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Canadian Wonder Tales is a collection of classic Canadian folklore stories by Cyrus MacMillan. The tales in this collection have been gathered in various parts of Canada. They have been selected from a larger collection of folk-tales and folk-songs made by the writer for more academic and scientific purposes. They are not the product of the writer's imagination; they are the common possession of the folk. Many of them are still reverently believed by the Canadian Indians, and all are still told with seriousness around camp fires in forests and on plains, upon the sea and by cottage hearths. .This is the book of a soldier-student. Captain Macmillan interrupted his teaching work in Montreal to go overseas with one of our McGill Batteries, and from Somewhere in France he has asked me to stand sponsor for his volume. The author's method resembles that followed by the brothers Grimm a century ago. He has taken down from the lips of living people, pretty much as they were given to him, a series of stories which obviously contain many elements that have been handed down by oral tradition from some far-off past. They are mostly animal stories, with all the usual features of magic and transformation, articulate speech on the part of the animals, and interchange of more or less kindly offices between man and beast. The result is a collection of fables which--especially as illustrated by an eminent artist--will prove a very acceptable Christmas book for children, and will give their elders also some food for reflection. Not that there is, so far as I have been able to discover, any moral about some at least of the tales. They are not stories with a purpose. But they suggest to the adult reader the essential identity of many of the methods by which in a more or less remote antiquity the human race expressed itself in various parts of the world.

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9781774412190

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Cyrus Macmillan, PC (September 12, 1882 - June 29, 1953) was a Canadian academic, writer and politician. Born in Wood Islands, Prince Edward Island, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1900 and a Master of Arts degree in 1903 from McGill University. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1909 and started as a lecturer at McGill. During World War I, he served with the 7th Canadian Siege Battery. After the war, he became an Associate Professor and in 1923 was appointed Chairman of the English department. From 1940 to 1947, he was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science. In June 1930, he was appointed Minister of Fisheries in the cabinet of Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King. He was defeated in July's 1930 federal election in the Prince Edward Island riding of Queen's. In 1940, he was elected to the House of Commons of Canada in the riding of Queen's. He was defeated in 1945. From 1943 to 1946, he was the Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of National Defence for Air. He is the author of McGill and Its Story, 1821-1921 (1921), Canadian Wonder Tales (1918) and Canadian Fairy Tales (1922)

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