Andrew Lang's Coloured Fairy Books in Order: 8 Free Online, and Which to Read First
Between 1889 and 1910 Andrew Lang published twelve fairy-tale collections, each named after a colour, and together they are the reason a great many stories are known in English at all. He was a folklorist by training and a compiler by method: he gathered tales from every tradition he could reach, and his wife Leonora Blyth Lang did most of the actual translating and retelling — a fact the title pages of the period consistently omit.
Eight of the twelve are free to read in the library. The order below is publication order, which matters more than you would expect: the earliest volumes hold the famous stories and the later ones get progressively stranger and further from Europe.
The order, and what is in each
1. The Blue Fairy Book (1889) — the first and the one to read first. It is where the canon lives: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, Jack the Giant-Killer, Aladdin, Puss in Boots. If someone reads exactly one book on this page, it is this one, and it is the best single fairy-tale collection in English. 2. The Yellow Fairy Book (1894) — the Nordic volume, and the best of the sequels. Heavy on Andersen and on Russian and Icelandic material, and it holds "The Nightingale", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and the Norwegian tales. Darker in temperament than Blue. 3. The Pink Fairy Book (1897) — Danish, Sicilian and Japanese tales, and where the collection first travels properly. Odd, funny, and much less familiar. 4. The Violet Fairy Book (1901) — Serbian, Romanian, Lithuanian and Japanese, and the volume where the stories start behaving unpredictably. Excellent for a reader who has had enough of princesses. 5. The Crimson Fairy Book (1903) — mostly Hungarian and Finnish, and the strongest of the late volumes. Long, strange, cruel stories with genuine narrative drive. 6. The Brown Fairy Book (1904) — the widest net: Australian Aboriginal, African, Native American, Persian and Indian material. Historically the most interesting volume and the one whose framing has aged worst — see the note below. 7. The Orange Fairy Book (1906) — largely African and Jutland tales. Uneven, with three or four very good ones. 8. The Lilac Fairy Book (1910) — the last, mostly Irish, Portuguese and Welsh, and a gentler close to the series than Crimson or Brown.
Not in the library yet: the Red (1890), Green (1892), Grey (1900) and Olive (1907) Fairy Books. Red and Green are the two to want — both sit early in the sequence and both hold well-known material. Eight of twelve is still more fairy tale than most childhoods get through.
There is also the linked index to all twelve volumes, which is a table rather than a book: useful if you are hunting one specific story and do not know which colour it is in.
His own two books, which are not collections
- Prince Prigio — Lang writing his own fairy tale rather than collecting one, and it is a comic one: a prince cursed at birth with being too clever, who is insufferable about it. Genuinely funny, and a good antidote after a run of solemn tales.
- The Arabian Nights Entertainments — his selection from the Thousand and One Nights, cut for children. Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad's voyages. This is the standard route into the material for a young reader; expect an abridgement that quietly removes a great deal.
How to actually read them
Do not read a volume front to back. They are 30 to 40 stories each with no arc, and read continuously they blur. One or two a night is the format they were sold for, and it is still right.
On age: the tales are short, so they suit a five-year-old read aloud — but they are the unsoftened versions. Stepsisters cut off pieces of their feet, and there are severed heads and wolves that succeed. That is not a reason to avoid them; children generally handle the old plots better than their parents expect. It is a reason to read a story yourself first if you are unsure of the child.
On the Brown and Orange volumes: the framing Lang gives non-European tales is Victorian anthropology, and the introductions in particular sort the world's storytellers by how "primitive" he took them to be. The stories are worth having; the framing wants saying out loud rather than skipping past.
If you want the same material organised by where the story came from rather than by colour, fairy tales around the world does exactly that, fairy tale books free online covers Grimm and Andersen directly, and all 127 books in the fairy tales collection are browsable in one place. Everything of Lang's is on his author page.