Czech Folk Tales

Czech and Moravian tales gathered by a philologist: the twelve months, the water sprite, the shepherd who outwitted death, and stories of the Sunday child. Josef Baudiš translated them in wartime Britain in 1917, and kept the spoken idiom. The Slavonic material is closer to the Grimms in shape and much dryer in tone. Fifty-three plates by painters including Josef Mánes and Alois Kalvoda follow the tales through birch groves, village edges and winter fields, the Bohemian landscape these stories grew from.