Roger Lancelyn Green; Authority on Children’s Literature of Victorian Era

Roger Lancelyn Green, whose retelling of the myths, legends and fairy tales of yesteryear became favored stories for children, died Thursday at the age of 68, the British press reported this week.

Green, an authority on children’s literature of the Victorian Era, wrote nearly 100 books of stories, literature and history for young and old, including highly praised revisits to such classics as “King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “Heroes of Greece and Troy.”

In 1979, he published a two-volume edition of the letters of Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice, and wrote biographies of children’s story writers, including Carroll, Andrew Lang, J. M. Barrie and A. E. W. Mason, besides editing journals on Rudyard Kipling and Sherlock Holmes.

Hia “Into Other Worlds” in 1958 was an examination of the science fiction genre, beginning with the ancient Greeks’ fascination with the stars.

Green’s 1946 book about children’s authors since 1800, “Tellers of Tales,” made the subject appropriate for academic study.

Before becoming a writer, Green was a schoolmaster, antiquarian bookseller, actor and a librarian of Merton College, Oxford. The cause and place of his death were not reported.