# The Twelve Dancing Princesses

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-three-ravens-podcast-6092563/the-twelve-dancing-princesses
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-three-ravens-podcast-6092563/the-twelve-dancing-princesses.md
Podcast: [The Three Ravens Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-three-ravens-podcast-6092563)
Published: 2026-04-04T05:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.threeravenspodcast.com/
Audio file: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/6404e1f4c5ea8c0011811194/e/69d0178ad2e95f5131e96470/media.mp3
Processing state: processed
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-three-ravens-podcast-6092563/episodes/the-twelve-dancing-princesses
Duration seconds: 1960

## Resource

Our Lang Fairy Tale Project continues with a well-known classic, The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Should stargazers be allowed to turn invisible and hang out in young ladies' bedrooms? This is a question rather ducked by The Brother's Grimm, and it remains unanswered in Nora and Andrew Lang's "Red Fairy Book." Martin performs the story today, after which we dig into it. For example, should it be desirable to have 'velvet eyes'? Surely that would be horrifying for everyone?! If you are unfamiliar with the Lang Fairy Tales, these seminal collections were assembled between 1889 and 1913 by a married couple, folklorists and translators Nora and Andrew Lang, with most of the work done to compile them completed by Nora, also known as Leonora Blanche Alleyne. Assembled and published in 12 colour-coded "Fairy Books," the corpus the Langs put together included 798 fairy tales from across cultures, many of which had never before been translated into English. They were amongst the most influential books of their time, changing the course of children's literature - although they're hardly just for children, and often deal with quite challenging concepts. Today, purchasing a complete set of the Lang Fairy Books in good condition costs over £4,000 ($5,000+). Thankfully, the collections are all out of copyright, meaning that we can now tell these stories, in podcast form, many for the first time, and share them with a global audience, for free. Our plan is to release the stories between main series of Three Ravens, performing them straight (though with plenty of silly voices) letting the tales speak for themselves in all their madcap, sharp-edged, often quite bizarre glory. The only edits we have made are to amend some culturally-insensitive epithets, which typically pertain to ethnici…

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## Transcript

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