Of the many books by Sabine Baring-Gould, only six are collections of short fiction, not counting his volumes of fairy tales and other stories for children. He wrote far more novels (around thirty-five) and more than twenty guide books and accounts of his travels--to Iceland as a young man in 1861 and to parts of the Continent, where he spent most of his childhood. As a parson in Yorkshire he began bringing out his Lives of the Saints (1872-1889), which eventually ran to seventeen volumes. As a pioneer song collector and folklorist, he published more than twenty volumes, including the collection of West Country ballads that he considered his "principal achievement." He wrote biographies of such figures as Napoleon, historical studies of "Oddities and Strange Events," and two popular studies in comparative mythology, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1866, 1868), which reached thirty-five printings by 1914 and remained in print into...