller felt he had truly impressed the king, and so he said, Oh yes, said the miller. I’ve seen her spin do it many times!

      Well, said the king, she must be very useful to have in the house. Bring your daughter to court tomorrow morning. I’d like to see this talent of hers in action.

      The next day, the miller brought his daughter to the king, and the king took her into a room filled with straw. He gave her a spinning wheel and a spindle, and said, Your fame runs before you, my girl. Your father says that you can spin straw into gold. Well, here is the straw. You know what to do. But let me warn you. If, by tomorrow morning, you have not spun this straw into gold, I will take my sword and chop off your head myself! The king smiled an icy smile, and then left the room, locking the door behind him.

      The girl burst into tears. She could spin flax into yarn, and was famous in her village for doing just that. But no one could spin straw into gold! Tomorrow she would die because of her father’s unthinking boast.

      Suddenly the girl heard a series of clicks, like a key turning in a lock, and a tiny little man jumped through the keyhole and onto the floor. He put his hands on his hips so he looked like a prosperous merchant, and said, Girl, why are you crying?

      I am crying, she said, finding it difficult to speak through her tears, I am crying because the king is going to kill me. I’m supposed to spin this straw into gold, but I don’t know how!

      The little man tilted his head to one side. Then he stuck his chin forward, and tapped it three times with his fingers. I know how! he said with a sly smile. But what will you give me if I help you out?

      My necklace, said the girl.

      I’ll take it! cried the little man, and he snatched the girl’s necklace from her hands. Then he sat at the spinning wheel. Whir, whir, whir went the wheel–only three times around and the spool was full of gold thread! The little man replaced the spool with an empty one. Whir, whir, whir went the wheel–only three times around and it was full again! And this he did until morning, when all the spools were full and all the straw had been spun into gold.

      The sun had just broken into the sky when the king arrived to check on his prisoner. He was ready to punish the miller for his wild story about spinning straw into gold; his sword was drawn and ready. But when he opened the door, the sword dropped from his hand, and his eyes opened wide. The room was full of darkly glowing gold. Then the king’s heart began to pound with greed.

      You’ve done a fine job, he said, but tonight you must do even better. He took her to another room that was bigger than the first, and was packed with straw from the floor right to the ceiling. Then he said, Now I know your father was telling the truth. You can indeed spin straw into gold. But how much can you spin in a single night? Can you spin all of this? Let me warn you as I did last night: if by tomorrow morning you have not spun all this into gold, I will have you locked away in my darkest dungeon! Then the king smiled a hungry smile

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