1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Fairy Tales from Many Lands," Katharine Pyle curates a captivating anthology that transcends cultural boundaries, weaving together folk tales from various traditions into a single, enchanting tapestry. Her literary style, characterized by lyrical prose and vivid imagery, invites readers into a world where magic and morality coexist. Pyle adeptly captures the essence of each tale, maintaining their unique cultural significance while employing a cohesive narrative voice. This collection not only reflects the rich diversity of global folklore but also serves as a testament to the universal themes of love, bravery, and wisdom that resonate across generations. Katharine Pyle, an accomplished author and illustrator, was deeply influenced by her own experiences of travel and the various folk traditions she encountered. Growing up in a culturally rich environment, Pyle was imbued with the stories and lore that shaped her understanding of humanity. This extensive exposure fueled her passion for storytelling and inspired her to compile this collection, aiming to preserve and celebrate the oral traditions of countless cultures in a format appealing to both children and adults. "Fairy Tales from Many Lands" is a must-read for anyone intrigued by the power of storytelling and the lessons embedded within diverse cultural narratives. Whether you're a scholar of folklore or simply a lover of magical tales, Pyle's collection invites you to lose yourself in its pages, igniting your imagination while reminding you of our shared human journey. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
Fairy Tales from Many Lands
Table of Contents
Introduction
Gathered from many shores and shaped for attentive readers, these stories chart how courage, kindness, and cunning meet the unpredictable turns of fate, revealing that the marvels we call magic often reflect the daily trials of the heart, that justice and mercy contend within the same wish, that promises bind as tightly as spells, and that travel across borders—whether through forests, mountains, or enchanted thresholds—leads not only to hidden kingdoms and curious creatures but also to recognitions of ourselves, for in every land the path of wonder is also a path of choice, consequence, and transformation.
Fairy Tales from Many Lands is a collection of traditional stories retold by Katharine Pyle, an American author associated with children’s literature and folklore adaptations in the early twentieth century. Assembling narratives set in varied, unnamed regions and distant times, the book belongs to the enduring genre of fairy-tale anthologies. Its publication reflects a period when English-language readers showed renewed interest in folk materials from around the world, seeking accessible versions for home and school. Within this context, Pyle’s volume offers a cohesive gateway to multiple traditions, presenting readers with a curated journey through the imaginative landscapes that have long nourished communal memory.
The premise is straightforward yet expansive: a sequence of self-contained tales, each inviting entry into a fresh world where ordinary people encounter marvels, confront tests, and discover what their choices cost or redeem. Readers can expect a clear, steady narrative voice, attentive to rhythm and image, that favors forward movement over ornament. The mood shifts with each selection, from playful to eerie to warmly reflective, while maintaining a consistent sense of wonder. Pyle’s retellings shape source materials into concise episodes suited for reading aloud or quiet reflection, allowing the stories’ archetypal energies to register without elaborate commentary or intrusive explanation.
Across its pages, the collection turns on themes that have animated folklore for centuries: the trial that reveals character, the bargain that must be kept or cleverly undone, the generosity that refashions scarcity, and the courage that steadies itself against fear. Magic in these tales works as moral weather, clarifying motives and consequences rather than eclipsing them. The stories ask what we owe to kin and stranger, what we risk for love or livelihood, and how we learn to discern true aid from tempting misdirection. By gathering many voices into one book, the volume underscores the shared human questions beneath distinctive local colors.
Part of the book’s appeal lies in its balance of familiarity and surprise. Readers meet figures who feel recognizable—humble heroes, resourceful youngest children, imperious rulers, helpful helpers—yet each narrative arranges these presences with fresh emphasis. Scenes unfold briskly: a challenge posed, a journey undertaken, a gift offered or refused, a result earned. The clarity of structure keeps the stakes visible while leaving space for atmosphere and quiet turns of feeling. Without insisting on a single moral, the stories invite reflection, letting patterns emerge across tales so that repeated images and outcomes deepen rather than narrow the experience.
For contemporary readers, the relevance is twofold. First, the collection models cross-cultural curiosity by welcoming listeners into diverse imaginative environments without collapsing them into sameness; it encourages attention to difference while revealing kinship of concerns. Second, the tales furnish an accessible vocabulary for discussing values—promise-keeping, hospitality, stewardship, courage—without didactic pressure. Families, classrooms, and solo readers can use the book as a springboard for conversations about choice and consequence, generosity and justice. Its brevity and variety support reading in small portions, while the cumulative effect invites broader comparisons, making it a durable companion for thoughtful, pleasurable exploration.
Approached in this spirit, Fairy Tales from Many Lands offers an invitation to wander: to step from story to story as from village to village, noticing how each path frames a different view of the same human sky. Pyle’s early-twentieth-century sensibility—respectful of tradition, mindful of clarity—helps the tales travel well into the present, where their questions remain vivid and their images bright. Whether discovered anew or revisited with fresh eyes, the collection promises an experience both restful and alert, alive to surprise yet grounded in steady craft, and it leaves readers poised to recognize wonder wherever it next appears.
Synopsis (Selection)
Fairy Tales from Many Lands, retold by Katharine Pyle, gathers classic folk narratives from a range of countries into a single volume. Each story is self-contained, yet the sequence traces a gentle arc from familiar European woods and villages toward distant coasts and courts, and back again. The language is straightforward, presenting recognizable figures—princes, peasants, wise women, and talking beasts—confronting compact, high-stakes dilemmas. Early episodes introduce the book’s core patterns: a promise made in haste, a bargain struck at a threshold, a journey begun under enchantment. With these elements in place, the collection proceeds by setting new variations on trials, helpers, and hidden identities.
The opening group centers on humble protagonists summoned to larger destinies. A neglected child receives unexpected aid from a small, uncanny friend; a youngest son, mocked at home, volunteers for an impossible errand; a fisher or woodcutter stumbles upon a secret that alters the family’s fortunes. These tales establish the balance of courage and courtesy required to cross boundaries—forest margins, castle gates, and cave mouths—where rules shift. Tests of restraint and truthfulness recur, often framed as prohibitions or time-limited tasks. Transforming objects, such as a cloak, bird, or ring, introduce the motif of earned assistance that will echo in later stories.
As the collection advances, quests expand into journeys across mountains, rivers, and kingdoms. Trios of siblings attempt the same challenge in turn, with the youngest observing, learning, and choosing differently. Ailing rulers require a rare cure found only beyond familiar borders; captives must be retrieved from enchanted keeps; a lost bride or brother calls the hero onward. Magical helpers appear in answer to earlier kindness—wolves, foxes, and birds who know secret paths or passwords. Major turning points arise at crossroads where gifts must be trusted and temptations refused. Outcomes hinge on patience and the careful reading of signs rather than brute force.
Stories rooted in northern settings heighten encounters with giants, trolls, and cold-weather perils. A hidden chamber, a sealed chest, or a forbidden key introduces consequences for curiosity; yet the same boldness, measured wisely, reveals the way forward. Heroic endurance acquires practical tones—counted tasks, hard bargains, and clever substitutions—to meet demands set by unyielding keepers. Dreams and prophecies surface, not as commands, but as cues to timing and place. In these episodes, hospitality and promise-keeping are tested at extremes, and compassion toward unlikely allies yields essential knowledge, preparing the ground for the collection’s shift to farther coasts and caravan roads.
A mid-collection turn carries the reader to marketplaces, deserts, and river cities where quick wit contends with wealth and power. Here appear judges with riddles, sultans and viziers, and spirits bound by conditions. Agreements are precise, and words themselves become tools or traps. Youthful protagonists bargain to free a parent or colleague, to reclaim a token, or to avert a peril foretold. The dramatic centers are hearings, wagers, and choices that must be voiced correctly. Clever speech restores balance where strength cannot, while generous acts—feeding a stranger, rescuing a creature, honoring a deadline—establish obligations that later open locked doors.
Further eastward, the tone shifts toward tales of duty, gratitude, and transformation bound to seasons and family bonds. A promise kept to a rescuer returns as protection against a storm; a gift from a river or sea kingdom must be repaid with discretion; a fox, crane, or dragon tests the hero’s steadiness. Journeys move through gardens, temples, and coastal cliffs, where silence can be as decisive as action. Choices often weigh personal desire against a wider harmony, and the cost of breaking a vow is measured in separations rather than punishments. Recognition scenes hinge on subtle tokens, crafts, and songs.
Interspersed are lighter animal and trickster histories that clarify the collection’s moral economy. A small creature bargains for its life by promising future help, and later assembles friends to accomplish the impossible. A boastful strongman is undone by a nimble adversary; a cheating bully is caught by his own device. These episodes compress the larger themes into brisk fables: reciprocity, proportionate reward, and the clear line between greed and rightful gain. Their humor relieves the darker pressures of enchantment while reinforcing the rule that attention and kindness yield the surest guidance when roads are tangled and stakes are high.
In the closing stretch, the adventures return to grand enchantments and near-irreversible choices. Sleep that blankets a household, a bride glimpsed only at night, and stairways descending to undersea halls pose final thresholds. Heroes must tread precise paths, counting steps, keeping lights low, or carrying burdens without complaint. The most perilous acts are recognitions—naming a true name, choosing the right twin, or resisting a deceptive welcome. Objects introduced earlier—rings, mirrors, slippers, and strands of hair—reappear as proofs. Revelations assemble, but the narration withholds outcomes until last moments, maintaining momentum while aligning promises made at the beginning with debts finally repaid.
Together these retellings present a consistent message carried by varied settings: steadfastness joined to courtesy opens the world, and compassion binds help to need across distance. Without lingering on lessons, the sequence demonstrates that justice may arrive slowly but surely, and that identity is proven by choices under pressure. Pyle’s arrangement and clear style allow each culture’s flavor to stand while underscoring shared patterns—tests in threes, grateful helpers, and vows that must be kept. The volume concludes with a sense of return and right order restored, closing the circle traced from cottage to palace, sea to shore, and back.
Historical Context
Fairy Tales from Many Lands is not confined to a single locale or era; it curates pre‑industrial village and courtly settings from Europe, the Near East, and Asia, framing them for early twentieth‑century American readers. Published in the United States in the 1910s, with Katharine Pyle working within the mid‑Atlantic publishing corridor between Philadelphia and New York, the book’s temporal horizon spans folkloric pasts—medieval kingdoms, rural agrarian life, and artisanal towns—transmitted through modern print culture. Its geographies reflect Scandinavia’s fjords and forests, the Iberian Peninsula’s courts and countryside, the Balkan borderlands, and markets and caravans of the Eastern Mediterranean. The resulting setting is a composite historical space, traditional in content yet contemporary in presentation and audience.
Nineteenth‑century European nation‑building made folklore a repository of identity. The Brothers Grimm published Kinder‑ und Hausmärchen in 1812–1815 amid German cultural consolidation that culminated in the 1871 unification under Prussian leadership. In Finland, Elias Lönnrot compiled the Kalevala (1835; expanded 1849) during a national awakening under Russian imperial rule, while Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864) collected Serbian songs and tales in the wake of the First and Second Serbian Uprisings (1804–1815; 1815–1817). These projects mapped tale types onto ethnic and political geographies. Pyle’s anthology taps this corpus: by presenting “many lands,” it mirrors how folktales were mobilized to define peoples and borders, translating that nationalist archive into an American, child‑oriented format.
Mass immigration to the United States between 1880 and 1924, peaking in 1907 with more than 1.2 million arrivals through Ellis Island (opened 1892), transformed schools and libraries. Italians, Poles, Jews from the Russian Empire, Scandinavians, and Balkan communities carried repertoires of stories that entered public storytelling, settlement houses, and classrooms. Publishers in New York cultivated juvenile lists that promised both entertainment and cultural literacy for a heterogeneous readership. Pyle’s title and selections answer this milieu: “many lands” acknowledges the plural origins of her audience and validates immigrant heritages. Her retellings domesticate Old World plots into clear English prose, offering cultural bridges at a moment when nativist politics coexisted uneasily with everyday multicultural exchange.
Progressive Era reforms (c. 1890–1920) reshaped childhood, education, and print. By 1918 all U.S. states had compulsory schooling; child‑centered pedagogy and the growth of the public library movement—exemplified by Anne Carroll Moore’s leadership in children’s services at the New York Public Library beginning in 1906 and the opening of its central Children’s Room in 1911—created a sustained demand for vetted storybooks. Reformers linked storytelling to civic formation, while campaigns such as the Keating–Owen Child Labor Act (1916) sought to protect childhood time for learning and play, even as the Supreme Court struck it down in 1918 (Hammer v. Dagenhart). Pyle’s volume aligns with these priorities: clearly structured tales, moral causality, and durable bindings suited classroom and library use. The book thus embodies Progressive Era ideals—standardized access, ethical instruction, and age‑appropriate design—deploying old narratives to serve new civic and educational ends.
Imperial and commercial networks expanded access to Asian and Middle Eastern narratives. The British Raj (1858–1947) and global steamship/mail routes supported translations and ethnographic compilations, while widely read versions of the Thousand and One Nights—from Antoine Galland’s French (1704–1717) to Richard Burton’s annotated English (1885–1888)—popularized Near Eastern motifs. Folklorists such as William Crooke documented North Indian tales in the 1890s, and Joseph Jacobs edited English, Celtic, and Indian story collections in the same decade. Pyle’s anthology emerges from this circulation, incorporating motifs of djinn, talismans, merchant caravans, and court intrigue that entered Western pedagogy through empire‑facilitated knowledge flows, reframing them for American children without the scholarly apparatus of the original translators.
Eastern European political change also shaped the tale archive. Alexander Afanasyev’s Narodnye russkie skazki (1855–1863) cataloged Russian narratives amid debates over serf emancipation (1861) and the role of the peasantry in the tsarist state. Across the Habsburg realms, the 1848 revolutions and the 1867 Austro‑Hungarian Compromise intensified ethnic self‑definition, prompting collectors in Bohemia, Slovakia, and Croatia to publish vernacular tales. In the Balkans, the decline of Ottoman authority and new states in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece (19th century) encouraged the printing of local folk materials. Pyle’s selections reflect this documented Slavic and Balkan repertoire—tests of wit, enchanted forests, and borderland heroes—transmitted to Anglophone readers through the prior era’s politically charged collecting.
Technological and commercial developments in printing made such anthologies viable. Halftone processes in the 1880s and advances in chromolithography in the 1890s lowered costs for illustrated books; American houses such as Duffield & Company in New York (active 1902–1917) built juvenile lines for libraries and schools. Mail‑order catalogs, department stores, and subscription libraries broadened distribution beyond elite bookshops. Katharine Pyle, trained and active in the mid‑Atlantic art‑publishing milieu, leveraged these infrastructures to pair accessible prose with decorative illustration at affordable prices. The book’s format—portable, illustrated, and durable—reflects the era’s industrial print economy. Its availability to civic institutions ensured that the cross‑cultural tales circulated widely in a democratizing information landscape.
While framed as timeless stories, the volume registers a social critique of its contemporary moment. By emphasizing clever commoners, just rulers bound by law, and rewards for compassion across status lines, the tales counter Gilded Age and Progressive Era inequities of wealth and power. In an age of exclusionary policies (e.g., the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) and rising quotas that culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924, celebrating “many lands” tacitly contests xenophobia, modeling empathy and reciprocity across cultures. The prominence of a woman author in a male‑dominated industry, on the eve of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), further underscores a quiet challenge to gender hierarchies embedded in both public life and traditional narratives.
