English Fairy Tales
1923
Forget what you think you know about fairy tales. These aren't the darkened woods and wicked stepmothers of the Grimm brothers - this is English folklore at its warmest and strangest, whereimps trick farmers and clever girls outwit giants and a cat can talk its way out of trouble. Joseph Jacobs collected these stories from oral tradition in the 1890s, preserving tales that had circulated for centuries in English farmhouses and cottages before anyone thought to write them down. The result is a collection that feels closer to a grandmother's fireside than a storybook: rough-hewn, often very funny, occasionally unsettling, always alive. Here you'll meet the girl who solves a riddle by eating three pies, an earl who turns into a cat (and himself again), and Tom Tit Tot, the creature with too many fingers and a name you must never guess. These aren't sanitized nursery tales - they're the real stuff of English imagination, with all the oddity and wit that implies. They move faster than Grimm, land harder on their punchlines, and linger in the memory with the stubbornness of something heard rather than read. Perfect for reading aloud, reading alone, or passing on to someone who deserves to know where these stories really come from.
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X-Ray
“Finally, I’d say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don’t be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I’m at work I’m highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what’s more, they’re completely amoral: like the air-spirits who helped Strong Hans escape from the cave, the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever has the ring, whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply, ‘Of course, and this is the way my imagination works.””
— Unknown
“The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.””
— Unknown
“He sat down and collected his thoughts. They were quite easy to collect, because there weren't very many of them, and they all concerned the same subject--what a burden his life was.””
— Unknown
“Princess, princess, youngest daughter,Open up and let me in!Or else your promise by the waterIsn’t worth a rusty pin.Keep your promise, royal daughter,Open up and let me in!””
— Unknown
“the particular plant longed for by the wife, which was originally parsley, was a well-known abortifacient.””
— Unknown
“Much ingenious interpretation of story is little more than seeing pleasing patterns in the sparks of a fire, but it does no harm.””
— Unknown
“and she saw a bed of lamb’s lettuce, or rapunzel.””
— Unknown
“The Musicians of Bremen””
— Unknown
