The Red Book of Heroes

Lang, Mrs., ed by Andrew Lang

Longmans Greem & Co., 1909

Bound in publisher's blind stamped red cloth, with gilt spine.  Top edge gilt. Illustrated end papers.  With 8 color plates (including frontispiece), full-page and other illustrations. xiv, 368 pages.  Text clean, bright and crisp.  

  Andrew Lang was a prolific Scottish scholar, folklorist, anthropologist, historian, and classic children's author.  He is best known for his popular 12 volume fairy books.  His work, "represents the first maturing of a scientific interest in the folk narrative as a means of discovering the nature of primeval man and the details of his unrecorded history.  "The student of this lore," he wrote, "can look back and see the long trodden way behind him, the winding tracks through marsh and forest and ever burning sands" (Green 1946, p. 37).  His contention that the myth is a "historical" document, useful for the revelation of a cultural or value system, became so generally accepted as an assumption in anthropology that his originality is often forgotten." - Jacob W. Gruber, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2008.