The Laughing Prince

The Laughing Prince: A Book of Jugoslav Fairy Tales and Folk Tales is a 1921 collection by Parker Fillmore (1878-1944), the American reteller of Slavic folk literature. The book presents the wonder tales of the South Slavs, led by the title story of the farm boy whose absurd narrative of impossible things makes the unsmiling princess laugh and wins her hand. Fillmore shaped the tales from translated Serbian and Croatian sources into the direct storytelling style that made his Czechoslovak Fairy Tales and Shoemaker’s Apron favourites of American children’s rooms, and the collection appeared in the years when the new Yugoslav state had brought South Slav culture to American attention. The book remains among the standard English gateways to Balkan folk tale. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.