The "Savage" and the "Civilized": Andrew Lang's Representation of the Child and the Translation of Folklore

Critics often identify Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book (1889) as a turning point in Victorian children's literature, because the book seems to have returned readers' preferences from children's realistic stories to traditional folktales.¹ This renewed appetite for folktales was fed by Lang's numerous Colour Fairy Books, which appeared until 1910 and are reprinted to this day. As significant and impressive as this achievement in children's literature is, however, it represents only a part of Lang's lifetime work. Anthropologist, classical scholar, folklorist, poet, essayist, reviewer, literary critic, French translator, historian, even sportswriter—Lang took on all of these roles and published prodigiously in most of them.² While it is difficult to grasp the whole range of Lang's interests, it is possible to identify certain predominant concerns that led him to most of the subjects he examined. His contributions to children's literature are intricately woven in this fabric of ideas. The larger patterns of Lang's thinking, revolving around representations of the "savage" and the "civilized," reveal how he constructs the child as a primitive creature analogous to the primitive peoples he studied. Lang's notions of "savage" stories, storytellers, and audiences strengthened already existing associations of the folktale with the child, determined the way in which he undertook his work as editor and translator, and continue to influence our ideas on children and their literature.

Lang's education and working life coincided with the peak of the nineteenth-century philological enterprise, as the techniques and assumptions of the comparative, historical study of languages gave rise to theories of, for example, mythology, religion, literature, politics, history, and race. His examination of folklore and myth connects him to a tradition of philological study of that subject, and in translating some of that material, he participated in one of the main activities of nineteenth-century philologists, namely the editing and translating of texts. Lang's translations for adults include the lliad, the Odyssey, Homeric Hymns, Theocritus, and Bion and Moschus, as well as several other Greek and French works. But he also translated, or more often supervised the translations of, stories for children. To understand how Lang conceived of that child audience, it is first necessary to outline some of his intellectual preoccupations, which derive from the immensely productive field of philology.

Nineteenth-century philologists, in retrieving and examining documents, often expressed mixed views of the past. On the one hand, they might idealize their nation's primitive origin, in which the present seemed to be a more degenerate age; on the other, they might express a belief that their present age had progressed in refinement and knowledge from a past era. Whether philologists stressed the degeneration or the progress of the present, however, they often conflated images of the natural and the primitive,³ and Lang is no exception. In his History of English Literature he states, "The best traditional ballads have the colour and fragrance of wild flowers" (149), and in his Lilac Fairy Book he points out that fairy tales "are older than reading and writing, and arose like wild flowers before men had any education to quarrel over" them (vii).

Lang's tendency to speak of traditional literature as a natural and wild growth in an early age is part of his larger view of the evolution of literature from a wild, primitive, or uncivilized state toward a refined, sophisticated, and civilized condition. Lang's belief in progress, not degeneration, is evident in his description of the process as a journey:

The student of this lore can look back and see the long trodden way behind him, the winding tracks through marsh and forest and over burning sands. He sees the caves, the camps, the villages, the towns where the race has tarried, for shorter times or longer, strange places many of them, and strangely haunted, desolate dwellings and inhospitable. But the scarce visible tracks converge at last on the beaten ways, the ways to that city whither mankind is wandering.

("Adventures" 36)

The two poles of that journey...