Fairies and Witches: Fairytales and Mysteries of the Supernatural - Paperback
Fairies and Witches: Fairytales and Mysteries of the Supernatural - Paperback
by Kytka Hilmarova (Translator), Karel Weinfurter (Author)
Fairies and Witches: Fairytales and Mysteries of the Supernatural
More than a century ago, in 1920, the Prague publisher Alois Hynek issued a collection of Czech and Central European tales called O vílách a čarodějích. Its compiler was Karel Weinfurter - writer, translator, and one of the foundational figures of Czech mysticism and the occult. For Weinfurter, fairy tales were never just amusements for children. He spent his life studying the hidden and the unseen, and he read these old stories as something stranger and older than bedtime reading: vessels for what people once believed about the supernatural world pressing in at the edges of the ordinary one.
Inside are devils outwitted by peasants, princesses stranded on burning mountains, enchanted horses, werewolves, and Krakonos - the temperamental spirit of the Krkonose Mountains who has haunted the Czech imagination for centuries. By turns funny, eerie, and genuinely unsettling, these tales keep the rough edges that later, gentler retellings tend to sand away. Good wins, but it has to earn it. Hilmarova's translation stays faithful to Weinfurter's originals while letting them breathe in English, preserving their strangeness and moral weight rather than prettifying them for modern tastes.
Among the stories you'll find: The Devil and the Peasant
The Princess on the Fiery Mountain
The Enchanted Horse
Krakonos
Werewolf
The Elf and the Cook
The Devil's Flute ...and many more, drawn from a Central Europe where the line between the everyday and the supernatural ran thin - and was not always safe to cross.