“You shall stay with me now forever and we shall be very happy together”, says the Beggar to the Poor Man at the end of “The Silver Tracks”, before revealing that he is in fact Christ in disguise, there to welcome his long-suffering companion into the Garden of Paradise. It’s the kind of just-so ending common to folklore traditions the world over. And yet, taken out of context, the line could also perhaps describe something else: the way that the stories we hear as children never really disappear but travel with us forever, in the morals they impart, in the narrative structures they accustom us to, and above all else in the warmth of recognition and longing they produce when we recognize something of them in our adulthood and are ever so briefly transported.

“The Silver Tracks” is the final entry in The Laughing Prince: A Book of Jugoslav Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (1921) by the American folklorist Parker Fillmore. In his introduction, Fillmore writes that the collection brings together stories from across South Slavic cultures, though a biographical note published in another one of Fillmore’s books of folklore argues that, in fact, The Laughing Prince includes material from as far afield as Russia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland. Complementing each selection are illustrations and decorative elements by Jay van Everen, who also collaborated with Fillmore on some of his other collections of European folklore. Van Everen’s drawings place detailed renderings of humans and animals against geometric jags and swirls, cracking the frame into separate narrative shards as it suited him to be able to encapsulate more of the story’s elements.

In terms of genre, the contents of The Laughing Prince run the gamut from “gay picaresque tales of adventure”, as Fillmore puts it in his introduction, to “charming little stories of sentiment”. Vilas — nymph-like creatures who are as beautiful as they are vengeful — make several appearances, as do angels who descend from heaven to grant prophetic dreams and put peasants’ virtue to the test. The moral arcs of the selections frequently trace a goodly protagonist’s social ascent from humble origins to peerless wealth after their moral purity wins them a royal’s hand in marriage. In “The Little Singing Frog”, a Frog Prince analogue, the titular character’s sweet voice catches the ear of a passing tsarevich, who is apparently undaunted by the amphibian appearance of the maiden who possesses it. His first impression is confirmed when the frog-girl is asked to bring a flower to the palace and selects a spear of wheat instead — evidence, as the tsarevich sees it, of his bride-to-be’s unsurpassable practicality. In another story, “The Girl in the Chest”, a young woman escapes the lair of a vampire by asking for God’s aid; a prince catches sight of her in the woods after she flees and falls instantly in love. As for what the prince’s father thought of his future daughter-in-law, a dowryless commoner who surely made an unsuitable match: “the girl was so modest and lovely that the king soon agreed to the marriage”. The air of bloodshed and menace that haunts the Grimms’ fairy tales is absent here; there is no scrape, it seems, that the characters of The Laughing Prince can’t get themselves out of by virtue of their piety and loveliness.

Fillmore appears never to have visited the places whose tales so fascinated him; his introduction thanks the scholars and storytellers he consulted (albeit none by name), but he makes no mention of travels to what was then called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In any case, the stated goal of his collection is not to present an ethnographic survey of regional folklore or a scrupulous catalogue of variants but to capture the imaginations of children and their parents. As such, Fillmore makes no bones about the fact that the collection’s contents are not faithful renderings of the ones he heard from his interlocutors or read in scholarly accounts. Certain details were added or adjusted in order to better suit the fresh language of these versions. And yet, as Fillmore saw it, such changes were not really changes at all — merely a question of revealing in a new way what the original already contained, albeit in an occluded form: “Any folk tale, however bald, contains all sorts of things by implication. The true story teller, it seems to me, is he who is able to grasp these implications and turn them to his own use.”