Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, Second Series

This is a window into a world where the Devil himself wanders the Cornish moors, bargaining with peasants and stealing knitting work. Bottrell's 1873 collection preserves the oral traditions of West Cornwall, where standing stones whisper ancient secrets and the landscape bristles with giants, forgotten castles, and spirits. The book opens with "Duffy and the Devil," a Christmas play that blends dark humor with a Faustian bargain: three years of supernatural labor in exchange for a soul. Other tales follow the generational saga of the I'ans family, threading through generations of Cornish village life. These aren't polished literary tales but something rawer: stories told around hearths, thick with local dialect, wry observation, and the particular logic of a place where the supernatural and the everyday collide. The Devil here is no dread figure but a comic trickster, ready for a jest, reflecting Cornwall's irreverent folk tradition. For readers who want folklore before it was polished smooth for polite company.