IMAGINE you are one of the finest writers of your day, a poet, historian, journalist, translator, teacher, biographer, novelist and playwright so renowned that on the Blue Plaque that now sits outside your former home in London it simply calls you “man of letters”. Yet most people who know of you associate you with fairy stories and fables, with too many Scots unaware of your huge influence on writers and whole genres of writing.
That is what happened to Andrew Lang, the Scottish writer who died in this week of 1912. “Man of letters” is a truly accurate description of a writing powerhouse, a man whose genius touched millions without them ever really knowing that he did so.
For as the author – technically the co-author – of the “Fairy Books”, Lang brought into the English language many dozens of now familiar stories from the folklore of many countries, everything from Cinderella to Rumpelstiltskin, to Aladdin and Little Red Riding Hood. For that alone he should be better known.
Born in Selkirk on March 31, 1844, Lang was the eldest son of the eight children of John Lang, Selkirk’s town clerk, and his wife Jane Sellar, the daughter of the infamous factor of the Duke of Sutherland, Patrick Sellar.
Educated at Selkirk Grammar School and Edinburgh Academy, Lang moved on to St Andrews University then had a brief spell at Glasgow University before going to Balliol College, Oxford, where he did so well that he was taken on as a Fellow of Merton College. Even before he graduated with first class honours, his reputation as a writer and translator was spreading and it was no surprise when he moved to London and became a journalist.
His scholarly research into culture and religion was maintained, and in the 1880s he produced two books on the subject of myths, arguing that irrational elements of mythology were descended from earlier primitive tales.
In 1875 he had married Leonora Blanche Alleyne, usually known as Nora. She was highly educated for a woman at that time and began to work alongside her husband as he prepared his masterwork, the Blue Fairy Book published in 1889. It would be the first of 12 such books arranged by colour, and all were beautifully produced and illustrated and made the Langs very comfortably off.
In turn that allowed Lang to further his pursuits in everything from psychic research to anthropology, from Ancient Greek texts, which he translated, to poems and novels and plays.
His greatest contribution to Scottish literature was his monumental four volume work A History Of Scotland From The Roman Occupation which was published from 1900 – it remains a major source of material for historians and history writers to this day.
The major controversy about Lang’s life is which of the couple did the most work. In 1910, Lang (above) admitted: “The fairy books have been almost wholly the work of Mrs Lang, who has translated and adapted them from the French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and other languages.”
But that’s not entirely the case, because Lang stamped his writ all over the books as translator and editor. He would translate and adapt the works of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, and as the first translator to render their fairy tales – many taken from the folklore of Europe – into English he had a profound influence on how they were received.
Take this classic passage from Little Red Riding Hood which we all surely know: “‘Grandmamma, what great arms you have got!’ ‘That is the better to hug thee, my dear’.
‘Grandmamma, what great legs you have got!’ ‘That is to run the better, my child’.
‘Grandmamma, what great ears you have got!’ ‘That is to hear the better, my child’.
‘Grandmamma, what great eyes you have got!’ ‘It is to see the better, my child’.”
Versions of Little Red Riding Hood have proliferated in English but it is Lang’s original take from which they descend.
A particular favourite of mine is Cinderella which is in the Blue Fairy Book. This is how Lang translated Perrault’s version which itself descended from a Neapolitan collector of fairy tales called Giambattista Basile who published the first written version of “Cenerentola” in the early 17th century.
“Her godmother only just touched her with her wand, and, at the same instant, her clothes were turned into cloth of gold and silver, all beset with jewels. This done, she gave her a pair of glass slippers, the prettiest in the whole world … her godmother … commanded her not to stay till after midnight, telling her, at the same time, that if she stayed one moment longer, the coach would be a pumpkin again, her horses mice, her coachman a rat, her footmen lizards, and her clothes just as they were before.”
It is Lang’s version which gave us the Cinderella we all know and which is said to have influenced Walt Disney’s screen version.
He could be a waspish journalist, once writing “politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts – for support rather than illumination”. He was also a literary editor and critic, and edited the influential 1896 work The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns.
Lang died suddenly of angina at a hotel in Banchory on July 20, 1912, 110 years ago this week.
The Andrew Lang lectures are given occasionally at St Andrews University in his honour. The most famous of them was given by Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien (above) in 1939. His speech entitled On Fairy-Stories was published as an essay and curiously enough the creator of Middle Earth, the Shire and Hobbits disagreed with Lang’s broad approach to such tales, insisting on his own philosophy on fantasy.
Lang continues to inspire modern writers. Peter Green in the preface to his excellent 2015 work ‘The Iliad: A new translation’ states: “Andrew Lang’s marvellous Tales of Troy and Greece...fired my imagination as a child, in an unforgettable way.”
Good luck to those who are trying to bring Lang to a wider audience, because for all of us who write about Scottish history he was a pioneer whose work should be much more appreciated.
