ISBN: 0-226-07493-5 (clothbound); 0-226-07494-3 (paperbound)
ISBN: 978-0-226-37582-3 (ebook)
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-18341
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1965 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved
Published 1965.
Paperback edition 1968
Printed in the United States of America
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FOLKTALES OF England
EDITED BY
Katharine M. Briggs
AND
Ruth L. Tongue
FOREWORD BY
Richard M. Dorson
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago and London
Folktales OF THE WORLD
GENERAL EDITOR : RICHARD M. DORSON
Foreword
In Victorian England, folklore flowered as a living study in all save one major branch, the folktale. The ballad has proved England’s strength and joy, ever since Bishop Percy brought forth his version of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765; thereafter balladry developed its own cult. Those antiquaries who baptized the field of folklore in the first half of the nineteenth century concentrated their efforts on popular customs and usages. When the mammoth two-volume edition of John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities, edited by Sir Henry Ellis, Keeper of Manuscripts of the British Museum, was published in London in 1813, its vast, disorderly assemblage of “bygones” captivated English intellectuals. The interest kindled by these tomes eventually led to the devising of the word “folk-lore” in 1846 by antiquary William John Thoms and, after the fresh stimulus supplied by the anthropologist E. B. Tylor, to the formation of a vigorous Folk-Lore Society in 1878. From 1878 until the outbreak of the First World War, the society and its stellar figures, enormously gifted private scholars such as Andrew Lang and Sidney Hartland, Sir George Laurence Gomme and Edward Clodd and Alfred Nutt—who each served as president—developed folklore into an acknowledged science. The influence of folklore science extended into many fields of learning—the classics and anthropology, history and literature, philology and psychology, and even affected imperial policy, for colonial administrators around the globe collected folklore to understand better the peoples they governed.
In spite of changed theories, the central emphasis of English folklore studies remained upon custom. The rationalist antiquaries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries uncovered curious specimens of ancient rites and feasts as examples of pagan and papist superstition. The late nineteenth-century school of anthropological folklorists dissected archaic customs as survivals of primitive stages in human culture and thought. Today the English Folklore Society continues to issue its series of British Calendar Customs, stemming directly from the Popular Antiquities of John Brand.1
Amidst the ferment and excitement aroused by the new science of folklore, the folktale necessarily came in for its share of attention. The impact of the famous collection begun by the brothers Grimm in 1812 made itself felt in England, as in all Europe, and a still standard edition of their Household Tales appeared in 1884 in the English translation of Margaret Hunt, with a lengthy introduction by Andrew Lang, who analyzed the primitive ideas concealed in the tales. Yet the fact had become painfully evident, by the close of Victoria’s reign, that the treasure trove of fairy tales unearthed for nearly every European country, in replica of the Grimms’ discovery in Germany, would not be found in England. In Scotland and Ireland vast stockpiles of Märchen had been, and would continue to be, collected from the mouths of villagers. Why had a blight struck merry England?
No one has yet produced a satisfactory answer. From settlers of English stock in the southern Appalachians, American collectors suddenly chanced, in the 1920’s, upon a wealth of magical folk narrative, centering on Jack the Giant Killer. But English collectors have gathered no such harvest. In 1890, when Edwin Sidney Hartland assembled a volume comparable to the present one, English Fairy and Other Folk Tales, he located only half a dozen “nursery tales” to place among his seventy-two stories and culled the rest from “sagas” about local events, fairies, ghosts, witches, giants, and devils, including a packet of eight “drolls,” the term then current for comical tales. (The proportions have remained fairly constant in the present work, proof enough how few Märchen have come to light in England after a century and a half of scattered searching.) Hartland, a scholar of the first rank, remained always faithful to his sources and printed his narratives exactly as they appeared in the chapbooks, county collections, table-books, and journal of the Folk-Lore Society. Few of these sources presented the tales in the precise words of their tellers, for the concept of scientific accuracy in field-work would be a long time in gaining acceptance. Yet an oral past lay behind them, as Hartland unerringly perceived in making selections from Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology (1828), Mrs. Bray’s A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy (three volumes, 1836), and Robert Hunt’s Cornish collection, Popular Romances from the West of England (two volumes, 1865). Other favourite resources included such stalwart compendiums as the Shropshire Folk-Lore of Charlotte S. Burne (1883) and William Henderson’s Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1866). Some of the county collections, however, were published subsequent to Hartland’s gleaning.
A volume similar in aim issued by Joseph Jacobs that same year achieved more popular success but fell below Hartland’s standards. Jacobs, a knowledgeable folklorist who stressed diffusion rather than survival in folktales and is known for a valuable edition of Aesop’s Fables, published English Fairy Tales in 1890 and More English Fairy Tales in 1894. To compensate for the lack of available oral texts in England, Jacobs slipped across the border to lowland Scotland for selections, roamed to the United States and Australia, and even adapted ballad stories into tales. He rewrote all his sources to please children. Wanting to have and eat his cake, he provided an appendix with data on his altering and blending of incidents, and cited some parallels in Great Britain and on the Continent. This veneer of scholarship gave Jacobs’s volumes an undeserved claim to authenticity. Unlike most other purveyors of children’s tales, Jacobs knew better, and defended himself, particularly in the preface to the second volume, with assertions that the Grimms and Asbjörnsen had used printed sources and revamped stories, and that any writer familiar with his native tradition could indulge in the same storytelling license enjoyed by the folk. In the history of folklore studies, no claim has proved more spurious and harmful than this assertion of license to tamper with texts. Jacobs’s vain comparison of his English Fairy Tales with the Märchen of the Grimm brothers—a fashionable comparison in many countries over the past century—had no substance. The Grimms in Germany, and Asbjörnsen and Moe in Norway, pioneered in the direct collection of oral folktales from storytellers, but Jacobs engaged in no such field-work.
The inferiority complex in folktale matters under which England has so long suffered proceeds from the aristocratic status of Märchen. Hartland and Jacobs felt the need to include “fairy tales” in their titles, the term adopted in English as an equivalent for Märchen. These lengthy, adventuresome, highly structured fictions filled with magical episodes and royal personages seemed indeed prize treasures when the Grimms first heralded them to the world. By contrast, the brief, formless Sagen, or legends, tied to local places, events, and characters, appeared of little general interest, and the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen (1816–18) was never translated into English. Only in 1959 did recognition come to the lowly legend, when the newly organized International Society for Folk Narrative Research appointed a committee to investigate and co-ordinate legend studies and catalogues. Yet for legendary traditions, and legend scholarship, England can point with pride to the beginnings of folklore inquiries.
As early as 1828, in his work on The Fairy Mythology, Thomas Keightley explored one branch of local tradition. “Fairy” in his title applied not to Märchen but to reports about elflike beings who were regarded as real. Keightley was born in Ireland but came to London to make a Grub Street livelihood producing schoolbooks, histories, and editions of popular authors. Wracked with illness, boastful yet naïve, Keightley published in The Fairy Mythology and Tales and Popular Fictions (1834) two original treatises on folk narrative deserving recognition. He contributed four fairy legends known from his youth to the pioneer collection, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland issued by his fellow Anglo-Irishman, T. Crofton Croker, in 1825; later, after breaking with Croker, he confessed to decorating them, and to transplanting a German legend onto Irish soil. But Keightley quickly perceived the rules of folklore research and the nature of folklore materials. For The Fairy Mythology he assembled scattered sources from all over Europe and the Middle East—he claimed to know over twenty languages—and made their connections apparent. To compile his substantial section on England, he scoured twelfth- and thirteenth-century chronicles by William of Newbridge and Gervase of Tilbury; picked up the trail again in the Elizabethan age with a chapbook on Robin Goodfellow used by Shakespeare and the discussion of bogies in the 1665 edition of Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft; extracted a few nuggets from John Aubrey’s seven-teenth-century notebooks; and so made his way to his own day. In the later, expanded edition of 1850 Keightley fattened his offering from interim reports of local collectors. Thus he wrote:
There is no stronger proof of the neglect of what Mr. Thoms has very happily designated “Folk-lore” in this country, than the fact of there having been no account given anywhere of the Pixies or Pisgies of Devonshire and Cornwall, till within these last few years. In the year 1836, Mrs. Bray, a lady well known as the author of several novels, and wife of a clergyman at Tavistock, published, in a series of letters to Robert Southey, interesting descriptions of the part of Devonshire bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy. In this work there is given an account of the Pixies, from which we derive the following information:2
With such assistance Keightley was able to chart the course of the “vairies, farisees, frairies, farys,” as they were alternatively called, through southern and northern counties, including several narrations he himself had heard. After the collectors he moved to the poets, from Chaucer to Spenser, who had known fairy traditions at first hand. All these items of fairylore Keightley sought to fit into a scheme of racial geography. Strongly influenced by the Deutsche Mythologie of Jacob Grimm (which would be translated into English in four volumes by James S. Stallybrass, 1882–88), he theorized that the fairy belief descended from a primitive “Gotho-Germanic” religion, and thence spread to the weaker “Celtic-Cymric” peoples. Accordingly the Norwegian nisse and German kobold preceded the Irish fairy and Scottish brownie. The family relationship was, however, apparent, and the fairies of England, like their northern brethren, were “divided into two classes—the rural Elves, inhabiting the woods, fields, mountains, and caverns; and the domestic or house-spirits, usually called Hobgoblins and Robin Good-fellows.”3
The explorations of Keightley prepared the way for a major synthesis by Hartland, written in the changed atmosphere of post-Darwinian researches. His The Science of Fairy Tales, An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology, published in 1891, is an ingenious and masterful exposition of the laws and formulas perceptible in traditions about the elfin beings of legend and the heroes and heroines of popular tales. Hartland supplemented Keightley’s materials with collections issued in the preceding forty years—his bibliography of sources covered twelve pages—and applied the investigative technique of the anthropological folklorists. He proposed to show how the fairy belief reflected savage ideas about magic and demonology which still survived in the state of civilization. Fairies, ghosts, witches, the gods of classical myths, the ogres of popular sagas all ultimately derived from the imaginative conjurations of primitive man, who guarded himself against these dread beings with taboo, charm, sacrifice, and propitiatory rite. Hartland quoted the London Daily. Telegraph of May 17, 1884, as reporting the arrest of two women in Clonmel who stole into a neighbor’s house and placed on a hot shovel a three-year-old child they suspected of being a changeling left by the fairies. Examples such as these proved to Hartland and his fellow folklorists in the wake of Tylor that the notions of the universe once held by savages still persisted among the “lower orders.” In Märchen too, which were fictions absorbing ancient beliefs, and often took the form of sagas (legends), the same order of unnatural or supernatural creatures could plainly be seen. Hartland discussed at length the worldwide Märchen centering on a swan-maiden who is changed from a bird to a beautiful woman when she removes her feathers to go swimming; he concludes that a totemic worship of a goddess underlies the story. The Märchen hero in Fairyland who is unaware of time passing corresponds to the Sleeping Hero of national legend who succours his people in time of crisis; both figures descend from a heathen god never totally suppressed by Christianity. Jack the Giant Killer and King Arthur are one.
In a splendid opening chapter Hartland described “The Art of Story-Telling,” giving extracts and illustrations of narrative practices from many cultures, and stressing their uniformity and faithful adherence to tradition.
Whether told by men to men in the bazaar or the coffee-house of the East, or by old men or women to children in the sacred recesses of the European home, or by men to a mixed assembly during the endless nights of the Arctic Circle, or in the huts of the tropical forest . . . the endeavour to render to the audience just that which the speaker has himself received from his predecessors is paramount.4
And Hartland cautioned the collector in turn to ensure that the “documents are gathered direct from the lips of the illiterate story-teller” and set down with all their imperfections and coarseness. Only thus could contributions to the science of folklore be registered. Literary renderings of traditions might serve to amuse, but had little other purpose.
This ringing declaration, made in 1891, can still serve as a creed for the folklorist today. The method of precise field work demanded by Hartland is unquestioned in scholarly circles. Hartland’s theoretical premises are more debatable. He contended that the science of fairy tales dealt not with a juvenile world of fantasy and entertainment, but with a primitive universe still visible in the nineteenth century, in Märchen and sagas alike. The Märchen so prized by continental scholars turn out to be but an offshoot of the heroic legends so deep-rooted in England.
The legend studies of Keightley and Hartland depended of course on legend collectors. Who can be called the first deliberate collector of English traditional tales? A clear-cut answer may not be possible, since the question really hinges on the degree of accuracy one demands, and throughout the nineteenth century the concept of fidelity to the oral text never won a complete victory. However, a first of a kind must go to Mrs. Bray and her three volumes, issued in 1836 and reissued in 1879 in two volumes under its best-known title, The Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy, with a more revealing subtitle: “Their Natural History, Manners, Customs, Superstitions, Scenery, Antiquities, Eminent Persons, etc. In a Series of Letters to the Late Robert Southey, Esq.” The widow of a clergyman and antiquarian of Dartmoor, Edward Atkyns Bray, and a writer of reputation in her own right, Mrs. Bray undertook her epistolary narrative of Devonshire traditions in response to a fertile suggestion made by her friend the poet Southey, in a letter he wrote her in 1831.
I should like to see from you what English literature yet wants—a good specimen of local history, not the antiquities only, nor the natural history, nor both together (as in White’s delightful book about Selbourne), nor the statistics, but everything about a parish that can be made interesting—all of its history, traditions, and manners that can be saved from oblivion . . . not omitting some of those ‘short and simple annals’ of domestic life which ought not to be forgotten.5
Southey here was proposing a new ingredient in a well-established and prospering English genre, the county survey of Roman and Saxon ruins (antiquities) coupled with commentary on geologic and topographic features (natural history). Now he added the local customs and beliefs which in 1846 Thoms would designate folklore. They were themselves a species of antiquities—the term “folklore” replaced Brand’s phrase “popular antiquities”—and their local associations wedded them to scenic landmarks.
The total quantity of folk tradition included by Mrs. Bray in her flowery musings was not large, but her method of discussing local traditions directly rather than embroidering them in fictional sketches was new, and this impressed later collectors. One letter she devoted entirely to the pixies or “pisgies” of Devon, in another she set forth some fabulous legends about Sir Francis Drake, and in a third she spoke about “vestiges of ancient superstitions.” From her mixed brew to a volume wholly concerned with local traditions was an easy step.
