Neil Philip is a writer, folklorist, and poet. The Watkins Book of English Folktales is out on October 11th, but you can read an excerpt from it here, concerning Legends of Sir Francis Drake and his possible dealings with the devil. Among Philip’s many other books are The Cinderella Story, The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse, The Tale of Sir Gawain, and The Adventures of Odysseus. Neil has also written for stage, screen, and radio. His work has won the Aesop Award of the American Folklore Society, multiple ALA Notable Children’s Book honours, and the inaugural Literary Criticism Book Award of the Children’s Literature Association. CF editor Elizabeth Kim spoke with him via email.
Elizabeth Kim Folk tales, as you acknowledge in other words, have a slippery quality to them, for want of a better word. They are told orally so many times by different people that they change. How did you go about finding these stories, and deciding which versions to commit to the page?
Neil Philip That’s a really interesting question, because ideally you would be recording oral narrations, or reprinting faithfully recorded oral narrations—but as I explain in my Introduction, that’s not feasible in the English context, because the oral tradition that was still thriving in Shakespeare’s day (he makes many references to folktales, and obviously expects his audience to know the stories behind them) had pretty much died out when scholars, inspired by the Brothers Grimm in Germany, started looking for them and trying to record them. And many of those early folklorists didn’t understand the importance of recording the actual words of a telling, rather than just the story. Not that words are the only important element—there are all kinds of subtexts to oral narration, such as intonation, tempo, gesture, performance, and audience reaction, all quite hard to capture on a printed page. So what I looked for was often the earliest version of an often retold story, or the one that seemed to show the most respect for the narrator.
EK And why is recording folklore important?
NP I think storytelling is a fundamental part of what makes us human, and has been since the dawn of time. In one of the stories in The Watkins Book of English Folktales, “The Small-Tooth Dog” (which is a tale of the Beauty and the Beast type), a merchant who has been rescued from robbers by the small-tooth dog tries to dissuade the dog from asking for his daughter as his reward by offering him various wonderful gifts. One of these is “a mirror in which you can see what anybody is thinking about”. It seems to me that folktales are mirrors in which we can see ourselves clearly. Folk narrative is my thing, but all of folklore—customs, beliefs, superstitions, cookery, crafts, folkspeech, folklife—is crucial to a culture. You can look in it and see what anybody is thinking about.
EK You have read and compiled many story collections to date. What, if any, universal tropes do you regularly see in folklore, and perhaps myth? And what might these tell us about human hopes, fears, struggles, and dreams?
NP That question may be too open-ended to answer satisfactorily! Folklorists have long categorised fairy tales by international tale types (now known as the ATU, Aarne-Thompson-Üther, Index). This enables you to trace stories with similar plots, themes, and elements across different cultures—Cinderella, say, or Beauty and the Beast. And we find that many of these stories do repeat and echo across historical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. That doesn’t mean the stories are the same—each story is complete in itself—but it does mean that there is a shared human interest in their content, which is the individual drama of growing up and the shared drama of family life.
EK Your book, published in 1992 as the Penguin Book of Folktales, has now been revised and re-published as The Watkin's Book of Folktales. What changes did you make to the text, and what can we expect to see in this beautifully presented new edition?
NP Watkins have completely revamped the book, so it feels entirely new and different, but the essential book is still the same. I could have done a thorough revision, but I think the book stands up as it is, and trying to do things such as replace the AT references in the original with the newer ATU ones only risked bringing in errors and confusion. I wrote an Introduction to the new edition, and an update to the Further Reading, and Neil Gaiman kindly wrote a new Foreword. Apart from that, I replaced one short story from the first edition, “The Sale of a Wife”, with another, “The Hedge Priest”, and added one new story at the end, “The Dead Moon”. I regretted that I had not used more of the weird and macabre stories collected in the Lincolnshire Fens by Marie Clothilde Balfour, because I doubted their authenticity. But those doubts have been disproved, so as there was room, I added another one. I chose “The Dead Moon” because it is a great story, but also because it’s Neil Gaiman’s favourite. Otherwise it might have been “Yallery Brown”, another marvellous tale.
EK Which story within the collection is your favourite, and why?
NP I suspect the answer to that would change every time I answered it! I do love “The Small-Tooth Dog”, and various of the English Romany tales such as “Sorrow and Love” and “Doctor Forster”. I think today I would veer between “Tom Tit Tot”, which is one of the English stories on the Rumpelstiltskin “Name of the Helper” theme, and “De Little Fox”, a version of ATU 708 The Wonder-Child collected from Wasti Gray in 1892 by John Sampson. I’ve always loved the concept of stories-within-stories, and “De Little Fox” comes to its climax when the little fox of the title, who is born to a princess through the spells of an evil witch, tells the assembled company in the king’s hall everything that has happened. The old witch tries to silence him, but the rest of the company urge him on, “’Speak an! my little fox.’ ‘Well tole! my little fox.’ ‘Werry good tale, indeed!’”
EK As you mention, this collection has inspired the likes of Neil Gaiman and probably others. Can you tell me more about that connection?
NP From the very beginning I wanted English Folktales to be a source book for poets and storytellers, and so it has proved. I knew Neil Gaiman liked the book, because he has often mentioned it in interviews and introductions, and on Twitter. His connection to the book goes quite deep, as his Foreword makes clear. He bought it when it first came out 30 years ago. Tales he found in it have inspired a story in Sandman, “The Flyin’ Childer”, and the macabre short story “Snow, Glass, Apples”. As he writes, reading Traienti Lovell’s narration of “Snow-White”, “changed the inside of my head”.
The story in English Folktales that had the most profound influence on Gaiman is “The Pear-Drum”. This time he did not retell the story so much as transform it completely. “The Pear-Drum” is another unusual and terrifying tale, with an interesting provenance, because it started out as a literary fairy tale, “The New Mother”, published by Lucy Clifford in 1899. It haunted the imagination of the historian of children’s literature, F. J. Harvey Darton, who wrote that, “Getting on for fifty years after I met her first, I still cannot rid my mind of that fearful creation.” J. Y. Bell contributed an orally transmitted version of the story, now called “The Pear-Drum”, to the journal Folklore in 1955. When Neil Gaiman read that, with its ghastly new mother “with glass eyes and a wooden tail”, it lodged in his mind as Lucy Clifford’s had in Harvey Darton’s. And along came Coraline, and her equally scary “other mother” with big black button eyes.
What I hadn’t quite realised—because it’s been out of print for a quarter of a century—is how the book had quietly achieved a kind of cult status among those who know about such things. I was really humbled by all the lovely comments from scholars such as Jack Zipes and Marina Warner, and writers such as Philip Pullman and Gregory Maguire.
EK The term Folklore has been trending in recent years. We often receive emails from people asking if we can recommend a good introductory book to folklore. Aside from pointing people to wonderful collections such as your own, the motif index of folklore, and the Twitter hashtag #FolkloreThursday, I'm often at a loss as to how to reply; I see folklore and folk culture all around us, even if they have seldom enjoyed the prestige of myths; folklore often evades categorization or standardisation, changing with each teller and across regions or communities rather than nations—even if some folk tales are embraced and standardised as part of a particular government agenda. How might you recommend readers connect with the folklore of their region, or from further afield? And why ought we be interested in folk cultures?
NP I think we ought to be interested in folk cultures because folk culture is the bedrock of all culture. To ignore folklore is to ignore a crucial element of our humanity.
There are quite a few good primers now which explain and explore what folklore is all about. I’d recommend Jeana Jorgensen’s Folklore 101 and Fairy Tales 101, Lynne S. McNeill’s Folklore Rules, and Folklore: The Basics by Simon J. Bronner. Both Marina Warner and Andrew Teverson have written good short introductions to the fairy tale, while Nicolas Jubbers’ The Fairy Tellers looks at some of the major figures in the history of the fairy tale. Jack Zipes is always informative, entertaining, and provocative: maybe start with The Irresistible Fairy Tale, or Why Fairy Tales Stick.
In terms of English folklore, I would particularly recommend Carolyne Larrington’s The Land of the Green Man, for the way it intertwines story and landscape, Ronald Hutton’s Stations of the Sun for its clear-eyed account of the ritual year, Julia Bishop & Steve Roud’s Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, and Iona & Peter Opie’s Children’s Games in Street and Playground.
If someone has a developing interest in folklore, most good books have excellent bibliographies or further reading sections, so you can just follow your interests, book by book. Probably the most helpful thing anyone in the UK can do is to join The Folklore Society.
The Watkins Book of English Folktales is out on October 11th, priced £14.99, and is available in all good book stores.