Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan (Penguin Classics) (2 page)

Joseph Jacobs once estimated that there were more than 2,000 Scottish folk tales – a substantial corpus. And of course they also had countless local variants, so this anthology barely reveals the tip of a large iceberg. But it tries to convey within a single collection a hint of the literature’s variety and vitality.

The stories listed in this book by ‘J. F. Campbell’, by ‘Elizabeth Grierson’ or by ‘Joseph Jacobs’ are not original to those writers. It is in the nature of folk tales and the oral tradition that many versions of a story exist. So, for example, Miss Grierson’s version
of ‘The Milk-white Doo’ is based on that recorded by Robert Chambers (in his
The Popular Rhymes of Scotland
, 1826, with numerous reprints). Her ‘Assipattle and the Mester Stoorworm’ is probably based on a similar story recorded by W. Traill Dennison in
Scottish Antiquary
, vol. V (1891). Her source for ‘The Well o’ the World’s End’ is J. F. Campbell’s
Popular Tales of the West Highlands
(1860–62), with other sources including poems by John Leyden (1771–1811) and James Hogg (1770–1835), as well as Victorian and Edwardian texts from
The Folklore Journal.
The ancestry of James Hogg’s poem ‘The Mermaid’ may well be related to J. F. Campbell’s ‘The Sea Maiden’, orally collected by the latter in the course of his fieldwork.

Similarly, the text that here appears under the name of Margaret Fay Shaw (‘Thomas the Rhymer, Son of the Dead Woman’) is, as she tells us, her English translation of a Gaelic tale taken down by her husband John Lorne Campbell in November 1935, and published by him in a booklet called
Sia Sgialachdan
(
Six Stories)
in 1938. His oral source was the story-teller Seonaidh Campbell, of Glendale in South Uist, who in turn probably had the story from another oral source. And bearing in mind that it was a story about Thomas the Rhymer, it might well have gone back a very long way. Many if not most oral stories have come down to us in this manner.

Part of the aim of writers like Jacobs or Grierson was to popularize the writings of earlier collectors like J. F. Campbell. Sometimes, in the interests of authenticity, the original collectors’ texts tended to be long and turgid and over-repetitive, and in the print medium this was a factor that limited their popularity: the defence of the collectors was that they were writing down stories or poems as told to them or as they heard them. By shortening, simplifying and occasionally ‘anglifying’, later editors like Jacobs and Grierson were able to widen the popularity of the oral folk literature once it had become available in print. And it has to be added that, ever since Scott’s
Minstrelsy
and probably earlier, efforts were made to anglicize stories in order to render them accessible to readers furth of, or beyond, Scotland.

As well as this tradition of oral folk tales in Gaelic and English,
Scotland also had a long-standing anonymous ballad tradition dealing with aspects of the supernatural: ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ are among the oldest of these works, dating back to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. They are included here in versions collected respectively by Robert Burns (1796) and Sir Walter Scott (1802–3).

Literary, written texts represent the other end of the spectrum or tapestry of Scottish fairy tales, some of them in verse and some in prose. Many readers would identify Robert Burns’s memorable poem ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ as the keystone of that bridge into the corpus. Based on but transforming a local Ayrshire folk tale, this poem is one of many original texts, and Scottish literature is fortunate that so many of its great writers have contributed new material to the genre: as well as Burns, original texts by Robert Louis Stevenson, James Hogg, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Andrew Lang and others are included here.

In this context it is a real pleasure to reprint Andrew Lang’s story ‘The Gold of Fairnilee’, which has been described – rightly, as it seems to me – as one of the finest of all the Victorian fairy tales. It is interesting to note the entirely realistic historical background to this story – the horrors of a war on your own doorstep – whose action was triggered off by the battle of Flodden in 1513. Watch out in this magic narrative for the ingenious explanation of Tam Hislop’s seven-year disappearance on the eve of the battle, not to Fairyland at all (as Hislop told his neighbours) but a simple deserter hiding out at Perth, well away from the perils of front-line Border warfare. Similarly, note how the action in James Hogg’s story ‘Adam Bell’ commences with the disappearance of the main character ‘on the very day that Prince Charles Edward Stewart defeated General Hawley on Falkirk Muir’ in that other momentous year of 1745. Tales of the supernatural may well flourish best in periods of civil strife, of which Scotland once had its fair share. But I’m sure that if I had lived at the time of Flodden, I too might have been tempted to do a seven-year disappearing trick rather than get dragged into some suicidal war.

This book is an expanded version of the 1992 first edition,
Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales
issued first as a Puffin Classic and then from 1997 reprinted as a Penguin Popular Classic. Because the original collection had a young readership in view, it excluded texts in Scots on grounds of readability and difficulty of access. That meant making do with prose retellings of ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ and avoiding ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, a poem with good claim to be the greatest and best known of all Scottish folk tales.

This new edition contains twenty-nine texts. It includes all twenty-one of the texts that appeared in the 1992 edition, except that the 1992 retellings of ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ are here replaced by their late eighteenth-century Scots verse versions. Additionally, eight other texts in Scots prose and verse have been added in an attempt to provide readers with a wider, more authentic and more comprehensive selection. Thus approximately one third of the texts in this new edition use the Scots language in varying degrees of density. All these Scots texts are provided with glossaries. In the case of the poetry, Scots words are glossed alongside the lines where they occur. In the case of the prose, they are glossed in footnotes at the foot of the relevant page. Words that are merely spelt differently in Old Scots are not glossed (e.g. ‘boozing’ for ‘bousing’). Perhaps the easiest way to make sense of the Scots words here is to read the text aloud. Otherwise, readers requiring further assistance with Scots vocabulary are referred to the
Concise Scots Dictionary
(1985, ed. Mairi Robinson) or to
www.dsl.ac.uk/
for online information.

There was once a man who got his living by working in the fields. He had one little son, called Curly-locks, and one little daughter, called Golden-tresses; but his wife was dead, and, as he had to be out all day, these children were often left alone. So, as he was afraid that some evil might befall them when there was no one to look after them, he, in an ill day, married again.

I say ‘in an ill day’, for his second wife was a most deceitful woman, who really hated children, although she pretended, before her marriage, to love them. And she was so unkind to them, and made the houseso uncomfortable with her bad temper, that her poor husband often sighed to himself, and wished that he had let well alone, and remained a widower.

But it was no use crying over spilt milk; the deed was done, and he had just to try to make the best of it. So things went on for several years, until the children were beginning to run about out of doors and play by themselves.

Then one day the Goodman chanced to catch a hare, and he brought it home and gave it to his wife to cook for the dinner.

Now his wife was a very good cook, and she made the hare into a pot of delicious soup; but she was also very greedy, and while the soup was boiling she tasted it, and tasted it, till at last she discovered that it was almost gone. Then she was in a fine state of mind, for she knew that her husband would soon be coming home for his dinner, and that she would have nothing to set before him.

So what do you think the wicked woman did? She went out to the door, where her little stepson, Curly-locks, was playing in the sun, and told him to come in and get his face washed. And
while she was washing his face, she struck him on the head with a hammer and stunned him, and popped him into the pot to make soup for his father’s dinner.

By and by the Goodman came in from his work, and the soup was dished up; and he, and his wife, and his little daughter, Golden-tresses, sat down to sup it.

‘Where’s Curly-locks?’ asked the Goodman. ‘It’s a pity he is not here while the soup is hot.’

‘How should I ken where he is?’ answered his wife crossly. ‘I have other work to do than to run about after a mischievous laddie all the morning.’

The Goodman went on supping his soup in silence for some minutes; then he lifted up a little foot in his spoon.

‘This is Curly-locks’ foot,’ he cried in horror. ‘There’s been ill work here.’

‘Hoots, havers,’ answered his wife, laughing, pretending to be very much amused. ‘What should Curly-locks’ foot be doing in the soup? ’Tis the hare’s forefoot, which is very like that of a bairn.’

But presently the Goodman took something else up in his spoon.

‘This is Curly-locks’ hand,’ he said shrilly. ‘I ken it by the crook in its little finger.’

‘The man’s demented,’ retorted his wife, ‘not to ken the hind foot of a hare when he sees it!’

So the poor father did not say any more, but went away back to his work, sorely perplexed in his mind; while his little daughter, Golden-tresses, who had a shrewd suspicion of what had happened, gathered all the bones from the empty plates, and, carrying them away in her apron, buried them beneath a flat stone, close by a white rose tree that grew by the cottage door.

And, lo and behold! those poor bones, which she buried with such care –

And at last it lighted on a tuft of grass by a burnside, where two women were washing clothes. It sat there cooing to itself for some time; then it sang this song softly to them:

The women stopped washing and looked at one another in astonishment. It was not every day that they came across a bird that could sing a song like that, and they felt that there was something not canny about it.

‘Sing that song again, my bonnie bird,’ said one of them at last, ‘and we’ll give you all these clothes!’

So the bird sang its song over again, and the washerwomen gave it all the clothes, and it tucked them under its right wing, and flew on.

Presently it came to a house where all the windows were open, and it perched on one of the window-sills, and inside it saw a man counting out a great heap of silver.

And, sitting on the window-sill, it sang its song to him:

The man stopped counting his silver, and listened. He felt, like the washerwomen, that there was something not canny about this Doo. When it had finished its song, he said:

‘Sing that song again, my bonnie bird, and I’ll give you a’ this siller in a bag.’

So the Doo sang its song over again, and got the bag of silver, which it tucked under its left wing. Then it flew on.

It had not flown very far, however, before it came to a mill where two millers were grinding corn. And it settled down on a sack of meal and sang its song to them.