The Princess Blog

After completing over 400 fairy tales in Andrew Lang's Fairy Books , it's easy to get burnt out by all the alternate versions of stories we're already familiar with. The biggest draw of these books is the potential to discover new fairy tales that are as compelling and imaginative as the ones we tell our children. Though these stories are few and far between, I compiled a list of the top ten hidden gems after reading all twelve books. Since this list only contains stories I have never heard of outside the Fairy Books, The Blue Fairy Book is automatically disqualified since it mainly contains popular stories. I also didn't care for any of the stories from The Pink or Lilac Fairy Book s even though these are named after the two most feminine colors in the set. The stories listed below are ahead of their time in one way or another with brave princesses who rescue princes, spiteful fairies, and unique visual or story elements that stand out from anything Disney or any ot...

I was inspired to write this story after reading the version of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses"  in  The Red Fairy Book . It was one of my favorite stories as a child. In this version, the princes that the princesses dance with in their underground world were other candidates who tried to learn their secret and were brainwashed by a magic potion to forget everything but the love of dancing. As soon as I saw that, I knew there was another story in there. This is that story. "The Dancing Prince" Prince Justin loved Princess Calliope with all his heart, but no matter how he tried to convince his parents to break off his alliance to Princess Jessamine, they simply would not listen to reason. Even after Calliope's father issued a contest to learn the secret that she shared with her eleven sisters with the prize of marrying one of the princesses, Justin's parents still would not relent. "You may enter the contest if you wish," they told him, "but yo...

Though it feels like fairy tales have been around forever, the popular versions that we know today have actually only been circulating in English-speaking countries for a little over a hundred years. Much of this is thanks to a name that we rarely hear associated with fairy tales, Andrew Lang . Lang didn't write any fairy tales himself, but he was one of the first people to translate stories from the Brothers Grimm , Hans Christian Andersen , Charles Perrault , Madame d"Aulnoy , and others into English to introduce them to a wider audience of fantasy lovers with the Fairy Books of Many Colors , a 12-volume encyclopedia of fairy tales from all over the world. Lang was a scholar who published a number of periodicals, poems, and fiction, but he was most famous for annotating these stories that were translated by his wife and illustrated with beautiful ink drawings by H.J. Ford . Thanks to the magic of the internet, I was able to acquire a full set of the Fairy Books at a relative...