Folk Tales of Britain - Narratives

Katharine M. Briggs

The Folio Society

2014

1402 páginas

1d 22h 44m

ISBN-10: 9990507562

‘Every nation needs its own collection of folk tales, and this is the fullest and most authoritative we have. To open it anywhere is to sink a shaft into the memory of a people and all that they know …’ With these words Philip Pullman introduces a new Folio Society edition of a pioneering publication. Katharine M. Briggs’s Folk Tales of Britain: Narratives is an unrivalled collection of stories, from local traditions and historical legends to shaggy dog stories and fairy tales. A cornucopia of storytelling, it is an essential part of both Britain’s heritage and the literary heritage of the world.

Katharine M. Briggs was born in 1898 to a wealthy family that had made its fortune in the coalmining industry. With no pressure to work, she was able to devote her life to her passion: the study of folklore. She set out to compile a definitive collection of Britain’s folk tales, seeking out the widest possible variety of sources, from medieval manuscripts to oral transcripts recorded in the 20th century. It became her life’s work, and only in 1971, aged 73, did she finally publish A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language. It was instantly hailed as a landmark publication.

Collected from every corner of Britain, from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands, these stories are wonderfully diverse, with famous tales like ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and ‘Robin Hood’, and others less familiar such as ‘Chimbley Charlie’. The roots and branches of these tales spread all over the world: ‘Old John and Young John’ is known in Germany, China and Ireland while ‘Jack the Robber’ is told as ‘The Clever Thief ’ in North Carolina. ‘Ashpitel’ is a Scottish version of the Cinderella story, in which the heroine meets the prince at church rather than at a ball, and is helped by a black lamb instead of a fairy godmother. Many have specific local origins, including tales of places, such as Settle in Yorkshire and Gotham in Nottinghamshire, ‘celebrated’ for their supposedly foolish inhabitants.

This beautifully bound and illustrated edition of Folk Tales of Britain is the perfect way to appreciate stories that are at the very heart of our cultural heritage. As Philip Pullman says, Katharine M. Briggs’s great achievement was to create ‘the greatest source we have in our language for these funny, coarse, uncanny, beautiful, earthy, tender, cruel, wise and mysterious old stories’.

Folk Tales of Britain: Narratives comprises the first part of A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales and is divided into 5 categories. Within these categories, each story is assigned a ‘tale-type’. These group together different versions of similar stories under headings that range from ‘Cinderella’ and ‘The fairy funeral’ to the wonderfully obscure ‘Numbskulls unable to count their own number’ and ‘One cheese sent out to bring back another.’ An index of these tale-types is included in volume I, providing a fascinating insight into common themes in stories around the world.

FABLES AND EXEMPLA:
Often just a few lines long, these frequently explain natural phenomena or use animals to illustrate a moral. Here we learn how the robin got his red breast by pulling a thorn from Christ’s brow, and that the Cornish maiden Alice was punished for her pride by being turned into a mole (still dressed in her black velvet gown).

FAIRY TALES:
These range from popular tales such as ‘Tom Thumb’ and ‘The Frog Prince’ to less-well-known stories such as ‘The Flight of Birds’ and ‘The Girl Who Went Through Fire, Water and the Golden Gate’.

JOCULAR TALES:
Bawdy or merely humorous, these tales include ‘The Miller of Abingdon’, a version of Chaucer’s ‘The Reeve’s Tale’. Others poke fun at stereotypes: a miserly Scotsman, a woman whose talk cannot be silenced by all the devils in hell, and a forgetful husband.

NOVELLE:
These longer tales are collected from more literary sources and are what Briggs terms ‘naturalistic fairy tales’, in which ordinary girls marry princes or heroes outwit robbers, but without supernatural aid.

NURSERY TALES:
These are nonsense tales, rhymes and animals stories intended for reading aloud, from ‘The Three Bears’ to ‘Chicken-Licken’ and ‘The House that Jack Built’.