A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales

A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales collects Nathaniel Hawthorne’s two beloved books of retold Greek myths for young readers, originally published separately in 1851 and 1853. The combined volume gives readers all twelve of Hawthorne’s retold myths in a single book, with the connecting framing device of Eustace Bright entertaining children at the Tanglewood estate in the Berkshires running through both volumes.

A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, the 1851 volume, contains six myths. The Gorgon’s Head about Perseus and Medusa, the Golden Touch about King Midas, the Paradise of Children about Pandora’s box, the Three Golden Apples about Hercules, the Miraculous Pitcher about Baucis and Philemon, and the Chimaera about Bellerophon and the winged horse Pegasus. Tanglewood Tales, the 1853 follow up, adds six more myths to the project. The Minotaur about Theseus and the labyrinth, the Pygmies, the Dragon’s Teeth about Cadmus, Circe’s Palace from the Odyssey, the Pomegranate Seeds about Demeter and Persephone, and the Golden Fleece about Jason and the Argonauts.

Hawthorne wrote the books at a moment when classical mythology was a standard part of American school curricula but the available retellings for children were often dry or moralizing in ways that made the stories difficult for young readers to actually engage with. His own retellings were aimed at making the myths come alive for children in ways that the more academic versions could not. Together the twelve stories became standard family reading in nineteenth and early twentieth century America, with generations of children encountering the myths first through Hawthorne’s versions before going on to read the more direct translations of the original Greek and Roman sources.

Hawthorne’s prose in the Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales is more accessible than the heavier moral allegories of his major novels. The voice is that of a storyteller working to entertain children rather than a moralist working through the deeper themes that animate The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. The combined volume reads as warmly today as it did when first published, with the central pleasure of the stories themselves still very much intact even after more than a century and a half of subsequent retellings have appeared.

For families with young children who are encountering Greek mythology for the first time, this combined edition remains essential. The framing device with Eustace Bright and the children at Tanglewood gives the volume its particular nineteenth century New England texture, which adds rather than subtracts from the experience of the myths themselves.