Hermann Hesse's fairy tales in Pictor's Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies are nowhere near the standard of his great work. Hesse thrives on the shifting, blurring, dangerous balance between fantasy and what we call reality: it is this balance between real and imagined worlds which characterizes his masterpieces Steppenwolf or the magnificent and sustained The Glass Bead Game. Only one story stands out from this collection, published in an authorized translation in Britain for the first time, Pictor's Metamorphoses itself, which tells in allegorical form his love for his second wife, the singer Ruth Winger whom he married briefly after living in an isolation he found unconducive to happiness or creation….

In these fairy tales full of stock characters—the merman, the simple wise boy, the virgin, the three brothers—Hesse limbers up for his major work, establishing links between his conscious and the deeper, unconscious world of myth...