H.C. Andersen's "The Snow Queen," George Macdonald's "The Magic Mirror," G.K. Chesterton's "The Coloured Lands," and Owen Barfield's "The Child and the Giant," along with Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine, comprise the fairy tale influences. With its theme of the ultimately doomed romance between the water-sprite Undine and the knight Huldbrand, Undine is one of the loveliest bittersweet productions of the German Romantic movement. Though widely available it is also widely forgotten and, besides Lewis' ties to it, is well deserving of being reprinted.

The pieces "Letters from Hell: Letter III" by Valdemar Thisted and John Magowan's "Fastosus and Avaro" both consist of conversations with devils, and are putative influences on Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. While suffering from the now somewhat dated construct of presenting theological/philosophical concepts through a dialogue between characters of differing points of view, they are an interesting counterpoint to the more openly fantastical works presented.

Another fascinating and seldom seen piece is Kenneth Grahame's First Whisper of The Wind in the Willows. First edited and published by K. Grahame's widow in 1944 [rpt. as My Dearest Mouse - The Wind In The Willows Letters (1988)], it collects Grahame's 1907 letters to his son which told stories of Mole, Ratty, Badger and Mr. Toad), whose adventures were later collected and published as The Wind in the Willows (1908). The reprinting here excludes the reproduction of the letters' crossings-out and rewordings present in the original edition, which perhaps of interest to a textual scholar, intrude on a smooth reading and appreciation of the stories. While it does include a series of story-letters which are primarily about Mr. Toad's adventures, it excludes the non-canon animal story "Bertie's Escapade" -- Bertie being a pig -- which was neither a letter, nor original to First Whisper....

Tales Before Narnia also includes tales of Christian love and of coping with loss (Kipling, Williams). Sir Walter Scott's "The Tapestried Chamber" is a fine and oft-reprinted old-school ghost tale, while C.F. Hall's wonderfully humourous story of time travel gone somewhat awry is reminiscent in spirit of H. Kuttner's Proud Robot stories.

However, in my book, the best piece in the whole collection is Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Waif Woman. A Cue - From a Saga" -- a story which wonderfully captures the bleakness of Icelandic sagas, while purveying a message of modesty and respect of others. I enjoyed "The Waif Woman" both because it was not something I would have expected from R.L. Stevenson, because the story seemed to mask a lot of underlying themes, and also largely because I very much enjoyed the absence of a happy ending, which would have ruined the story.

Tales Before Narnia, besides being of interest to fans and students of C.S. Lewis, provides a sufficiently wide array of stories, that while not everyone will thrill to every story (however seminal some might be in their genre), certainly everyone should find something to their taste. The introductory and appendix materials are well balanced between being informative and succinct, as well as ably pointing out the stories' links to C.S. Lewis' works without getting bogged down into arcane academic controversies. Certainly, between Andersen's "The Snow Queen," Fouqué Undine and Grahame's "Mr. Toad Letters" a reader will already have gotten his money's worth of fantasy classics, the remainder being rather delicious if variegated icing on the cake.