Folk tales
Feb. 4th, 2009 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofastolatI've got to do a whole morning of storytelling next week in a school, in which all my stories must be folk tales from around the world. Whenever I'm asked to do this, my heart sinks, because it's just so hard to find folk tale retellings that will delight an entire class of over-excited primary school children. I often wonder why this is. Many of these tales were passed on orally, but a lot of the retellings are very wordy and literary and don't lend themselves well to reading aloud. While they might work very well on a one-to-one basis, reading to a mixed ability class is very different, in that you have to aim for the lowest common denominator. The children don't know me, and are less inclined to be thoughtful and reflective than they are with their teacher. They're excited, and they respond best to stories with lots of noise, humour and actions. It is just so hard to find traditional tales that work well.
The search did, though, make me muse nostalgically about my own favourite traditional tales from my childhood. When I was very little, such things were too scary for me. One of my earliest memories of school is of sobbing inconsolably for hours because the prince had his eye poked out when falling from Rapunzel's tower. This has led me to be quite tolerant of toned-down versions of traditional stories, in which Chicken Licken lives, and big bad wolves go off with their tales between their legs and never, ever, ever come back. There is no single correct version of an orally-transmitted traditional tale, so I don't think that it's ruining a tale to tone it down when telling it to sensitive children.
Once I'd grown out of that, though, I loved Ruth Manning-Sanders' fairy tale retellings. I think I read most of them from the library, but I owned the books of witches, wizards, and sorcerers and spells, and read them many times. I still have strong memories of many of those stories, and a strong visual and emotional memory of the pictures. Stories that stick in my mind are a long Russian one about three brothers all called Ivan; one called "Go I know what wither and fetch I know not what"; something involving a magic stone inside a dead hen; a wizard who said "i' faith, Jack"; Long, Broad and Sharpsight; something about a bear who was really a prince; a picture of a wizard all covered in leaves, meeting a soldier; some lad called Esben who tricked a witch into killing her own daughters; and one that rather traumatised me, involving witch girls who'd stolen an old man's eyes.
My mum had a book that was yellow and, I think, involved Walter de la Mare somehow. I can't remember the stories in it off the top of my head, but I'm sure I'd remember them all if I saw it again. I think it contained Molly Whuppie: "Woe betide you, Molly Whuppie, if you e'er come back again!" (which I've probably totally misremembered.)
I don't know which book contained the story of the hobyahs, but it upset me badly. Many years later, I'd totally forgotten it, except for the refrain "hobyah hobyah hobyah!" which I took to chanting a year or two ago whenever I used a unit of hobelars in a board game about the Battle of Crecy. This led me to refinding the story… and being upset all over again.
The more well-known fairy tales I got from an large hardback book with horribly twee paintings. I've no idea who wrote it, but I doubt it had an awful lot of literary merit.
I don't think I ever read the Andrew Lang fairy books. I remember seeing them en masse on the shelves of the library in the place I lived aged 7 to 11, but I don't think I ever borrowed them. I suspect that I assumed they were all about fairies, and didn't realise that they contained just to sort of stories that I loved in the Ruth Manning-Sanders books.
The search did, though, make me muse nostalgically about my own favourite traditional tales from my childhood. When I was very little, such things were too scary for me. One of my earliest memories of school is of sobbing inconsolably for hours because the prince had his eye poked out when falling from Rapunzel's tower. This has led me to be quite tolerant of toned-down versions of traditional stories, in which Chicken Licken lives, and big bad wolves go off with their tales between their legs and never, ever, ever come back. There is no single correct version of an orally-transmitted traditional tale, so I don't think that it's ruining a tale to tone it down when telling it to sensitive children.
Once I'd grown out of that, though, I loved Ruth Manning-Sanders' fairy tale retellings. I think I read most of them from the library, but I owned the books of witches, wizards, and sorcerers and spells, and read them many times. I still have strong memories of many of those stories, and a strong visual and emotional memory of the pictures. Stories that stick in my mind are a long Russian one about three brothers all called Ivan; one called "Go I know what wither and fetch I know not what"; something involving a magic stone inside a dead hen; a wizard who said "i' faith, Jack"; Long, Broad and Sharpsight; something about a bear who was really a prince; a picture of a wizard all covered in leaves, meeting a soldier; some lad called Esben who tricked a witch into killing her own daughters; and one that rather traumatised me, involving witch girls who'd stolen an old man's eyes.
My mum had a book that was yellow and, I think, involved Walter de la Mare somehow. I can't remember the stories in it off the top of my head, but I'm sure I'd remember them all if I saw it again. I think it contained Molly Whuppie: "Woe betide you, Molly Whuppie, if you e'er come back again!" (which I've probably totally misremembered.)
I don't know which book contained the story of the hobyahs, but it upset me badly. Many years later, I'd totally forgotten it, except for the refrain "hobyah hobyah hobyah!" which I took to chanting a year or two ago whenever I used a unit of hobelars in a board game about the Battle of Crecy. This led me to refinding the story… and being upset all over again.
The more well-known fairy tales I got from an large hardback book with horribly twee paintings. I've no idea who wrote it, but I doubt it had an awful lot of literary merit.
I don't think I ever read the Andrew Lang fairy books. I remember seeing them en masse on the shelves of the library in the place I lived aged 7 to 11, but I don't think I ever borrowed them. I suspect that I assumed they were all about fairies, and didn't realise that they contained just to sort of stories that I loved in the Ruth Manning-Sanders books.
