The Provensen Book of Fairy Tales

On behalf of the two artists, the Canadian folklorist, Joan Bodger, explains in a Foreword that the ‘fairy tales’ being presented to the reader are not of the traditional variety with no definitive text. As ‘literary fairy tales’ they are authorial creations, influenced by the imaginative licence found in Tradition but with words not to be tampered with.

The best-known examples here are such as Andersen’s ‘Nightingale’ or ‘The Happy Prince’ by that follower of Andersen, Oscar Wilde. But you will have to google up lesser-known storytellers such as the Irish-American Seumas Macmanus (for ‘Feather o’ my Wing’) or the forgotten but intriguing novelist Elinor Mordaunt (for ‘The Prince and the Goose Girl’ – unrelated to the Brothers Grimm) and it is a failing in the book which was first published in 1971 that no guidance is given to the original collections from which the tales are taken.

The book is planned as an artistic unit with its decorative prelims, its emblematic titling and tailpieces, and colour illustrations that mostly occupy full pages or two-thirds of a page-opening, across the gutter (curiously ‘The Nightingale’ is unadoorned). It is not easy to differentiate a separate personality behind the husband-and-wife illustrators who have abandoned line-drawing in favour of a full-colour coverage with colour-work distinguishing the images. Much of this takes place in gloomy shades of brown and dark green with character and action emerging in lighter tints. The consistency with which this occurs takes some getting used to but imposes a uniformity on the varied storytelling not least through the vernacular cartooning adopted in portraying all and sundry: magicians, royals and yokels alike.