Katharine Mary Briggs (1898–1980)

This is a big, big book. Big in volume. Big in price. But big in value, too.

For some reason, the study of British folk tales was slow to catch on. Charles Perrault in France and the Grimms in Germany came long before Joseph Jacobs compiled the first serious collection of English folktales. This lack meant that there was never a collection as substantial as that of the Grimms. Katherine Briggs changed that. She gathered up just about everything in this multi-volume work, organizing the tales show more into categories and then arranging them by title within the categories.

That by itself would have been important enough, but she also classified them by motifs (based on the Aarne-Thompson motif set) and indexed them on this basis. And she listed parallel versions, allowing the user of the dictionary to find the materials not included in the book.

The result is one of the greatest references on folklore in the English language. If the works of Stith Thompson are the first thing anyone should acquire (and they probably are), this book has a very strong claim to be second. You'll quickly learn to work around the few minor defects it has. show less

Hobberdy Dick is the hobgoblin who protects Widford Manor and has for countless years. The house has changed hands and no longer belongs to the original family, and Dick isn't too keen on the new owners. He does take a liking to the older son, though, and also a young maidservant, who, it so happens, is the only living relative to the original inhabitant and therefore the rightful heir to the riches buried in the old stable...

I started this one without high expectations, to be honest - I show more assumed it would be another children's book from the '50s that hasn't aged well - but I was very happily surprised. You can't help but love Dick and his well-meaning antics, and the young protagonists are very easy to root for. I also loved the keeping up of old traditions and beliefs, as lovingly told by the author as they are respected by the manor's working folk. Definitely recommended. show less

It is mid-seventeenth-century England. Hobberdy Dick, a hobgoblin whose charge it is to guard Widford Manor in the Cotswolds, watches unhappily as new tenants, a city merchant and his family, move in. What makes it even worse is the fact that they are Puritans. Hobberdy Dick knows that now the happy days of mumming and Maying, of Christmas dancing and fireside games are things of the past.
It seems a bleak outlook, until Dick sees hope for the future in Anne Seckar, the penniless cousin of show more the Culvers, and Joel, the merchant's eldest son, who loves the country and the old ways. show less

Briggs is apparently one of the major figures of folklore as an academic discipline, with a PhD from Oxford, and later president of the Folklore Society. The Personnell of Fairyland is an odd little volume. Even if it doesn’t quite match modern standards, the organization and ‘facticity’ of the book make it clear that this is a serious and scholarly collection of British fairy-stories. However, the subtitle is “for those who tell Stories to children,” and every third story or so show more has a darling little woodcut illustration.

As expected, this is a book of fairy tales. Each individual story is brief, and I recall the longest being no more than seven pages or so. The stories are divided into four major sections, heroic fairies who have great and mythical powers, brownies or little fairies who work in great swarms, tutelary families connected to a particular family or house, nature fairies, and finally assorted giants, witches, and monsters. Additionally, there’s a dictionary of different types of fairies. Generally, the stories involve humans interacting with fairies, sometimes tricking them but usually being tricked by the Fair Folk. There’s some deaths and maimings, although less than you’d see in unbowdlerized Grimm’s fairy tales. The worst thing that English fairies do in these stories is abandon humanity. Some of the tales are in plain English, some in dialect, without much pattern or explanation as to why.

As an introduction and basic reference, this is a decent enough introduction to English fairies. However, it entirely lacks context, and unless you are a particularly gifted reader, I can’t see reading these stories to children. show less