Folk tales falling flat
A disappointing collection of stories: oral narrative doesn’t always work well in print
Animal Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland
Sharon Jacksties The History Press 2020 Hb, 190pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780750991353
No animals were harmed in the making of this book; in fact harmlessness is its guiding light, along with gentle wisdom, love and luck. There’s a happy ending for everyone, even the wolves, who are noble spirits of the wild and wouldn’t dream of eating small children.
Most of the tales come from original folk narratives of the British Isles – though about a fifth of them seem to have been made up for the story-telling circuit – but they have all been reshaped fora modern morality: feminist, ecological, humanist. A bit of broad humour gets through the filter, but none of the cynicism of the old villagers, nor their xenophobia, spite and cunning.
Folk horror is absent except in the one story, about a rat army, that was collected directly from oral tradition.
Sharon Jacksties is a popular storyteller who draws eclectically on local legend, fairytale, numskull stories, the Fionn and Arthurian cycles and the Mabinogion. She seems to have been stretched by the scope of this book; several stories look as if they’re taken from her regular repertoire with the animal element played up.
Animal Folk Tales is the latest book in a joint project of the History Press and the Society for Story-Telling. They have tried to bring oral narrative back to life for a modern readership, beginning with the English counties and moving onto mythical themes, with mixed results.
Some of their authors successfully harmonised folklore scholarship and performance skills; some just played fantasy games with local history; and some seem to have picked a county at random and retold anything they’d heard on the circuit as if it were regional lore.
Not every teller is a good writer, and vice versa – the quirks that work with a live audience don’t necessarily transfer to the page, but if you leave them out the style drifts towards Jackanory.
Besides, epic and fable and comical folktale are delivered in very different styles in English, let alone Irish and Welsh, so that when a book like Animal Folk Tales tells them all in much the same manner, they fall a little flat.
Perhaps it would enchant a first-time reader who had never heard anything like these stories before. But to anyone who has, this book says more about the culture of 21st-century storytelling than about folk narrative itself.
Jeremy Harte
★★★