Ruth Padel on a collection that attempts to put folk tales in their place.
'Today," said the Abbé Fénelon in 1714, "the most serious men enjoy fables; even fairy tales! We willingly become children again." Our minds now fly to Tolkien or Pullman but Fénelon was reacting to Charles Perrault, who invented the fairy tale as a literary form for children in 1697. Fairy tales, legends and folk tales became books, written and illustrated. They were now read, rather than told, at granny's knee.
In the 19th century came the collectors of folk tales, whom Rosalind Kerven cites as sources for her English Fairy Tales and Legends, and writers of new stories in fairytale idiom such as Hans Andersen and George Macdonald. And then, of course, came the film-makers.
Fairytale adapts to every new medium. The Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp discerned seven character types and 31 narrative units in folk tales. They are all common currency in today's media. Everyone re-works the same patterns. "Hero leaves home" becomes "hero is recognised". After "villain is exposed" comes "hero ascends the throne".
Fairytale is a language of wish-fulfilment. The world is odder and more frightening than we imagine, but it comes right in the end. Innocence triumphs, virtue is rewarded, the beggar becomes a king. (The American Dream is a perfect example.) In one story here, a girl is saved from a witch by a grateful, somewhat loquacious, loaf of bread. Fairytale jumps us into a reassuringly story-shaped world with a happy ending; it frightens in order to reassure. Fairies themselves are not obligatory. The few in this book suggest why we call it fairytale: the Little People embody the dangers we know to exist in the world but which, luckily, are invisible most of the time.
Modern users of fairy tale have to decide whether to make the stories contemporary, as Angela Carter did, or make them archaic, which Tolkien chose. Kerven has opted for time past. Her introduction does not mention Walt Disney, who was responsible for today's global popularity of Aladdin, Snow White and Cinderella. Kerven avoids those stories rather for their "foreign roots" (respectively, the Middle East, Germany and France) and asks our attention for the home-grown English article instead.
She tells 15 tales at a lively pace but in slightly uneasy fairytalese: a voice of pretending-to-be-oral that fails to lift off the page. Her last two lines just miss the right note of oral engagingness. "And that's just about the end of my tale, except to tell you this, my friend; if you believe even half of this fine old nonsense, you're more of a fool than I am!" What makes her book original, however, is that she cites a different English county as the source of each tale. You might not believe her. Does Jack the Giant-Killer really come from Cornwall? And The Asrai (a shape-shifting mermaid) from the landlocked county of Shropshire?
The notes at the back are somewhat arbitrary. Why not mention Swan Lake when commenting on a young hunter who shoots a swan who turns out to be a girl? Why, in the last story, does Kerven explain this is a quest, "a form of story surprisingly not very common in England", then hark back to the first tale, King Arthur and the Hideous Hag, but say the Grail story, though certainly a quest, is not English but "based on an old French Romance"? Why not lump all Arthuriana together as early medieval England was so much part of Europe that these tales do not really "come from" Cumbria or Cornwall, and say that what her lovely book is offering, instead, are local versions from different counties?
For what sings, in Kerven's book, is the regionality. English Fairy Tales and Legends is exquisitely produced (Arthur Rackham glows on these pages in a mysterious terracotta wash) and it is both fun, and new, to read tales both well known and less known in a shifting context of now Northumberland, now Yorkshire, now Kent, now London.
The landscape of fairytale is a universal landscape of the psyche. Forest, heath and cottage, city and palace, are full of witches, wolves, jealous stepmothers, magic spells, ineffectual fathers and arduous struggle. But this book offers something extra, too: a different English landscape as a specific and intriguing backdrop to each different story.
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