English Fairy Tales (Myths, Legend and Folk Tales from Around the World)

This volume contains forty-three English folk stories and tales. But why call them FAIRY STORIES? One cannot imagine a child saying, ‘Tell me a folk-tale’, or ‘Another nursery tale, please, grandma’. Fairy tales are stories in which occurs something ‘fairy’, something extraordinary–fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals, or the remarkable stupidity of some of the characters. Many of the tales in this volume are what folklorists call Drolls (a humorous story in which there is a jester or a wag) . They justify the title of “Merrie England”, a phrase which once indicated the underlying capacity for fun and humour of the English. The story of Tom Tit Tot, for example, is unequalled among all other folk-tales for its combined humorousness and dramatic power. So take some time out and travel back to a period before television and radio, a time when families would gather around a crackling and spitting hearth and granddad or grandma or uncle or auntie would delight and captivate the gathering with stories passed on to them from their parents and grandparents from time immemorial. A proportion of the profit from the sale of this book will be donated towards the education of the underprivileged in England.