England has a great culture of letters, but when it comes to folklore, people often don’t think further than Jack and the Beanstalk. In this collection of English folktales though, we can see that the isles have a great tradition of oral storytelling beyond it.
In my ongoing pursuit of folklore from around the world, I never really stopped to consider English folktales until this book reminded me that my knowledge of it was in fact pretty scanty. Over the course of about 400 pages, I read everything kind of folktale, from your classic fairytales to stories about giants, mermaids, and ghosts, and even popular jokes and anecdotes.
The really cool thing about this book is that there’s been a real effort to preserve the way in which they were originally told, with information about how they were collected and about their tellers. The stories are generally grouped together by type, making for interesting contrasts as one goes through the various takes on similar subjects and tropes. It was especially fascinating for me to read the stories collected from nursemaids and nannies, which they often told their young charges – none of them are your typical Mother Goose fare, but often quite adventurous and even horrifying at times.
However, I did find the dialect in some of the stories made them almost impossible to read, for example ‘The Flyin’ Childer’ – I wish there were translated versions for these, or at least better annotations. I also wish there was more commentary on the short jokes and anecdotes that were collected in the volume, touching upon why these were the ones collected out of the many that must have been doubtless told throughout England, as well as why they were the ones that were retold so often.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.