Popular Tales from the Norse by Asbjørnsen, Moe, and Dasent

The most careless reader can hardly fail to see that many of the Tales in this volume have the same groundwork as those with which he has been familiar from his earliest youth. They are Nursery Tales, in fact, of the days when there were tales in nurseries—old wives’ fables, which have faded away before the light of gas and the power of steam. It is long, indeed, since English nurses told these tales to English children by force of memory and word of mouth. In a written shape, we have long had some of them, at least, in English versions of the Contes de ma Mère l’ Oye of Perrault, and the Contes de Fées of Madame D’Aulnoy; those tight-laced, high- heeled tales of the ‘teacup times’ of Louis XIV and his successors, in which the popular tale appears to as much disadvantage as an artless country girl in the stifling atmosphere of a London theatre.