Andrew Lang's Violet Fairy Book (1901)
35 old and forgotten folk tales and fairy tales collected from around the world

The stories in this Violet Fairy Book, as in all the others of the series, have been translated out of the popular traditional tales in a number of different languages. These stories are as old as anything that men have invented. They were inherited by our earliest civilised ancestors, who really believed that beasts and trees and stones can talk if they choose. The stories are full of the oldest ideas of ages when science did not exist, and magic took the place of science. Anybody who has the curiosity to read the 'Australian Legendary Tales,' (ISBN 978-1-907256-41-7) which Mrs. Langloh Parker has collected from the lips of the Australian Aborigines, now known as the Australian Jungle Book, will find that these tales are closely akin to our own. Who were the first authors of these tales? Nobody knows—probably the first men and women.