Cossack Fairy and Folk Tales

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. R. Nisbet Bain's richly illustrated collection opens a vivid window onto Cossack fairy tales and folk legends, gathered from Ruthenian oral tradition and introduced as a distinctive body of Slavic folklore. Bain highlights the freshness, simplicity, and imaginative force of these stories, with their recurring enchanted objects, demons, saints, witches, serpents, tsars, and clever common folk. The result is a lively blend of heroic adventure, comic trickery, moral fable, and eerie wonder. That spirit is embodied in tales like "Oh: The Tsar of the Forest," where a lazy son is bargained away to a mysterious underworld ruler and transformed through repeated deaths and rebirths into a powerful, handsome youth. Other stories follow shape-shifting pursuits, magical rings, and sudden romance; a poor man cheated of his grain but gifted a food-giving sack; and darker narratives of ambition, disguise, and ruthless betrayal. Alongside these are witty animal fables of persistence, loyalty, and cunning, where sparrows, dogs, cats, foxes, and wolves reveal the comic wisdom of the folk imagination.