Folk Tales of the Night E-Book

Chris Salisbury

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 202

Beschreibung

'An enchanting treasury of magical tales handed down through the ages. Infectious and soul-stirring, these are stories crying out to be shared.' - Ben Hoare, award winning wildlife journalist and nature nerd Have you heard the tale of Black Annis, the witch-demon that lurks beneath a Leicester housing estate? Do you know the legend of the Hunting of the Great Bear, or how the crow brought daylight? Why should you be careful to never insult the moon? Star stories and creature tales, good-old-fashioned ghost stories together with traditional narratives about how the night became kindle the fires of our imagination and deepen our acquaintance with the dark in this compendium of stories to tell out loud. Filtered through the wild imaginations and indigenous tongues of storytellers from all over the world, this collection is rewritten and re-presented here by a master storyteller from the UK, who has been spinning nocturnal narratives around the campfire for three decades. This is a delicious midnight feast of 'tales from the dark side' to fascinate, terrify, enchant and inform about the night-time realm.

Leseprobe

First published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Text © Chris Salisbury, 2023

Illustrations © Bea Baranowska, 2023

The right of Chris Salisbury to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 580 9

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Foreword

About the Author

Introduction

1   Origins of the Night – Stories of Birth, Becoming and Banishment

Introduction

Where Night Came From – Brazil

Basket of Darkness – Kono, Sierra Leone

Crow Brings Daylight – Inuit, Alaska

Darkness Versus Daylight – Inuit, Canadian Central Arctic

The Balance of Day and Night – Caddo Nation, Arkansas, America

The Banquet of Strange Delights – Japan

King of the Birds – Mamaiuran, Brazil

2   Moon Stories

Introduction

The Giant and the Moons – Aboriginal Australia

Don’t Curse the Moon! – Māori, New Zealand

The Blacksmith and the Moon – Mandingo, Africa

Quadjac and the Man in the Moon – Inuit, Greenland

The Jilted Moon – Chukchee, Siberia

The Moon Maiden – Japan

A Gift from the Moon – Guaraní, South America

3   Star Stories

Introduction

A Necklace of Stars – Philippines

Road of Stars – South Africa

How the Pleiades Became – Denmark

The Hunting of the Great Bear – First Nations, America

Orion the Hunter – Ancient Greece

4   Creature Stories

Introduction

The Fire Quest – Japan

A Moth Case – Queensland, Aboriginal Australia

The Tale of Owl – First Nations, America

How Bat Became – Anishinaabe, Canada/America

Bat Hides from the Sun – Africa

Theft of the Sun – Siberia

The Hare in the Moon – San Bushman, Kalahari, Namibia

5   The Coming of Fire

Introduction

How Fire Came Between People and Animals – San Bushman, Kalahari, Namibia

A Fire Tail – Cowichan, Canada

Grandmother Spider Fetches Fire – Choctaw, America

Bokka Fetches Fire – Romany Gypsy

Rainbow Crow – Lenni-Lenape, Canada/America

The Gift from Prometheus – Ancient Greece

6   Ghost Stories

Introduction

Old Crooker – Derbyshire, England

The Death Coach – Dartmoor, Devon, England

A Stick of Blackthorn – Ireland

Mercy Bestowed – Dartmoor, Devon, England

Black Annis – Leicestershire, England

See No Evil, Hear No Evil – Mayo, Ireland

The Demon Huntsman – Torquay, Devon, England

7   Tales from Betwixt and Between

Introduction

Fox Fire – Lincolnshire, England

Fishbones in the Sky – Aboriginal Australia

The Island of Bones – First Nations, America

The Rope of Light – South Africa

The Legend of Lussi – Norway

The Flowers Gave Us Sleep – India

Dancing Demons – Source Unknown

Swan Lights – Sweden

The Firefox – Finland

Acknowledgements

Dedication

For Torin, a little boy whose flame flickered so brightly in the endless night, and whose lifeblood was nourished by stories.

Gratitude

For all the colourful threads of tales that have woven the world tapestry of cultures, and to the storytellers who tended the flames of their tradition, so that future generations may prosper in loving stewardship of our sacred Earth.

Foreword

This is treasure, what you have in your hands. A University of Life, all of itself. There’s a wily genius throughout these stories that tell us about how to live, to encounter challenge, even to bless. Chris Salisbury’s been a storyteller since Noah was a boy (or getting on for thirty years), and I’ve delighted in his tales in almost every kind of setting: from under a majestic beech at mid-summer to the wires and lights of a modern theatre. The thing that stays unchanged in all these landscapes is the rapt look in the gaze of the listeners. They are off on some kind of magic carpet ride. Don’t wait up.

I’m especially pleased there’s a section on ghost stories. Chris is the finest teller of ghost stories I’ve come across. He never hurries but waits till the fire is down to the embers, waits till the candle is casting odd shadows on the cottage wall. Then, maybe, he’ll begin. Some of his favourites are in this book. It’s always a furtive walk back to the tent after Chris’s storytelling. Who knows who’s peering in from the woods?

These beautiful stories are a bundle of stars that light up not just the darkness of the night but the darkness within us, within our culture. I would suggest taking one story a week and making it your teacher. They’re robust, they have nuance, they have something to tell you. And never hear a story and think it not your duty to pass it on.

Folk Tales of the Night is a book curated by a man that loves his craft. You can feel it within the words and you can trust it. These stories don’t just live on his laptop, but out there amongst starlings, curling rivers, winding smoke, and the jubilant look in his kiddie’s eyes as they say, again, again!

Martin Shaw

2023

About the Author

Chris Salisbury is a professional storyteller (aka ‘Spindle Wayfarer’), who has been telling stories around the campfire and leading night walks for twenty-seven years. He co-founded the Westcountry and Oxford Storytelling Festivals and founded WildWise (www.wildwise.co.uk) in 1999 after many years as education officer for Devon Wildlife Trust. With a background in the theatre, a training in therapy and a career in outdoor education, he uses every creative means at his disposal to encourage people to enjoy and value the natural world on the courses and programmes he runs for WildWise.

He directs the acclaimed ‘Call of the Wild’ programme for educators-in-training amongst various other courses and events. His first book, Wild Nights Out: The Magic of Exploring the Outdoors After Dark (2021), with foreword by Chris Packham, has received excellent reviews.

He is the founder of the Animate School of Narrative Arts, which teaches storytelling skills.

He is married with four children and lives in enchantment in the Dart Valley, Devon.

Introduction

How insupportable would be the days, if the night with its dews and darkness did not come to restore the drooping world.

Henry David Thoreau

Without a second thought, at the day’s end, we switch on the lights to continue whatever activity we were pursuing, or simply for sanctuary from the threatening dark. Lest we forget, it wasn’t always like this. For most of our history, the night held terrors in the form of apex predators with claws and teeth and we were humbled into submissive mode without the comforting daylight. Then along came the capacity to generate fire, and along with that a chance to keep the darkness, and the animals, at bay while we enjoyed the warmth and companionship of the hearth. Thus, the perfect habitat for stories and storytelling had arrived, and humanity indulged themselves with the oral tradition for thousands of years. Until today, when the practice has sadly subsided, largely succumbing to the proliferation of artificial light.

A particular acceleration point was when our homes were electrified, which afforded us the luxury of extended hours of bright light so the day’s activity could continue unabated. However, as well as interfering with our circadian rhythms, so important for the sleep cycle, the advent of artificial light had a dramatic effect on stories and storytelling. More so when that other gear-change development came with the advent of television, and latterly the prevalence of all screen devices. As the old saying goes on the Isle of Lewis, ‘When the television came in through the front door, the stories went out the back door.’

The night had always gathered people together, around the warmth and protection of the fire, or the soft atmosphere of lamplight. The shadowy dark was the ideal projection screen for our innate imaginations which, for thousands of years, were indulged by storytelling. The night-time is liminal space, a psychoactive context for us to engage the imaginal realms of the story world. The relatively blank screen of the dark provided the perfect backdrop on which to project the images that flowed forth from the storyteller’s mouth. The night-time was story time – and still is for those cultures who live without electricity and screens.

The stories in this book are meant to be spoken aloud, in honour of the great tradition from which they come. Anthologies of oral narratives often seem a little lifeless on the page, and it could be said this strange ‘new’ literary form of recording them in writing is an act of imprisonment. They deserve instead to be filtered through the living strata of human flesh, bone, breath and memory so they can spring to life again, fresh and revitalised. Tell these stories as a storyteller, and you will be amazed how they seem to have a life of their own. As the old saying goes, ‘Read a story and it goes from the eye to the brain, tell a story and it goes from the mouth to the heart’.

Here, I’ve done my best to make them a pleasure to read too and, by all means, read them aloud to your kids. However, I want to encourage you to learn at least one and see for yourself the difference in the experience, for both you and whoever is listening, and how your life experience and imagination can help the story take flight with new wings.

This anthology is divided into chapter headings that reflect the night’s constituency. Thus, there are the obvious components of the night, featuring stories about the moon and stars, but also a procession of dramas and characters that are engendered by the darkness, at least from a human perspective.

As is the storyteller’s wont, the repertoire is drawn from a wide variety of sources. This ‘pick and mix’ process is the artistic licence of the storyteller, who appreciates the nature of the oral tradition. Another aphorism advises, ‘When you are telling a story, it’s yours. When it is finished, you give it away, as a gift.’ In that spirit, despite some sensitivities about colonialism, I offer every story I tell with respect to the genius of the culture from which it came. It’s one of the ways culture is shared. In this way, the emphasis is very much on gift-giving, and the sharing of culture, as an enrichment. The underlining principle in this tradition is that because it’s not a script, there’s no copyright. Authorship is gained by the process of re-presenting the material, which changes it, and is one of the reasons that many stories gain immortality in a constantly evolving and emergent continuum.

Stories are, by their nature, promiscuous, which means they will go anywhere, with anyone. They have always had a certain sort of currency between travellers, merchants and migrants. Tales would have been exchanged and then transplanted in their new habitat, evolved and refreshed by new tellers to take up residency in a new community. Not unlike a virus, really.

And like a virus, they are contagious. It is my hope that these tales will infect you to the degree that you will share them with others, helping them to live again.

CJS – February 2023

One

Origins of the Night

Stories of Birth, Becoming and Banishment

Introduction

The night always carries its liminal invitation.

Martin Shaw

Anyone who is a parent or teacher of young children will testify to the sweetness of their curiosity about how the world was made. In the old days, the answer would come in the form of a traditional tale.

Traditional narratives address fundamental questions, and every culture, the world over, has a diaspora of tales to explain the beginning of things. In preliterate cultures and before the Age of Reason had taken insidious root in today’s culture, the stories lent themselves to natural phenomena which, once upon a time, didn’t have a scientific narrative to explain – for example, the arrival of the darkness or the coming of the light. The stories in this chapter are akin to Creation myths, and for early peoples were the natural habitat for active imaginations that could project onto the blank canvas of the dark.

Without the anchor of reason and rationale, the human imagination is free to speculate, characterise and create narratives that can provide extra dimensions to the phenomenal world, making us relate to and think about things differently. These are those stories that I hope will bring enrichment and wonder to the mysterious night-time realm.

Where Night Came From

Brazil

Once upon a time, in the time before time was measured by clocks, when the world had just been made, there was no darkness, because there was no night. It was daytime all the time. No one had ever seen a sunrise or sunset; the people knew no starlight or moonlight. In those times, therefore, there was a complete absence of creatures of the night, and no night-scented flowers. The only shadows were those created by the sun, and nobody knew the deep quiet and stillness of the dark.

In those days, the old stories say, there was a mighty sea serpent who lived in the depths of the ocean, whose daughter one day married one of the people who lived on the land. She left her home among the deep, dark depths of the sea and came to dwell with her husband in the land of the sun.

Her eyes soon grew weary of the bright everlasting days, and her beauty became bleached and faded. Her husband watched her with dismay, but he did not know what to do to help her.

But his new wife knew the medicine she needed was respite from the fiery heat of the sun, and she craved the cool dark. ‘Oh, if night would only come to this land,’ she moaned as she searched wearily for what shadows she could find to rest in. ‘Here it is always bright, but in my father’s kingdom there are many shadows. Oh, for a little of that darkness!’

‘What is this night?’ her husband would ask. ‘Tell me more about it and perhaps I can find some for you.’

‘Night,’ she said, ‘is the name we give to the heavy shadows which darken my father’s kingdom in the depths of the ocean. I love the sunlight of your earth land, but I grow very weary of it. If we could have only a little of the darkness of my father’s kingdom to give rest to our eyes, at least for part of the time.’

Her husband at once called his two brothers and asked them to help him on a quest. He explained that they must journey to the kingdom of the sea serpent to bring darkness back for his suffering wife.

The three brothers set forth upon the quest, and after a long and dangerous journey, across thrice nine lands and seven seas, a journey requiring all their strength, skill and cunning, they contrived to arrive at the serpent’s kingdom in the depths of the seventh sea, and there they asked him to give them some of the shadows of night to carry back to the earth land for his daughter. The serpent at once obliged and gave them a sack made of the skins of dogfish, and which had been securely fastened with a binding of bladderwrack. The serpent warned them not to open it until they were once more in the presence of his daughter.

The three brothers thanked the serpent and immediately started out for home, bearing the huge sack of night upon their backs. But as they carried their burden homeward, they began to hear strange sounds within the bag. Sounds they had never heard before. These were the voices of all the night beasts, all the night birds, and all the night insects. They were calling and clamouring and crying out, and at first the three brothers were frightened.

‘Perhaps we should drop the bag full of night, and run away as fast as we can,’ said the youngest. They set the bag down and retreated to a safe distance, to consider it.

When their fears had subsided, they grew more curious to know what was inside the bag. They heard the beautiful melodic song of the nightingale and wanted to see the musician. The nightjar sounded like some strange mechanical thing, and they wanted to meet the machine that made it. The hoot of the owl was mesmerising, but all together the sounds had a hypnotic effect on them. The more they listened to the wild orchestrations, the more their curiosity grew, until they were desperate to know what the sack contained.

Suddenly, the middle brother stood up and said, ‘By my beard, I am going to open the bag and see once and for all what is making this mysterious music!’

And before the others could stop him, he did exactly that. No sooner had he untied it than out rushed the great black cloud of night and riding the tide of darkness that poured forth were all the nocturnal beasts and birds. The brothers screamed and ran as fast as they could, and they didn’t stop running until they were home.

The daughter of the sea serpent was waiting anxiously for their return, scanning the horizon every day. One day, she saw what seemed to be a dark cloud of thunder broiling up on the western horizon, but then she saw the three brothers running frantically before it. As the tide of darkness arrived with the brothers, she cried out, ‘At last! Night has come. Night has finally come.’ And no sooner had she spoken these words than the cloud of night seemed to perch on her eyelids, and she fell fast asleep.

When she awoke, she felt greatly refreshed. She felt rested and becalmed by the passage of the night. She had dreamt for the first time since she had left the sea. She was once more the happy princess who had left her father’s kingdom in the depths of the great seas to come to the earth land. She was now ready for the day again.

She stretched and, as she looked up, she saw a bright shining star hanging low in the eastern sky, and she said, ‘Oh, what a beautiful star you are! Henceforth, you shall be called the morning star and you shall be the sun’s herald and forewarn of the approach of day. You shall reign and be queen of the sky at this hour every morning.’

Then she called all the birds about her and said to them, ‘Oh, wonderful, sweet singing birds, henceforth by my royal decree. I request you to sing your sweetest songs to herald the approach of day.’ The nightingale, owl and nightjar were perched in a nearby tree. ‘You three shall be appointed the watchmen of the night. Your voices shall be heard in the night and shall warn the others that the day is over. At the end of the night, the other birds will sing to greet the rise of the sun, let this be known as the chorus of the dawn.’

To this very day, those birds still sing in the night-time. And all the other birds sing their sweetest songs in that very first hour of the day, singing up the sun, and this we now call the dawn chorus. And still Venus reigns as the brightest star in the sky.

Basket of Darkness

Kono, Sierra Leone

Long, long ago the Kono people say, the world was bathed in continuous light. There was no darkness. Even when the golden rays of the sun sank beneath the horizon, still the bright silver ribbons of light would be reflected in the Moon.

God wanted to imbue the Earth with another special atmosphere and so created darkness, then put it in a basket to send it up to the Moon to disperse. He chose Bat for the task, as she was such a good flier, and summoned her. Bat was very pleased to be selected and listened carefully as God explained that she was to carry the special basket through the sky all the way to the Moon. Once there, God explained, she was to give it to the Moon and say that God would soon be along to explain how darkness could be used.

Bat lashed the basket to her back and set off on her long journey. After a while, she grew tired and hungry, so she placed the basket down and went to find some food.

In her absence, some animals came by and were curious about what might be in the basket. Of course, they hoped it might be food, and always being hungry, they started to have a closer look. Just as they were prising the lid off the basket, Bat returned and chased them away. But it was too late. The darkness had seeped out and was covering the land.

Bat tried to gather it back, flapping her wings furiously to waft it back in the basket, but to no avail. By the time the sun rose, she was exhausted, and so she slept. When she awoke, the sun was setting, and she took to the skies and again tried to flap the darkness back into the basket, so she could fulfil her task. But it was a hopeless endeavour, and even though she attempts this every night, she never succeeds.

And that is why the faithful bats still, to this very day, fly the way they do at night, flapping their wings as fast as they can to waft the darkness back into the basket.

Crow Brings Daylight

Inuit, Alaska

A long time ago, when the world was first born, it was always dark in the north country where the Inuit people lived, and where it was covered with snow for 300 days a year. They presumed that darkness covered the world until Crow told them about daylight and how he had seen it sometimes on his long journeys. The more they heard about daylight, the more the people grew curious, and the more curious they got, the more they wanted it. The more they wanted it, the more they considered it.

‘If there was daylight, we could hunt further and for longer,’ they said. ‘We could see the polar bears coming and run before they attack us.’

The people begged Crow to go and bring them daylight, but he didn’t want to. ‘It’s a long way and I’m too old to fly that far,’ he said.

But the people did not relent in their request, and they begged until he finally agreed to go. He flapped his coal-black wings and launched into the dark sky, towards the east. He flew for a long time until his wings were aching. He was about to turn back when he saw the dim glow of daylight in the distance. ‘At last, there is the daylight,’ said the tired Crow.

As he flew towards the dim light it became brighter and brighter until the whole sky was in bright light, and he could see for miles. The exhausted bird landed in a tree near a village to rest. It was very cold. He rested and watched.

Soon, his beady eye saw the daughter of the village chief coming to the river. She dipped her bucket in the icy water and returned to her father’s snow lodge. Crow followed and perched outside the entrance to glean what he could.

Inside the snow lodge it was warm and bright, and Crow saw the chief’s grandson playing on the lodge floor. After a while he started to cry.

‘What’s the matter? Why are you crying?’ asked the chief, who was sitting at the fire. The chief wanted his favourite grandson to be happy and told his daughter to fetch the box of daylight balls.