Life and career
Andrew Lang grew up in Selkirk in the Scottish Borders, where ballads and accounts of local families supplied an early education in the way stories travel. He studied at St Andrews and Oxford and became a fellow of Merton College. After leaving Oxford for London he made his living as a journalist. Reviewing books and writing for newspapers gave him room to pursue interests ranging from Greek poetry and Scottish history to contemporary accounts of apparitions.
In 1875 he married Leonora Blanche Alleyne. Their best-known publishing venture began in 1889 with The Blue Fairy Book. Its success produced a long series identified by the colours of their bindings. Andrew introduced and edited the books. Leonora translated and rewrote many tales and took an increasing share of the work of preparing the later collections. Other contributors, some named in the prefaces, brought stories from languages neither editor could have covered alone.
Work and ideas
Lang also asked scholarly questions about why related stories recur among people separated by language and geography. His writing on myth placed accounts of religious belief alongside folktales. He followed contemporary psychical research with the same interest in collecting testimony, though his conclusions about evidence often brought him into disagreement with other students of religion.
His collaborations extended well beyond the fairy books. With fellow classicists he made English prose versions of Homer. With H. Rider Haggard he wrote The World’s Desire, an adventure that imagines a further journey for Odysseus. Lang had translated the Odyssey with Samuel Henry Butcher. This time he was free to decide what happened to its hero after his return to Ithaca.
