Roumanian Fairy Tales and Legends

About this book

Fairy-tale bargains are seldom safe in the Romanian countryside. A creature may offer help with impossible work, a forest may conceal a test, and a king's daughter may know more than the hero expected.

This collection preserves stories from a region where popular narrative drew on a rich mixture of folklore, religious custom and village imagination. Transformations, strange companions and cunning reversals give the tales their pace. The English retellings also offer a glimpse of how nineteenth-century collectors introduced Eastern European traditions for an unfamiliar English-speaking audience.