The Book of English Folk Tales

by Sybil Marshall

  For the archaeologist as well, folk tales can occasionally give a sudden flash of understanding; a concrete example of this may prove interesting. The Icelandic Sagas (surely some of the most comprehensive and exciting collections of genuine folk tales in existence) make many references to objects called ‘life-stones’. In the tales, these life-stones appear to have magic-amulet properties, but are always mentioned in the context of the warrior’s most treasured possession, his sword. Folklorists were puzzled as to what these ‘life-stones’ could be; meanwhile, at the same time, archaeologists were equally puzzled about the objects found in warriors’ graves of the same period, which they designated ‘sword-beads’. These were large beads, which could be elaborately worked of gold inset with garnets, or made of meerschaum, of rock crystal, or of plain pottery; the thing they had in common was that they were always found lying next to the sword, usually by the side of the blade, a little way down from the hilt. Then, in the course of research centred specifically on swords of the Anglo-Saxon period in England, a flash of inspired insight made the connection. The life-stones of the tales and the sword-beads of the archaeologists were one and the same thing. Many a sword had its ‘good-luck’ bead. The warrior probably wore the bead (or life-stone) on a thong round his neck when alive; in his grave, it was attached to his sword, the thong looped round the sword hilt, so that the bead lay alongside the blade. The thong rotted away, and left the bead lying.

  Then there is the study of the tales themselves, that is, with regard to the different types within the genre as a whole, the different but ever-recurring motifs, the location of different variations, and so on; this is the realm of the modern academic folklorist per se as, for example, the late Katharine Briggs, whose four-volume Dictionary of British Folk-Tales will be referred to later.

  And lastly, though by no means least, there is great value in them for the entertainer, by which I really mean, any story-teller. Teachers of young children, particularly, are for ever on the watch for stories to tell or to read, for it seems that mankind is born with an avid appetite for details of other lives beside the one his own small span of corporeal existence grants to him; it is as though he seizes from his earliest years upon this way of enlarging the bounds of his own life. Teachers look to folk tales more and more as the treasury from which they can draw, day after day and year after year, for their exacting needs. (In passing, it is worth remarking how the majority of teachers will scour the world for tales to tell their pupils and forget that their own country has a wealth of them. Very few other than the so-called ‘fairy tales’, and the deservedly well-worn ‘matter of England’ about King Arthur, ever find their place in our schools.)

  The need and desire for stories is, apparently, a psychological one that people never grow out of, which must be why they sit, hour after hour, with their eyes fixed on a television screen. The box in the corner is today’s equivalent of the story-teller. Sound radio is nearer still to the original, since it deals with words more than with pictures, and thereby allows more scope to individual imagination. It is also an interesting thought that both radio and television have proved beyond doubt the need for humanity to share ‘community tales’ with each other. Coronation Street and The Archers provide simultaneously membership of a closed community and the tales of lives within it. Perhaps both are truly necessary to a great many who feel lost and isolated in the conditions of modern society. Indeed it may not be going too far to designate either of these programmes (and others of a similar nature) as ‘modern folk tales’.

  There are still many, however, who love the old tales better than the new, and like to read them for themselves. The purpose of this book is to give Everyman a chance to do just that. I hope the entertainment value in the wide variety of types of tale I have selected will be enough to keep him reading, whatever other ‘spinoffs’ of interest there may be. But the comfortable simplicity of such a statement of aim or purpose disappears Tike dew against the sun’ when it comes to deciding what to put in, and what to leave out. What constitutes a ‘folk’ tale?

  Much has been written about this, and it is no part of my task here to make a comparative study of such academic research. Nevertheless, everyone who for any purpose begins to deal seriously with the genre has perforce to reach some conclusions of his own before being able to proceed. I shall, in the course of this introductory dissertation, be obliged to reach a point where I can state fairly firmly the ‘definition’ I have made for myself; but this requires a lot of thought, and much weighing of other people’s arguments. I begin with two main ideas. One is that any definition seems to depend upon the purpose to which the tales are being put; where there is a declared and specific purpose, the definition of the author or compiler (implied if never exactly stated) is angled towards the purpose, and the selection of tales thereafter is governed by it. The second is that in my own case the main criterion on which I begin my selection is the question of a tale’s intrinsic validity (call it ‘truth’ if you will) with regard to the nature of the folk and their philosophy.

  Sir James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, writes, ‘Folktales are a faithful reflection of the world as it appeared to the primitive mind.’ Sir James was, of course, an antiquarian/anthropologist with a specific purpose in mind. He was looking backwards into time past, and was concerned mainly with ‘primitive’ minds. With his attention fixed upon his immediate purpose, he ignored the fact that the present is the child of the past, and the future of the present. He tells many an excellent tale in passing, if in brief, to prove a specific point, but without intending to supply entertainment for those who do not care much about ‘the succession to the priesthood of Diana in Aricia’. It would amount almost to an insult to apply his (implied) definition to Coronation Street or The Archers – or, on second thoughts, would it? If one were to substitute for his word ‘primitive’, which has pejorative connotations, the word ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’, it would be apt. Are not those programmes ‘a faithful reflection of the world as it appears’ to the countless thousands of their fans?

  In an essay, on ‘Myths, Legends and Fairy Tales in the Lives of Children’, which stands as an introduction to her brilliant book for teachers, The Ordinary and the Fabulous, Elizabeth Cook writes:

  In rough and ready phrasing myths are about gods, legends are about heroes, and fairy tales are about woodcutters and princesses. A rather more respectable definition might run: myths are about the creation of all things, the origin of evil, and the salvation of man’s soul; legends and sagas are about the doings of kings and peoples in the period before records were kept; fairy tales, folk tales and fables are about human behaviour in a world of magic, and often become incorporated in legends.

  She then goes on to say that while critics argue endlessly about the differences, to the ordinary reader they all appear very much alike. In other words, she is admitting that, in this particular field, any definitions are more academic than practical, except to the person attempting to make them. But she hits the nail on the head, I think, by saying that ‘folk tales are about human behaviour’, and the only quarrel I would have with her is that I would have wanted to qualify the rest of the statement by the inclusion of the word ‘often’ – that is ‘often’ (but not always) ‘in a world of magic’.

  Katharine Briggs, in her monumental work already cited, took on the enormous task of collecting, collating, categorizing and commenting upon the huge corpus of English folk tale (though she has to admit that she had perforce to leave a good deal out). She divided the mass of her material into two main categories, ‘Folk Narrative’ and ‘Folk Legend’, and distinguished between them by stating that the former is composed of ‘folk fiction’ and the latter of matter ‘which was once believed to be true’.

  I have some difficulty in accepting this rather arbitrary distinction. Fiction is, from its etymological root, something deliberately made up, and therefore declaring itself to be ‘not true’. That fiction (particularly the works of creative literary geni
us) is often a better reflection of the human condition than a bald recital of true facts, cannot be denied, and that the folk would have understood the metaphorical truth of such fictions as they heard, I am equally prepared to believe; in fact, this is the cornerstone of my argument set out below. Nevertheless, I find it almost impossible to conceive of the folk actually deliberately concocting tales from no root of factual or historical truth whatever. My contention is that however fantastic genuine folk tales may be (as for example, the story of Bolster and Jecholiah), they have grown to what they are from some germ of belief somewhere in centuries long past. If they had sprung, ready-made, as it were, like Athene from the thigh of Jove, the folk would not have claimed them, nor repeated them without qualification. That they embroidered the basic elements of a story with a wealth of fantastic detail as it passed from mouth to mouth, I accept entirely and without question, and this must blur the dividing line between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’. ‘Folk narrative’ must have included fiction – which is somewhat different from classing all folk narrative as fiction.

  The so-called ‘fairy tales’ are a case in point; not the stories of folk who have encountered the little people, which in my opinion are genuine folk tales, but those concerning ‘princesses and woodcutters’. These are, I believe, courtly in origin, fiction deliberately created by court minstrels for the beguiling of the knightly classes, which gradually descended to the peasants and, later still, to children. (We now use the term ‘fairy tale’ very loosely, and collections made for children often include some ‘folk’ tales, which again helps to confuse the issue.) I would exclude the courtly ‘fairy tales’ from the folk tale genre on the grounds that, though they may have been told by the folk, they were not believed, either factually or metaphorically; whereas I think the genuine folk tale contained something in which the teller could believe, and indeed, often did, in all its detail. Let me give an example from my own experience.

  As a child, I remember the occasion when my mother and her closest friend discussed, in my hearing, a dreadful tragedy that had occurred in a village just too far away from us for actual contact to be made with the people who lived there. It was harvest-time, and the women were out in the fields (as ours were) helping their menfolk to get the corn in. A mother had taken her baby with her, put it down in the shade of a stook, and left it asleep there. When she returned to it, it had been eaten by a sow that had escaped its sty and wandered into the field. My mother and my ‘aunt’ (by courtesy) were horrified by the tragedy, and shed tears of anguished sympathy combined with terror that it might have been me, or my cousin, Marjorie, to whom it had happened. They believed it absolutely.

  Twenty-five years or so later, we were in the middle of a war when every pair of hands was needed to gather crops. I was staying with my sister, a farmer’s wife. A field of peas was ready for picking, and we went to help get them in, along with a lot of other women from the village. My daughter was eight months old, and I took her with me, in her pram, leaving her at the side of the field. She fell out, having managed yet again to escape her straps, and was found by one of the village women sleeping quite peacefully among the pea rows. The woman grabbed her up, brought her to me, and proceeded in great agitation to recount the dreadful fate of a baby who had done exactly the same thing as my own in a village a few miles away – in a pea-field – and had been devoured by a hungry sow. There is no question whatsoever that my baby’s rescuer believed implicitly what she was telling me. So might I have done, had I not remembered the first time I had heard it. Years afterwards, when I had become an avid reader of folklore myself, I met it in a nineteenth-century book, which stated that it had by then been long in existence, turning up somewhere fresh every year with the details slightly changed. My guess is that it goes back to a real tragic occurrence when a wild sow did attack a peasant child, probably in the early Middle Ages.

  Now if we need to question why people in the twentieth century who are not ‘primitive-minded’, not gullible country bumpkins, not now out of touch with the big world outside their village community, should believe such tales, the answer is that there are various levels of ‘truth’. A tale such as the one I have just recounted is ‘a faithful reflection of the world’ as it appears to them (and as no fictional courtly ‘fairy tale’ could possibly be). It reflects the kind of tragedy that does, all too often, disturb the tenor of rural life – the child who is drowned, run over by a tractor, gored by a bull, smothered in a wheat-drier – and so on. In a small community, one person’s tragedy is everybody’s tragedy, because next time the little corpse might be brought home to anybody. Their belief is in the reflection, but it is nevertheless very real. And the reason for this is to be found in the metaphorical nature of the language they have always used, and continue to use. Whether it be a question of the use of metaphor, or ritual sacrifice, ‘the folk’ everywhere are conditioned to the idea of substituting the particular for the general, the reflection for the reality.

  It has often been noted what an extraordinarily metaphorical language English is. We hardly ever open our mouths to speak without employing some kind of metaphor, usually so common that it passes unnoticed, and so general that we should find difficulty in making plain our meaning easily without it. Behind such a metaphorical way of communicating lies metaphorical thinking.

  Country folk speak much in proverbs, sayings, and saws, many of them very old indeed. The difference between a proverb and a saying is, I think, that the first is probably used nationwide, and the second may be localized. A proverb is a crystal of wisdom left at the bottom of the crucible of human experience, summed up in a few words. The metaphor employed is usually a very homely one, so that all who will may benefit by it. ‘When the cat’s away, the mice will play.’ Everybody knows what it means – but how many pages of psychological jargon would it take to explain such ordinary reactions of human nature to specific conditions, I wonder? The proverb does it in eight words; the difficulties of ‘mice’ in the presence of a ‘cat’ are those that peasants have had good reason to understand since time began. The old fable (folk tale) ‘Belling the Cat’ simply extends the metaphor of the proverb.

  There are hundreds upon hundreds of these sayings ready at hand for use (which is what some people seem to find so reprehensible). ‘Visitors and fish stink after three days’ keeping’, my father used to say. How many a host or hostess must have acknowledged the truth of that one, for instance!

  Far from showing sluggish, uncreative minds or thought processes, it seems to me that they incorporate the very essence of English wit; and they have other, social, uses. Within a small community, this type of short-hand communication is like a badge of membership, a token of’belonging’, while at the same time relating the local and particular to the general in the world outside the community. Moreover, we ‘heir it’ (as my folks would say) from our ancestors. It is undeniably part of our cultural inheritance.

  We are wont to call ourselves Anglo-Saxon – a foolish term, like calling ourselves English-English, since there was so very little difference between Angles and Saxons anyway. We could be better described as Celtic-Norse. The indigenous Britons at the beginning of our history were basically Celtic (with a smattering of Latin blood thrown in); the successive waves of invaders – Angles, Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans – were all basically Teutonic. From the Celtic strain we inherit the love of words, the need to use words as a means of coming to terms with experience, the willingness to believe in mysteries of a supernatural kind, and the desire to communicate joy or sorrow with our neighbours. From the Norsemen we inherit a fear of the supernatural, a stolid acceptance of the idea of fate or ill-fortune, and the resolution to meet it with as much outward indifference as possible (the ‘stiff upper lip’); but from them too we have the habit of attempting to avert it by refusing to name what we fear, and to speak in riddles (or metaphors). From both sides, of course, we inherit the love of a good tale.

  The Norseman had a custom called ‘kenning’
– that is, of not calling a spade a spade. He invented some euphemism for almost every article upon which his life depended, so he might well have called a spade ‘disturber of the ground’ or ‘worm-slicer’, if he had need to invent a kenning for such an instrument. To a Viking, his sword was not simply a sword, but ‘Odin’s flame’, ‘the widow-maker’ or ‘the scabbard’s tongue’; his arrows were ‘birds of the string’, ‘glad-fliers’ or ‘the rain of the bow’; his shield was ‘the land of arrows’ or ‘the net of spears’; his ships (among a wealth of other kennings) were ‘ravens of the wind’, and the sea was ‘the whale’s way’.

  As an example of how we continue to follow in their linguistic footsteps, consider the number of expressions we employ to avoid admitting that human beings die. There’s a lovely passage in Noël Coward’s play, This Happy Breed, when someone makes a remark to the effect that dear mother has passed on, and is met by an exasperated rejoinder that mother neither passed on, passed over, nor passed out – she died! The mirror up to nature: people in our society rarely die. They depart this life, pass on, pass over, pass out, peg out, breathe their last, fall asleep in Jesus, hop the twig, snuff the candle, kick the bucket, slip their cable, give up the ghost, shrug off this mortal coil, are gathered to their fathers, turn up their toes, fly to Abraham’s bosom, cease to be, go to meet their maker, and ‘are no more’. The list is as endless as a Viking’s kennings for his horse or his boat. The translators of the Bible into the Authorized Version, and their contemporary, Shakespeare, relied absolutely upon the people’s ability to interpret metaphor. Until very recently, the Bible in particular was, like proverbs and country sayings, universal verbal currency that opened up the lanes of communication. We still give honour and praise to the poet who can create striking images, that is, present reflections of experience to which we can relate.