I received this week a very welcome reprint. In the early 1990s, Penguin published a great series of folktale collections. There were variations in the series, but it contained some brilliant anthologies by weighty and reputable scholars like Jacqueline Simpson (Scandinavian Folktales) and Henry Glassie (Irish Folktales).
It also included two magnificent collections by Neil Philip, Scottish Folktales and English Folktales. The latter was absolutely essential to me when I first came to folklore. For an MA class assignment I wrote on ‘The Small-Tooth Dog’, collected by Sidney Oldall Addy in Derbyshire, picked enthusiastically if randomly from this book. (The photograph here is my copy, bought second-hand in Highgate Village, and I’m surprised at how well it has borne its heavy use).
The Penguin Book of English Folktales, ed. Neil Philip (London: Penguin, 1992)
It wasn’t just that its 136 stories were marvellous, nor that they provided an invaluable snapshot and overview of the earlier collections of tales. The book also provided a useable small scholarly apparatus of Aarne-Thompson Tale Type numbers alongside the bibliographical data. As an editor, Philip was everything I could have wanted: his Introduction was fascinating and informed, shedding critical light on the stories, the narrators, the folklorists and the re-tellers, all with a sympathetic and shrewd writer’s eye for their qualities. On my beloved ‘Small-Tooth Dog’, he wrote, briefly but astutely: ‘The only real Beauty and the Beast story recorded in England, this succinct narration seems to me a much more potent text than Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s wordy and literary La Belle et la Bête (1756), which has been the basis of almost every retelling ever since.’
Such an historically informed and solid collection was clearly vital as a way of orienting the reader to oral traditions as well as scholarly interactions with them, so its unavailability for many years was a blow. This kind of book becomes all the more essential as volumes of retellings of traditional tales proliferate, as it helps the ever-growing numbers of people fascinated by this wonderful stuff to understand it a little better, to understand what might lie behind and around it.
I would have welcomed its reappearance in any form, therefore. What arrived this week, however, exceeded my expectations. It is more durable than my now-retired paperback, obviously, but that is only one criterion. The book is essentially a straightforward reprint of the 1992 volume with a couple of additions. (The apparatus reprints the Aarne-Thompson details, although the Introduction to the reprint does cite updated Aarne-Thompson-Üther numbers). Philip’s 2022 Introduction takes account of the flourishing storytelling scene since his original publication, and uses this and more folkloresque interpretative and creative uses of folklore (my description, not his) to offer a magnanimous reconsideration of some of his earlier comments. He gives Ruth Tongue the benefit of the doubt this time – I remain more ambivalent, but I take his point – and he points to Maureen James’s convincing work as clearing up his concerns over Marie Clothilde Balfour. He also, excitingly and compellingly, points to the durability of the oral tradition. As he notes, ‘the English folktale, far from being moribund, is alive and kicking’ (xix).
The Watkins Book of English Folktales, ed. Neil Philip (London: Watkins Media, 2022)
But there is something, too, in its presentation. The book is extremely attractive. The title of each story is contained within light black-and-white decoration – nothing too fancy, but elegant rather than austere. The beautiful cover features imagery invoking both specific stories and a more generalised view of folklore as it might be understood by an interested contemporary audience. It appeals to what a readership might think it already understands, while bringing readers to a body of work that will flesh out and expand dramatically that understanding. It seems the perfect meeting and interaction of form and content, aimed at the specific conditions of current interest in folklore.
In this respect, the Foreword by Neil Gaiman is charming and outstanding. Gaiman, with his usual generosity of spirit, outlines exactly the voyage of discovery awaiting those who have come to it without perhaps fully expecting what they will find within, just as he did when he read the first edition. The cover will get people in. Neil Gaiman will get even more in. And when they arrive, they will find folklore in all its riches, courtesy of Neil Philip. An exciting journey of discovery awaits, and this is exactly how such a journey should be prepared.
