More English Fairy Tales

Before Disney sanitized fairy tales, England had a richer, stranger tradition. Joseph Jacobs spent years collecting these vanishing stories from country storytellers, traveling salesmen, and obscure chapbooks - rescuing tales that were fading from memory. This companion volume to his seminal 'English Fairy Tales' gathers 44 stories that never became household names, yet pulse with the same dark magic and wit that once entertained entire villages. Here you'll find the tragic romance of Tamlane, stolen by the fairy queen. The horrifying Black Bull of Norroway. The Children in the Wood, where abandonment and murder lurk beneath the pastoral. The Lambton Worm, a Northumberland nightmare of serpentine horror. These aren't gentle bedtime stories - they're the raw folk memory of a world where witches grant wishes, cats talk, and cleverness defeats strength. Jacobs includes the bizarre 'Hereafterthis,' where a knight is trapped inside a whale, and 'Yallery Brown,' a creature of pestilence and mischief. The collection preserves not just narratives but the particular English voice - its humor, its fatalism, its love of the absurd.