English Fairy Tales Research Articles

English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales (review)

For the generations who grew up reading Joseph Jacobs's collections of fairy tales—side by side with the rainbow books of his arch-rival, Andrew Lang—it is a special pleasure to re-explore the English stories in this elegant edition replete with the original illustrations by J. D. Batten and an informative introduction by Donald Haase. For folklorists, storytellers, and Victorian scholars, the volume is a significant cultural artifact, encapsulating the approaches, practices, and debates about fairy lore so vigorously discussed in the 1890s, the golden age of folklore collecting in which it was produced.

English fairy tales; and, More English fairy tales

The first compilation of the full first-edition texts of the classic fairy tale collections by Joseph Jacobs, with Jacobs' original prefaces and annotations. In these two classic collections, first published in 1890 and 1894, Joseph Jacobs combined folklore, children's literature, and the eclectic scholarship of the Victorian era to create a storehouse of tales that inhabited the imaginations of children and adults for generations. Here readers first met Tom Tit Tot, Molly Whuppie, and Jack the Giant-Killer, and first read the stories of the Three Little Pigs, the Three Bears, and Henny-Penny. Jacobs' daring collections challenged conventional thinking about the meaning of folk, the individual artistry behind folktales, and the boundaries between folklore and literature, anticipating modern developments in folklore studies. His original editions of these 87 classic tales, along with the original illustrations, are reprinted in this new volume, offering readers an unsurpassed understanding of the development of the classic fairy tale in late Victorian England. Reprints Jacobs' original versions of these 87 classic tales exactly as they were first published more than a century ago Illustrated with the original block prints by John Batten

Written for Children: Two Eighteenth-Century English Fairy Tales

This essay discusses two eighteenth-century English literary fairy tales for children. The first, "The Dice Box," included by Horace Walpole in his six Hieroglyphic Tales (1785), written for the nine-year-old niece of a friend, probably in 1757, is unique, surreal in its nonsense, Rabelaisian with sophisticated sexual innuendo. In sharp contrast Jane Johnson's "A Very Pretty Story," the earliest known English fairy tale for children, written in 1744 and published for the first time in 2001 by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, who have recently acquired the manuscript, is decorous and benign, and was extemporized by a mother for her two small children. Both authors draw on French sources, particularly on Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy and, in Walpole's case, on Anthony Hamilton, and the article discusses the influence of these on eighteenth-century English writing.

Remembrance of Things False

M ore than 60 years ago, British psychologist Frederick Bartlett issued what amounted to a consumer alert regarding a common mental product-memory. Remembering events one has witnessed or experienced rests on a process of mental construction that tends to build in errors and outright fabrications, Bartlett asserted in Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1932). In his most famous experiment, Bartlett had college students read a North American Indian folk tale, War of the Ghosts, and then tested their recall of it on several occasions. Individuals mangled the story more with each succeeding attempt to remember it, notably by changing elements of the legend to match their own expectations, altering the form of the story to that of an English fairy tale, and sometimes even adding a moral to it. People use frameworks of knowledge about the world based on prior experience to interpret and remember events, Bartlett theorized. This approach proves more efficient than cramming the brain with one memory after another, each stored in its entirety within a cavernous cerebral library, but it also creates the possibility of remembering things that never happened. Largely neglected for several decades after its publication, Bartlett's book now attracts lots of attention in the world of memory research. Investigations of memory errors and illusions have mushroomed in the past several years. This trend takes its inspiration from both the long-standing study of perceptual and judgmental errors in psychology and the recent bitter debate over the reality of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse (SN: 9/18/93, p. 184). The conflict over lost and found memories of past traumas shows no sign of dissipating: Witness the final report of the American Psychological Association's working group on investigation of memories of childhood abuse, released in February. The group's six members-three clinicians who work with trauma victims and three psychologists who study the suggestibility of memory-agreed on a few general issues, such as the possibility that memories of abuse resurface after a period of forgetting and that psychotherapists or others can influence the construction of bogus memories. The bulk of the 239-page report, however, consists of an impassioned debate between the clinicians and the scientists. The clinicians point to evidence that sexual abuse can result in memory disturbances which interrupt recall but do not introduce false memories. The researchers emphasize studies demonstrating the relative ease with which misleading information and imagined events enter memory. Propelled by several highly publicized lawsuits against psychotherapists for allegedly conjuring up false memories of sexual abuse from their clients, a rising tide of studies examining what the researchers call implanted or illusory memory has deposited a thick layer of doubt atop any presumptions that recall of past events can be trusted. Memory's reputation has been tarnished lately, asserts Daniel L. Schacter, a Harvard University psychologist and author of Searching for (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Memory is by and large pretty accurate, but distortions can arise due to its constructive nature.

Folktales and fairytales in the Middle Ages

The world's best known collection of folktales is the Grimms' Kinderund Hausmdrchen, which grew to its final shape over some forty-odd years in the first half of the nineteenth century (1st edn. 1812-15, 7th edn. 1857). It contains over 200 tales which in their simple, but far from artless prose have come to be regarded as a formal norm of the folktale. About a quarter of these tales have either direct sources or analogues in material dating from before 1600. Some of this is in German, some in Latin, in verse as well as prose. It is far more varied in form and quality than that which the Grimms published. There is no single collection of folktales in English comparable to that of the Grimms in national scope and reputation. British compilers often drew in material of a kind that the Grimms had excluded folk legends, for example, and nursery rhymes. The major compilations from the late nineteenth century E.S. Hartland's English fairy and other folk tales (1890) and Joseph Jacobs's English fairy tales (1890) and More English fairy tales (1894) are rather a hotch-potch of folk literature, consisting of chapbooks, ballads, extracts from historical works, and printed versions of recently collected oral tales. A handful of tales have a venerable ancestry. The figure of Tom Thumb is mentioned as early as 1579, although our first extant text dates from 1621. 1 The Merie tales of the mad men of Gotam goes back to c.1565,2 while 'the foles of Gotham' are actually alluded to in the fifteenthcentury Towneley first shepherds' play? Hartland uses Thomas Keightley's Fairy mythology (1st edn. 1828, 2nd, revised edn. 1850) for episodes from medieval writers testifying to folk legends, such as 'The green children' from Ralph of Coggeshall, but neither he nor Jacobs really begins to deal with the body of medieval folktale material. Folk legends, which incorporate matters of folk belief, must be left on one side as beyond the scope of this article. The massive range of folktale types is systematized in Antti Aarne's and Stith Thompson's

Reading an Oral Tradition

Reading an Oral Tradition Jack Zipes (bio) Inside the Wolf's Belly: Aspects of the Fairy Tale, by Joyce Thomas. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989. Though in many ways an informative and perceptive study of different thematic aspects of the fairy tale, Joyce Thomas's Inside the Wolf's Belly is also disturbing and misleading. It tends to rehash phenomenological, Jungian, and Freudian notions about the whole-some and holistic nature of fairy tales without questioning whether these notions are valid. Moreover, Thomas disregards most of the recent historical, sociological, and feminist critiques of fairy tales as though they had no bearing on our understanding and reception of fairy tales today. Her book is divided into six chapters which focus on the aspects of the fairy tale that she believes are crucial for understanding the "essence" of the fairy tale: the human at the center, since, as she says, "the hero is the tale" (17); fantastic effigies; animal helpers and monsters; landscapes and things; and language, form, and structure. Simply stated, her main thesis purports that all fairy tales are concerned with the "humanization" of a protagonist, who must learn to acquire characteristics that she or he lacks to become whole. Along the way, other figures, animals, and landscapes are designed to assist the protagonist in his or her quest. Moreover, the language and style of the tales serve to reinforce the notion of "humanization." In this regard, Thomas follows in the tradition of Max Lüthi, whose works have treated the phenomenological features of folk and fairy tales. However, unlike Lüthi, who covers a wide tradition of folktales, she refers primarily to tales in Margaret Hunt's translation of The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales and Joseph Jacobs's English Fairy Tales, with some casual comments on tales by Basile and Perrault. As she states in her preface, My foremost concern is with the tales themselves, as narrative, as story. These are the Volksmärchen as fairy tales, products of anonymous tellers that were orally transmitted from one generation [End Page 198] to another until fixed in print. Taking my cue from other scholars, I employ both "fairy tale" and "Volksmärchen" to designate those oral creations best distinguished from other folk tales by the presence of the "faerie"—wonder, magic, marvels experienced as reality. [9-10] Thomas is at her best when she interprets individual fairy tales in detail, for she is a sensitive critic who has a fine appreciation of the symbolic language and subtle meanings of the fairy tales. Thus, her discussions of "Snow White" (69-75), the animal-helper tales (12336), "The Frog Prince" (157-60), and "Rumpelstiltskin" (227-232) are all stimulating, but not because they support her overall theory. Rather, they reveal just how insightful Thomas is as a reader. Her interpretations are valid readings of the texts, but her theoretical premises are, bluntly put, vacuous and erroneous. To begin with, Thomas claims to study folk fairy tales—that is, the oral tradition—and yet almost all her examples are from the literary tradition. There have been some excellent studies by Heinz Rölleke, Maria Tatar, and Ruth Bottigheimer that have demonstrated how the Grimms composed their own tales from different variants and how they relied on literature, not on the oral tradition, for their collection. Yet Thomas does not even allude to these studies or to the problematic nature of the so-called folk-fairy tales she claims were preserved and transmitted by anonymous tellers. Her references are almost always to a literary tradition: Basile, Perrault, the Grimms, and even Jacobs. And in the case of the Grimms, she has chosen the most archaic and faulty collection on the market; for Hunt's work is filled with incorrect titles and inaccurate translations. It seems to me an amazing tour de force (French for chutzpah) to try to develop a phenomenological and descriptive theory of the contents of the oral fairy tale when the critic relies mainly on literary sources and when she also makes generalizations about all folktales but focuses primarily on a tiny group of tales extensively revised by the brothers Grimm. Moreover, though Thomas talks about the reality of...

Arthur Rackham and the Romantic Tradition : The Question of Polarity and Ambiguity

Arthur Rackham and the Romantic TraditionThe Question of Polarity and Ambiguity* Christa Kamenetsky (bio) The question of identity has puzzled many critics of Arthur Rackham. Judging by the many contradictory essays written about his work, he still appears to be an artist of various styles that escape a definite classification in the history of the English graphic tradition. Was Rackham a Victorian artist or was he a Romantic visionary? Selma Lanes pointed out Rackham's philistine middle-class tendencies. Although she did not deny his magic in uncovering the fairyland beneath the countryside, she underscored to a greater extent his emotional detachment, his "matter-of-factness," and his affection for detail, texture, and elaborate design in "cozy English interiors replete with rugs, quilts and bric-a-brac."1 Henry Pitz felt that Rackham's drawings had more "conviction" than those of Caldecott and Greenaway and that he was "English to the very core."2 This was also Derek Hudson's view, who saw him as close to his British "Cockney origins."3 Eleanor Farjeon, on the other hand, saw in him an artist capable of transporting the commonplace into a sphere of the imagination, a romantic "wizard" bringing to life a world of fairies, elves, and dwarfs.4 How do we reconcile such differing opinions, which emphasize the realistic as well as the imaginative perspectives of Rackham's work? Margery Darrell came to the conclusion that in his "strange mix of magic and materialism" lay the very key to the credibility of his work. "Perhaps it was his very worldliness that made his drawings so believable," she suggested.5 Without attempting to minimize the British influences upon his work, we will proceed to view Rackham within the broader perspective of European Romanticism, of which English Romanticism was a definite part. A brief exploration of the nature of European Romanticism, in all its complexity, may throw some light upon the complexity of Rackham's subject choice and on the puzzling ambiguities of his style. Around 1920, Arthur Lovejoy pointed to the diversity of the [End Page 115] term "Romanticism," suggesting that one should refer to it only in the plural form. He felt that the confusion of terminology had led not only to the present "muddle" of critical thought, but also to the unfortunate ambiguity now associated with the word.6 Twenty years later, René Wellek contradicted Lovejoy by asserting that there were three unifying principles of Romanticism that could be detected throughout the art and literature of Europe. He identified them as: the role of the imagination as the very basis for poetry and art; the organic view of all natural objects; and the creative use of myths and symbols.7 In more recent times, Morse Peckham tried to reach a synthesis of Lovejoy's and Wellek's views. He felt it was more important to acknowledge the inherent contradictions of Romanticism as an integral part of the movement than to quarrel about "multiplicity" versus "unity." "Since the logic of Romanticism is that contradictions must be included in a single orientation, but without pseudo-reconciliation," he wrote, "romanticism is a remarkably stable and witful orientation."8 Keeping in mind Peckham's observation, we will now move on to examine the seemingly contradictory forces in Rackham's work on the basis that they may correspond to those inherent in European Romanticism as a whole. In this connection, we will give particular attention to his subject choice, his use of the imagination, his organic view of nature, and the ambiguous qualities of his style. In looking at the wide range of Rackham's illustrations, we notice that he gave considerable attention to folklore and imaginative literature. Among the folk literature of the oral tradition which he illustrated—with a natural feeling for the mood and the cultural uniqueness in the heritage of other lands—were such folk tales as Grimms' Fairy Tales, Stephens' Irish Fairy Tales, and Aesop's Fables. Of the illustrations of his native folklore we may mention Steele's English Fairy Tales and Mother Goose. Among the literary adaptations of traditional folklore we find his unique illustrations of Wagner's Rhinegold, and his Twilight of the Gods, Ibsen...

The Devil Has a Dublin Accent

The Devil Has a Dublin Accent* Alison White (bio) Nursery rhymes and tales, and the books read in childhood have fired the imaginations of the world's great writers. This is of special interest in the case of James Joyce because his mind, supremely sophisticated though it was, renewed itself ceaselessly in the popular culture: folklore, puns, jokes, cartoons, politics, music-hall, street cries, games, or theater, Punch and Judy, books for children. Joyce's Dubliners, written early in this century, is a book of stories mainly about people as obscure and as odd as the characters of Edward Lear's cartoons, and as prone to folly. Joyce wrote Dubliners in his early twenties while his childhood memories were sharp, as indeed they remained to the end. Perhaps the young author recalled books of fairy tales which came on the market in the 1890's. His family was well-off then, and its many children were well-supplied with toys, books, and free time to browse in the book shops. Joseph Jacobs' English Fairy Tales, 1892, may have drawn his ten-year-old eye. Its tales had long been current orally, as they still are, and some of them had long been in print. Jacobs' first tale, "Teeny-Tiny," was copied word for word out of Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes and Tales, published in 1848. There Halliwell had explained "Teeny-Tiny" as a cante-fable, rhymes surviving in prose. Joyce may easily have heard or read the story. I've never yet met anyone who doesn't know about the teeny tiny woman who leaves her teeny tiny house to go to the teeny tiny graveyard. There she finds a teeny tiny bone for her teeny tiny soup. Later, from her teeny tiny bed she hears a great voice call, "GIVE ME MY BONE!" In Joyce's Dubliners there is a story "Clay," first entitled "Hallow Eve." In it a tiny old maid, Maria, a laundry worker, spends Hallowe'en with a family. There, children blindfold Maria and guide her in a divination game: to choose a ring, for marriage; a prayer book, if she is to enter a convent; water, for crossing the sea. But, Maria touches a dish of clay, the symbol of death. Later, she pathetically sings "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls" from Balfe's Bohemian Girl. . . . A sad tale's best for Hallowe'en. I never read this story without feeling that the leprechaun at Joyce's elbow led him to recall "Teeny-Tiny" and other nursery tales and rhymes as well. For he wrote that Maria "put her tiny dress-boots beside the foot of the bed." She had a "tiny, quavering voice," she "bent her tiny head"; laughing, "her minute body nearly shook itself asunder." The graveyard motif, the dish of clay, further recalls the teeny-tiny woman's ghoulish selection of a soupbone from the churchyard. And another [End Page 139] child's tale of Joyce's youth comes to mind. Maria is like a household brownie. "How can you expect Maria to crack nuts without a nutcracker?" asks her host. Aside from being an indelicate allusion to Maria's profile, where "the tip of her nose nearly touched the tip of her chin," this hints at her elfin faculties. In 1874, eight years before Joyce's birth, there was published Dinah Maria Mulock Craik's Adventures of a Brownie. Brownie had "a very little mind like his little body; but he did the best he could with it." The style is that of Joyce's story, kept ever inside Maria's limited little mind. Maria sat "on the little stool . . . with her toes barely touching the floor." Miss Mulock's Brownie "placed himself on the milking stool, which was so high that his little legs were dangling halfway down." Brownie turns a stone into a cake. It disappears. Maria buys a cake. It disappears. Like Brownie, Maria does domestic magicking. At the laundry she cut the barnbracks so well that you could not see where the knife had been. (Last January in Dublin I cut a barnbrack and, in that sticky mess, no mere mortal could have avoided leaving clumsy...

Reviews

Legends of the Micmacs. By the Rev. Silas Tertius Rand, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D. Wellesley Philological Publications. New York and London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1894. By E. S. Hartland. Old Rabbit the Voodoo, and other Sorcerers. By Mary Alicia Owen. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893. By E. S. Hartland. More English Fairy Tales. Collected and edited by Joseph Jacobs. London: David Nutt, 1894. By E. S. Hartland. Scottish Fairy and Folk-Tales. Selected and edited, with an Introduction, by Sir George Douglas, Bart. London: Walter Scott, Limited. By E. S. Hartland.

English Fairy Tales

English Fairy Tales

English fairy tales

English fairy tales Get access Notes and Queries, Volume s7-X, Issue 253, 1 November 1890, Pages 358–359, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s7-X.253.358e Published: 01 November 1890

English and Scotch Fairy Tales

English and Scotch Fairy Tales