Joseph Jacobs

Generally speaking, it has been my ambition to write as a good old nurse will speak when she tells fairy tales.

Every place but that in which one is born is equally strange and wondrous. Once beyond the bounds of the city walls, and none knows what may happen. We have stepped forth into the Land of Faerie, but at least we are in the open air.

The first glimpse that we have of the notions which the Greeks possessed of the shape and the inhabitants of the earth is afforded by the poems passing under the name of Homer.

The great problems of the Twentieth century will have immediate relation to the discoveries of America, of Africa, and of Australia.

One might almost say that the history of geographical discovery, properly so called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive of whose voyages was purely scientific curiosity.

Obscure as still remains the origin of that 'genre' of romance to which the tales before us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople.

The Celtic folk-tales have been collected while the practice of story-telling is still in full vigour, though there is every sign that its term of life is already numbered.

Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.

Permanent bonds of culture began to be formed between the extreme East and the extreme West of Europe by intermarriage, by commerce, by the admission of the nobles of Byzantium within the orders of chivalry.

The first two crusades brought the flower of European chivalry to Constantinople and restored that spiritual union between Eastern and Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches.

In the Land of Ire, the belief in fairies, gnomes, ogres and monsters is all but dead; in the Land of Ind, it still flourishes in all the vigour of animism.

Certainly there is abundant evidence of the early transmission by literary means of a considerable number of drolls and folk-tales from India about the time of the Crusaders.