Folk Legends of Transylvania: Forgotten Tales, Legends & Ballads from the Romanian and Hungarian Hea

Two peoples. One haunted mountain country. A thousand years of story.

Folk Legends of Transylvania gathers, in a single volume, the folk tales, legends, and ballads that the Romanian and Hungarian peoples of the Carpathians told side by side for centuries, newly translated into a warm, fireside English and drawn entirely from public-domain nineteenth-century collections.

Here are dragon-slayers and fairy-born princes, the wonder-horse ridden to the world's end, and the walled-in bride of the rising tower. Here are the outlaw ballads and the captive lovers' songs, and the rare "twin tales," in which both peoples sing the very same story in two different voices. And when night falls, the darker legends the mountains never surrendered: Vlad the Impaler as his own people truly remembered him, cruel, and just, and the restless strigoi, the true vampire of the village, feared long before the world ever learned the name Dracula.

Freshly translated and annotated, with introductions and a glossary of the region's fairies, dragons, and demons, this collection presents Transylvania as it told itself: luminous, terrible, and wholly its own. A rich resource for readers and collections in folklore, mythology, gothic literature, and Eastern European studies.