Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang (Selkirk, 1844 – Banchory, 1912) was a Scottish writer whose work spanned criticism, anthropology, history and translation. He became one of the most visible literary figures in Britain at the close of the nineteenth century. Today he is remembered chiefly as the editor of a long series of fairy-tale collections, although he was never a celebrated author of original fiction or verse himself.

The eldest of eight children, he was educated in Selkirk, Loretto and Edinburgh before reading classics at St Andrews and Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a first-class degree in 1868 and later became a fellow of Merton. He quickly established himself as a journalist, poet and reviewer, contributing to London newspapers and periodicals. His early verse drew on French forms, and his criticism, often witty and sharp, ranged widely across books and their authors.

Lang's interest in folklore and anthropology led him to works such as Custom and Myth and Myth, Ritual and Religion, in which he treated the irrational features of myth as survivals of earlier thought. He helped found psychical research and served as president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1911. As a historian he wrote on Scotland and on Mary, Queen of Scots. As a classical scholar he produced prose translations of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, still admired for their archaic, musical English, along with versions of the Homeric Hymns and of Theocritus and Bion.

His lasting legacy is the series of fairy-book anthologies that bears his name, beginning with The Blue Fairy Book (1889). Much of the labour of collecting and translating fell to his wife, Leonora Blanche Lang, and to assistants, yet the books made his name familiar to generations of children. He is also associated with the name of the ring story that later inspired elements of Tolkien's work. Jorge Luis Borges praised his prose, though not the subjects it dealt with.