Since at least the time of the Brothers Grimm, Anglo-European folktale and fairy-tale studies have been in good measure about rescue and recovery. Early collectors like the Grimms sought to rescue traditional oral tales from the perceived threat of print and literacy and to recover tales already inscribed in disparate written sources. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Anglo-European collectors in colonial contexts “rescued” indigenous narratives through acts of appropriation, while recovery operations turned to individual tales or collections of tales that had gone out of print or had otherwise been neglected or suppressed, including unpublished texts languishing in archives. Recovery projects continue today, with editions, translations, and anthologies that resurface older and little-known tales and present them for new audiences.
Jack Zipes has been engaged in the recovery of folktales and fairy tales throughout his long career. In recent years he has made a special point of devoting his attention to the resurrection of obscure tales and children’s books that he deems valuable and deserving of attention. As Zipes puts it in a post on the website of the Children’s Literature Association’s International Committee:
"I am a gravedigger. I do not rob graves. I do not dig graves to bury the dead. I dig up graves to bring the dead back to life. Most gravediggers dig graves to keep people silent forever. I dig graves so that the dead can rejoin us and can have an honest word or two with us. I do not want to silence the dead or ignore them. I want to pay homage to them, especially writers, illustrators, and artists of all kinds.… [S]ince 2019, I have been very active editing and publishing highly relevant and startling books by neglected and gifted authors and illustrators." [1]
That is the context in which Zipes has exhumed and re-published three anthologies of fairy tales collected and arranged by the English novelist Romer Wilson (1891-1930): Green Magic (1928), Silver Magic (1929), and Red Magic (1930). In his preface, entitled “The Startling Romer Wilson,” Zipes justifies his recovery of Wilson’s anthologies by noting that she and her “fascinating collections of unusual tales” have been neglected by literary history (Green Magic, vii).
The three volumes—described in their shared subtitle as The World’s Best Fairy Tales—present over sixty tales, along with black-and-white and color illustrations by Violet Brunton and Kay Nielsen. All the tales originally published by Wilson are here, except for “three long and boring stories” that Zipes acknowledges having deleted (ix). While Zipes describes these anthologies as “fascinating collections of unusual tales,” what strikes me as most noticeably unusual about the three volumes is not so much the tales they contain (after all, many are well-known classical examples of the genre) but the way they are framed by Wilson’s creativity and unusual editorial paratexts.
It's true that Green Magic, Silver Magic, and Red Magic encompass, for their time, an unusually great diversity of tales. The collections’ geographical and cultural breadth is wide, with narratives, collectors, and authors from China, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, the United States and Canada, and Greek and Roman antiquity. Not bound by a strict definition of “fairy tale,” Wilson has also outfitted her collections with significant generic variety, including lesser-known oral narratives, literary fairy tales, and the classic fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Antoine Galland, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Charles Perrault, and others. As an example of the unexplained variety readers encounter in Wilson’s assemblage of tales, consider this random sequence of texts in Red Magic: “Hawk and Mole,” a tale of one half-page sourced from the Journal of American-Folklore (1918), is followed by “A Child’s Dream of a Star,” a brief story by Charles Dickens (1850), which is followed by “Bean Flower and Pea Blossom,” a much longer literary fairy tale by the French master of conte fantastique tales, Charles Nodier (1846). Turn the page once more and readers find “The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse,” one of Aesop’s classic animal fables.
It's not uncommon, of course, for folktale and fairy-tale collections to display considerable diversity in their contents. What is unusual about Wilson’s collections is the absence of editorial interventions that make their significance and intention clear. Unlike conventional compilers and editors who offer explicit reasons for their selection of tales and seek to direct how readers understand the texts contextually and intertextually, Wilson provides no clear direction. To be sure, she has penned a unique introduction for each volume and composed a brief headnote for most—but not all—of the individual tales. However, while she structurally simulates the paratextual apparatus of conventional collections, her introductions and headnotes—which are addressed directly to “you,” the reader—frame the selected tales in unusual ways. For example, although Wilson’s headnotes sometimes present information about a tale’s source, author, or contexts, they often seem intent on subtly undermining the editor’s instructive voice and empowering the reader’s own imagination. Take the headnote to “Clever Alice” (J. E. Taylor’s/Brothers Grimm), which replaces editorial expertise with readerly self-reliance by directly addressing the reader with a challenge: “Are you a Clever Alice? Do you know what that may be? Read this story and you will discover” (Silver Magic, 59). Wilson takes a similar tack in the headnote to Nodier’s “Bean Flower and Pea Blossom,” where editorial commentary gives way to acknowledgement of the reader’s independence:
"Charles Nodier, the author of this lovely tale, was born in France in 1780. He saw the French Revolution and the Empire of the first Napoleon. Here he expresses the great longing of French peasants for good sons and the great love of French men for their parents. There is more than that in it, of course, but the truth of the matter you must each discover for yourselves" (Red Magic, 43).
Similarly, Wilson’s unusual introductions to the three volumes prioritize engaging the reader and creating a whimsical and imaginative discourse. The introduction to the first collection, Green Magic, begins with Wilson asking the reader: “Do you believe in fairies?” (2). There follows her litany of reports on the existence of fairies until reality breaks in and forces Wilson, now in full ironic mode, to conclude:
"I could talk a great while on this subject, but the printer will allow me no more room. He says it is time to tell proper tales now, with real princesses, dragons, giants, dwarfs, ogres, witches, and whatnot in them. So I will stop and give way to his importunity, for his fingers are itching to be done with this introduction and to set the 'True and Marvelous History of Puss in Boots,' that the machine may print it for your edification. I hope that you may all be as clever as Puss, and become in time, as he did, ornaments to your country, Prime Ministers, Presidents, or Secretaries of State at the very least, not to mention Ambassadors and Ambassadresses, whose lives I believe are passed in splendid palaces, and who give balls and parties every night of their lives" (Green Magic, 2-3).
Nowhere in her three volumes of fairy tales does Wilson explain what her selection criteria and overall purpose are. Zipes notes that there is no standard that defines her choice of the tales, and the witty words at the beginning of each tale do not explain her choice (Green Magic, viii). Given that she republishes so many well-known tales, and that her editorial paratexts offer so little conventionally useful commentary, we might ask what the value of her project actually is. Zipes comes to the conclusion that, “to her credit, Wilson was one of the first anthologists of fairy tales to include major and minor fairy tales from all over the world, with an evident intention to demonstrate the ‘dazzling’ power of the narratives she selected.”
What Zipes means by “‘dazzling’ power” is clarified by his claim that Wilson’s “selection of the stories in all three volumes reflects an erudite mind bent on displaying cultural treasures—namely fairy tales to challenge readers” (Green Magic, viii). Wilson’s playful paratexts and advice to readers that they must each discover the truth of a tale themselves make it evident that her priority is not presenting texts as a folklorist would but giving readers permission to engage them imaginatively on their own terms. After all, Wilson was not a scholar but a novelist—one possessing a mind that was not only erudite but also playful. Her diverse selection of fairy tales challenges and encourages readers to read the tales without the sober paratextual guidance of a conventional editor and to be dazzled by the imaginative words and worlds they encounter. In recovering Green Magic, Silver Magic, and Red Magic, Zipes gives Romer Wilson a chance to remind us that fairy tales are also about play. For that we have a gravedigger to thank.
Note:
[1] “Little Mole & Honey Bear: Reviving Historical Children’s Books with Jack Zipes.” 24 Feb. 2022. https://childlitassn.wixsite.com/intlcommittee/single-post/reviving-historical-childrens-books-with-jack-zipes
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[Review length: 1495 words • Review posted on March 3, 2025]