The Little History of Storytelling in Cornwall E-Book

Mike O'Connor

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 329

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Cornwall's storytelling tradition stretches back a thousand years. Before TV and radio, stories were told among the flickering shadows at the fireside. They whiled away the travellers' miles, long hours in the fields, and days at sea. They gladdened brief moments of relaxation for miners and bal-maidens. Travelling storytellers wandered from village to village swapping words for supper, and a rich local dialect brought the tales to life. Classic Cornish tales such as the Mermaid of Zennor and Jan Tregeagle are wonderfully entertaining, and collectively tell us much about Cornwall, its people, and its history. Join accomplished storyteller, scholar and writer Mike O'Connor as he explores the 'when, where, and why' of Cornish folk tales and celebrates the rich traditions and cultural legacy of hwedhlow.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been written without the insight and encouragement of many storytelling friends. These include Taffy Thomas MBE, the late Duncan Williamson, my friends at Liskeard Storytelling Café and storytellers across the land. I am most grateful to Tina O’Connor and Barbara Griggs for their proofreading and constructive comments.

I am grateful to the editors of the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall and Old Cornwall magazine, publishers of my previous writing on folklore, some of which I have drawn on in this book. I commend those excellent publications to readers interested in the history and culture of Cornwall.1

The cover picture, The Storyteller, was painted by Leo Davey in 2003 for the An Daras folk arts project. Thank you to An Daras for permission to use this image. The drawing of ‘The Droll Teller and his Guide’ is by Michelle O’Connor. The G.H. Thomas woodcut of ‘A Ghost Story’ is licensed from Getty Images. Other woodcuts are by J.T. Blight, Thomas Bewick and others. The giant Bolster was drawn by George Cruikshank.

In the closing chapter my model is Kahlil Gibran.

Finally, I am grateful for the inspiration of many storytellers who have brought wisdom, humour and humanity to our firesides for hundreds of years. These men and women have been lights in the darkness, gatekeepers of the past and signposts for the future. When I speak, it is their words that echo in the distance.

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage

And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,

We Poets of the proud old lineage

Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why, –

What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales

Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,

Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,

And winds and shadows fall towards the West …

From The Golden Journey to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915).

1Old Cornwall, 16, 2, Autumn 2022, ‘Traditional Storytelling in Cornwall’ Old Cornwall, 16, 4, Autumn 2023, ‘John Ley Petheybridge’

Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, 2024 ‘At Sea with the Mermaid of Zennor’

First published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Text © Mike O’Connor, 2025

Cover illustration: Leo Davey 2003, used with the kind permission of An Daras.

The right of Mike O’Connor 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.

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ISBN 978 1 80399 967 8

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CONTENTS

Prelude: The Travelling Droll-Teller

Introduction

Some Definitions

A WORLD OF STORIES

A Starting Point

From Bard to Verse

A European Context

Story People

The Elephant in the Story: Transliteration

Literary Invention

What is a Storyteller?

Competing Concepts

Families of Stories

Evolution in Oral Transmission

How We Learn Stories

Telling Tales

Tales Collected in Cornwall

The Meaning in the Message

Orality in Medieval Cornwall

Tales in the Cornish Landscape

‘Cala Rag Whethlow’

How Far is Far Away?

How Old are our Folk Tales?

COLLECTORS, OBSERVERS AND WRITERS

West Cornwall

North and East Cornwall

Storytelling in the World of John Harris

Early Recorders of Dialect and Anecdote

Storytelling in the World of Charles Lee

Folkloric References in Anne Treneer

STORYTELLERS

The Nineteenth-Century Storytelling Environment

Fireside Storytellers of Old Cornwall

Kelynack and the Pickle

The Tradition of the Droll-Tellers

Anthony James

Droll-Tellers Remembered

Folk Poets

Dialect Speakers

ABOUT STORIES

The Supposed Founding of Cornwall

Giants and the Cornish Language

Giants as Memories

Named Giants

Bother with Bolster

Hagiography and Apocryphal Tales

Arthur in Cornwall

More Medieval Tales

Pengersick the Sorcerer

Dando and his Dogs

Lyonesse: Myth Creation and Evolution

Jowan Chy an Horth

Formulaic Prose in Kernewek Tales

Early Modern Tales

Early Mentions of Fairy Folk

Mischief Makers

Problems with Piskies

Notes on Knockers

Trouble with Tregeagle

The First Sightings of Mermaids

Mermaids Nasty and Nice

The Devil Deflected

Searching for Cornish Dragons

Witches, Wisdom, Magic and Malice

Searching for Gods and Heroes

Tamara

Mr Noy

SURVIVAL, ARRIVAL AND REVIVAL

The Power of Story

The Shock of the Twentieth Century

Dialect Performance in the Twentieth Century

The Cornish Litany

Searching for the Witches of Boscastle

Survival and Revival East of the Tamar

Late Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Cornish Storytelling

Parallel Cultures

Between Folklore and Fakelore

Listening in the Twenty-First Century

Storytelling Online

The Future

Aubade

REFERENCE MATERIAL

Index of Historical Storytellers and Folk Poets

Select Bibliography

Appendices

About the Author

PRELUDE: THE TRAVELLING DROLL-TELLER

It was a spring morning full of promise and birdsong. The day was sky-bright and clear. Young Jenny Bottrell was standing in the lane, watching for her cousin, William. But then another figure came into sight. The remote Cornish hamlet of Raftra saw few visitors. But from the north came a stranger.

His clothes were weather-beaten. Over his shoulder was a canvas sack. At his left side a green baize bag hung from his belt. His eyes were closed, and his right hand held a stick that constantly swept to right and left, sensing the grass verge of the road.

‘Who are you?’ asked the girl.

‘Guess!’ said the stranger, smiling.

‘Are you Anthony James?’ she asked.

He nodded. Immediately, she ran shouting.

‘Mamm, Tas, the droll-teller has come!’

Greetings came from windows and doors. The travelling storyteller brought news, gossip and magic words. He was always welcome.

Anthony was led to a chair by a fire, and a mug of tea was placed in his hand. After broth and bread, kowl ha bara in Cornish, the tales began. Firelight lit the listeners’ faces. The bright words mingled with the flames; they joined the dancing shadows in the room, leapt to the rafters and fled into the night. Stories told for many years might have happened yesterday. Tales from far away came from just over the horizon.

The cadence of the storyteller’s voice had a music of its own. Its notes drifted from the hearthside down the dusty road and over small fields into a landscape already brimming with legends.

The children listened, wide-eyed, and remembered every word.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the engaging world of hwedhlow, a Cornish word that means ‘stories’. This is a book about stories and storytelling, but it is not a book of stories. I am a storyteller, and this is my notebook, compiled over many years as I have explored traditional stories and oral storytelling, especially in my adopted home of Cornwall. Inevitably this book has a Cornish centre of gravity, but it should be of interest to anyone who tells, hears, reads, or studies folk tales. This book can be read on its own, but it is useful to have Cornish stories nearby, including the classic Victorian texts by Robert Hunt and William Bottrell, available in facsimile and online. Many of the tales are retold in my own books and others published by The History Press. All are referenced in the bibliography.

Cornwall, where I have lived and worked for over fifty years, has a unique and fascinating body of folklore. My folk tale database has over 1,000 entries. Many legends, folk tales and dialect tales have been preserved. The distinctive nature of Cornwall’s folk tales has been well explored by Ronald M. James; I commend his work to you.1 My intention is not to dispute or detract from his scholarship, but to view Cornish storytelling through a different lens – that of the working storyteller.

Before TV and radio, stories were told among the flickering shadows at the fireside. They whiled away the travellers’ miles, the sailors’ days at sea, and long hours in the fields. They gladdened brief moments of relaxation underground for miners, and on the surface for bal-maidens.2 Also, the tales would gently educate, for many contained worldly wisdom.

The storytellers were ordinary people, but with a love of the cadence of the voice, the music in the words, the familiar landscape secretly painted with magic. They were grandparents, parents, nursemaids, publicans, mine-captains and sailors. They were the people’s poets and dreamers. Some travelled the land, telling tales in exchange for hospitality.

Despite humble origins and scant education, many storytellers were multi-talented. In nineteenth-century Cornwall, the ex-soldier Anthony James was a storyteller, singer and fiddler. Billy Foss, a stonemason and clock-mender, was a folk poet, musician and storyteller. But though one person might be particularly noted as a storyteller, another as a poet and another as a singer, there was and is no hierarchy in the modes of expression. A folk tale is not of its nature ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than a vernacular poem or a folk ballad on the same subject.

Folktales, dialect tales and reminiscence joyfully coexist and overlap. Their emphases may respectively favour folklore, local language and local history, but all involve oral storytelling in some form. All are part of the vital discourse that defines us as social creatures.

The nineteenth-century dialect tale and folk tale collections of John Tregellas, William Bottrell and Robert Hunt are known to many; their details are in the bibliography. However, oral storytelling in Cornwall has a much longer history, which will be explored in the following pages. In them we move from the general to the particular and from the past to the future. It’s a fascinating journey through history, geography and time; through imagination, explanation and aspiration. I hope that this book, like the tales it describes, will help to tell the story of Cornwall and affirm its unique cultural identity.

1 James, R.M., The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation (Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2018)

2 Female mine workers, employed in breaking rocks, pushing trams, etc.

SOME DEFINITIONS

Over the years, understandings and definitions can change. At the time of writing, I am using these:

Reminiscence is the recalling of past personal experience.

Dialect is the use of characteristic local accents, words and speech forms.

Dialect tales celebrate local people, their language and their culture.

Folktales are stories in popular culture whose transmission has principally been oral for some generations. Some add the adjective ‘fictional’ to this definition.

In Cornwall, a ‘droll’ is an oral story, delivered in prose and augmented with rhyme and/or song.

Legends are traditional tales, currently or at one time popularly considered historical, even if not authenticated.

Localisation is a process in which stories acquire changed personal names, geography, or other cultural characteristics as they move from one community to another.

Kernow is the historic Cornish-language name for Cornwall.

Kernewek is Cornish for the Cornish language, a Brittonic Celtic tongue related to Welsh and Breton. By the early nineteenth century, it was only known by a few in the far west of Cornwall. It was revived in the early twentieth century and is now increasingly used.

Dumnonia was the Roman name for the geographical area comprising Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. Its peoples were collectively called Dumnonii.

A WORLD OF STORIES

A STARTING POINT

To help understand storytelling in Cornwall we will start by taking a wider view. For millennia, tales have been told to record events, assert lineages, educate and entertain. Tales of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh were written down on clay tablets about 2100 BCE. Those tales were discrete stories, but tablets of c. 1800 BCE record a lengthy Epic of Gilgamesh. A standard Babylonian text appeared between 1300 and 1000 BCE. The tales have many characteristics unique to oral culture and certainly had origins as spoken tales.1 They were told for 1,000 years and in four language variants.

Storytelling flourished in classical Greece. There the spoken word was in some ways thought preferable to the dead symbols of a written language. Socrates noted that once something was written down, it lost its ability for change and growth.2 The epic tales ascribed to Homer were probably written down about 750 BCE. Many passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey also reflect oral storytelling techniques.3 It is thought that the tales were first told by storytellers before they were echoed and crafted by singer-poets (ἀοιδοί, aoidoi) as stylistically coherent, poetic works. By the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, ‘rhapsodes’ told them from memory, in their travels and at Panathenaic Festivals.4

But while some were declaiming Homeric epics lasting hours, others were telling tales lasting minutes, such as Aesop’s fables. What we now call ‘fireside tales’ were also told thousands of years ago. Indeed, when considering oral cultures, it would be naive to suggest they were not.5 Many such tales survive to this day.

Across the world, stories, their subjects, their tellers and their listeners were found in all levels of society. Tales were told in palaces, theatres and homes. They existed in written forms and in memory. They were told by actors, bards and the unlettered. All this was surely true of early medieval Cornwall, but written records do not survive. To judge what may have happened in Cornwall we must study the culture of its Brittonic neighbour, Wales.6

THE ROLES OF THE BARD AND STORYTELLER IN WALES

In about 60 CE, the acclaimed Latin poet Lucan wrote of the bards of Gaul and Britain ‘whose martial rhymes preserve from ancient times the fame of valorous deeds in battle’, to ‘Pour forth in safety more abundant song.’7 In the sixth century, the first role of the famous Welsh bards Taliesin and Aneirin was to celebrate the king and his deeds, and the dour cleric Gildas criticised the bards of Maelgwn of Gwynedd for their raucous singing of the king’s praise-songs.8 As Sioned Davies succinctly put it, ‘verse was mainly, if not wholly, employed for elegy and eulogy.’9 This material was recited, sung or perhaps chanted, and ‘harps’ are often mentioned. It was copied many times before appearing in surviving manuscripts dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. It is carefully crafted, and to be effective in performance must have been read or accurately reproduced from memory.

Davies also reminds us that various medieval Welsh triads10 affirm both the separate identity and links between barddoniaeth (poetry and music) and cyfarwyddyd (stories and traditional lore).11 In medieval Wales, there was a distinction between the musico-literary verbatim world of the bard and the oral storytelling tradition of the cyfarwydd. Davies quotes the eleventh-century Math fab Mathonwy telling of Gwydion and his friends visiting the court of Pryderi:

They were made welcome. Gwydion was placed beside Pryderi that night. ‘Why,’ said Pryderi, ‘gladly would we have a tale from some of the young men yonder.’ ‘Lord,’ said Gwydion, ‘it is a custom with us that the first night after one comes to a great man, the chief bard shall have the say. I will tell a tale gladly.’ Gwydion was the best teller of tales [cyfarwydd] in the world. And that night he entertained the court with pleasant tales and storytelling till he was praised by everyone in the court.

So, both barddoniaeth and cyfarwyddyd were heard in high-status households. It is unlikely that bardic skills, requiring years of training, were often deployed in working-class situations. But the skills of the cyfarwydd were essentially those of fireside storytelling. Gwydion’s celebrated storytelling skill would be as much in place in cottage as in court. The evidence of domestic or social storytelling is in the survival of many traditional tales of great antiquity.

THE BARD AND STORYTELLER IN CORNWALL

There are clues to such activity in medieval Cornwall in the Vocabularium Cornicum.12 This Cornish-Latin lexicon, compiled in about 1100, was based on Ælfric’s Dictionarium Latino-Saxonicum of about the year 1000. Its listing includes barth (bard, musician, entertainer) and pridit (poet). It includes redior (reader) and datheluur (orator), thus drawing a distinction between the conveyors of written and oral material. It also has telynor (harper), piƿhit (piper), harfellor (fiddler), other musicians and their female counterparts.

These words echo distinctions apparent in the invitation proclaimed to the whole Brittonic world by Lord Rhys ap Gruffydd to attend his festival at Aberteifi in 1176. This is often identified as the first recorded Welsh eisteddfod. At this event ‘he appointed two sorts of competition; one between the bards and poets and the other between the harpers, fiddlers, pipers and various performers of instrumental music’.13 The Vocabularium Cornicum shows that the Cornish were expected to have all the skills needed to accept Lord Rhys’s invitation, though we do not know if any did. The Vocabularium suggests that in Cornwall the bardh (bard) worked alongside the hwedhlor (storyteller).

Early bardic activity in Cornwall is also hinted at in several medieval tales, though they reflect the (later) time of their creation as much as the early medieval period. There can be little doubt that the successive impositions of Saxon and Norman administration seriously affected previous Cornish custom and practice, especially in high-status contexts. However, that was probably less true of working-class society. The Cornish cyfarwydd, or fireside storyteller, would not have been immune to cultural influence and linguistic change. But, as we will find, about 150 years after the Norman conquest, Cornwall retained unique folk tales, suggesting a thriving pre-existing oral tradition of domestic and social storytelling.

FROM BARD TO VERSE

Several books from the high medieval period purport to tell of legends and minstrelsy associated with Cornwall in earlier years. With care we can learn from them.

THE HISTORIA REGUM BRITANNIÆ

The Historia Regum Britanniæ (History of the Kings of Britain) was written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in about 1136. Hugely popular and once considered historical, it supposedly records British history from the time of the Fall of Troy to the Norman Conquest. In the first and last chapters, Geoffrey tells his readers that while writing the book he struggled to research the early kings of the Britons. His problem was solved when Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, gave him a ‘very ancient book’ written in the British tongue. Geoffrey claimed that his Historia faithfully translated that book into Latin. Geoffrey’s work is now discredited. But although now considered historical fiction, the Historia made famous many British legends, including tales of King Arthur and the founding of Cornwall.

TRISTAN

The popular tales of Tristan describe minstrelsy at the early medieval court of Mark, King of Cornwall.14 They were documented by many, including Thomás of Britain (c.1173), Béroul (mid-twelfth century), Eilhart von Oberge (c.1170) and Gottfried von Strassburg (c.1210). Thomás wrote that his source was Bledri, a Welsh master storyteller, possibly a twelfth-century king of Dyfed.

THE ROMAN DE SILENCE

The thirteenth-century Roman de Silence by Heldris de Cornouaille (perhaps a pseudonym) exists in a single manuscript found in Wollaton Hall, Nottingham in 1911.15 The tale is of ‘Silence’, the daughter of Cador, ruler of sixth-century Cornwall. Cador (as Cado) is a historical figure mentioned in the Historia and other sources. The son of King Gerrens of Cornwall, he is a friend and possibly a relative of King Arthur. In the Roman, Silence, disguised as a young man in order to secure her inheritance, runs away with two minstrels. They teach her to sing and play harp and vielle (medieval fiddle). A feast is described at which ‘One fiddled a Breton lai; the other harped Gueron.’

LE MORTE D’ARTHUR

Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur of 1470 was compiled from multiple French and English sources including the Historia. It has many references to minstrelsy, but inevitably Malory’s text often reflects his own late-medieval times. In Malory, Tristan learns to play the harp in Brittany during a seven-year apprenticeship, which parallels the long training required of Welsh bards.16

GESTA HEREWARDI

The origins of the early twelfth-century Gesta Herewardi are unclear. It may have been compiled in Old English by one Leofric the Deacon and reproduced in Latin by Richard of Ely.17 In the Gesta, Hereward is asked to help a Cornish princess, daughter of the King of Gweek.18 At a feast before her enforced wedding he plays the harp and sings, to the chagrin of the resident musician. Subsequently, Hereward rescues the bride. Like the other medieval tales, the Gesta tells of bardic-like activity at a high-status Cornish feast at a pre-Norman date.

A COLOURED WINDOW ON REALITY

Geoffrey’s Historia was a work of historical fiction written as fact for a Norman readership. The other fictional accounts also suffer the opacity of time, and they too are coloured. Though most may have originated in oral tradition, in the form we know them they reflect the life experience, received understandings, social conventions and political outlook of their writers.

However, they do tell us of the need for, and the power of, stories, especially when set to music. They explore the relationship between minstrels or bards and nobility. They tell of the portability of verbal and musical culture, and of regional distinctiveness in the ancient kingdom of Cornwall.

Importantly, the status and roles of the Cornish minstrels and bards described are not inconsistent with the Cyfraith Hywell, the medieval summary of Welsh bardic custom and practice.

A EUROPEAN CONTEXT

Alongside the Historia and the medieval romances, we find folk tales: shorter stories that educate and entertain. Longer than fables and usually not literally true, they say much that is truthful and open a window on past times. Cornwall is especially rich in folk tales.

For the last millennium and until recently, folk tales have been recorded in two ways. The first is oral – tales are heard and then passed on by listeners who, in turn, tell the tales themselves. The second is documentary. Sometimes a complete tale is found in a book. Sometimes a story is incidentally mentioned. Sometimes, as in the medieval Welsh Triads, we find just a sentence or two.

Oral processes have usually been, of their nature, volatile, uncoordinated and shaped by the influence of individual storytellers and the receptiveness of their listeners. Yet books too have limitations. A story in a book is a record of a tale in one time and place. Also, oral tales seldom make effective literature without re-drafting, making them vulnerable to the mores of the writer, editor and publisher.

An anthology Le Piacevoli Notti by Giovanni Francesco Straparola was published in Venice between 1550 and 1553. Amongst other material it contained sixteen folk tales found in later collections, some with possible origins in Greece. The Pentamerone by the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile, known in English as the Tale of Tales, was published in 1634 and 1636. The French Contes de Ma Mère L’oye by Charles Perrault, published in 1697, was known in English as Tales of Mother Goose.

But those works were the exception. In Europe documentary recording of folk tales was sporadic and often incidental, until language and traditional culture were identified as central to a nation’s cultural heritage by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803). Thus inspired, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected tales in their Kinder und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) of 1812, augmented and rewritten until 1858. Many others followed their example.

In Cornwall, two pioneering collectors of folk tales were Robert Hunt (1807–1887) and William Bottrell (1816–1881), whose collections were published in 1865 (Hunt) and 1870, 1873 and 1880 (Bottrell).

The folklore of North and East Cornwall was explored by Anna Eliza Bray (1790–1883), Nellie Sloggett (1859–1923), Barbara Spooner (1893–1983) and Margaret Balfour (1898–1940).

Many others wrote and collected Cornish dialect tales and anecdotes. They are known from 1762. Significant recorders of older dialect tales were John Tabois Tregellas (1792–1863) and Charles Lee (1870–1956). Tregellas was published in 1868 and 1879, and Lee in 1941, 1995 and 2002.

In the following pages we explore these Cornish collections and seek clues in language, landscape and history that tell us about storytelling in Cornwall over the last thousand years or more. But we start by discussing storytelling, storytellers and the way we understand them.

STORY PEOPLE

THEN

Long ago there were just two types of story people: tellers and listeners. The categories overlapped, as most people had a tale of some sort to tell at family or community gatherings. Also, by definition, any storyteller must have ‘collected’ his or her tales before telling them. An example setting is that of the eighth-century tale of Caedmon, where a community of monastery workers sat down together, each in turn entertaining the others. In the twentieth century this was still true of the Traveller communities described by Betsy Whyte and Duncan Williamson.19

As we have heard, in many cultures, beside the oral tales that were their inspiration, poets and performers created stories, formally structured in rhyme, written down and meticulously performed in courts, theatres and contests. In Wales the bard worked alongside the storyteller. This was probably also true in Cornwall.

NOW

Since Victorian times collectors have gathered folk tales. They and others have rewritten and edited them as literary works. Scholars have studied them. The term ‘folklore’ was coined by William Thoms in 1846; the Folk Lore Society was founded in 1878.

So now, as well as tellers and listeners we have collectors, folklorists, authors and editors. Each of the latter may affect both public record and public perception.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE STORY: TRANSLITERATION

Everyday speech patterns do not necessarily make good written text. Also, while a verbatim transcription preserves a tale, it is only as heard at one particular time and place. Such transcriptions do not sell well and rarely popularise tales. Most authors or editors of folk tale collections have felt the need to redraft the stories. This is true even when a tale has a written source. An example is the tale of The Fairy Ointment, particularly popular in Cornwall. Recounted by Anna Bray in a letter of 24 April 1832, it was considerably redrafted in Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales in 1890.20 Another Cornish example is the Mermaid of Zennor, retold scores of times.

Study of collections of European folk tales show many differences between similar tales. But until the age of recording machines, it was often impossible to know which changes resulted from editing and re-drafting, and which were from oral evolution. In Cornwall, both Hunt and Bottrell claimed to have presented the tales as collected, but both also said they had made changes.

In the preface to his 1870 book Bottrell wrote:

In most cases the stories are given as related by the droll-tellers, except where our local dialect might be unintelligible to the general reader, or when (as is frequently the case) they indulge in a plainness of speech which the fastidious might regard as indelicate. On this account it became necessary to curtail and alter some stories in order to make them presentable.

In his introduction, Hunt wrote:

All the stories … are the genuine household tales of the people. The only liberties which have been taken with them, has been to alter them from the vernacular – in which they were for the most part related – into modern language. This applies to every romance but one. The Mermaid’s Vengeance is a combination of three stories, having no doubt a common origin, but varying considerably in their details.

Comparing tales in Hunt and Bottrell, we find that Bottrell often adds extra detail to convey context and background.

In both Hunt and Bottrell we find different English language versions of Jowan Chy an Horth, a tale told in Kernewek in about 1667. Many changes occurred before English-language publication 200 years later.

For the last 1,000 years, oral tradition has had the filter of publication. Without it, many old tales would have been lost. But each written version is of its time. If we can understand that time, and the backgrounds and reasoning of the writers, we can better understand the oral culture they portray. Written records, whatever their failings, are valuable snapshots in time. As culture and language evolve, sympathetic rewriting is needed to bring tales to a new readership.

Since medieval times both English and Kernewek have evolved, as has their spelling. In recent decades scholars have debated the spelling to be used in revived Kernewek. A Standard Written Form (SWF) of Kernewek is now used. However, in historical texts and various twentieth-century publications, variant spellings are found. In this book I use SWF, but in quotations I use the spellings of source documents.

The glorious escapee from editorial oversight is the world of dialect tales. Dialect spelling is not subject to academic discipline. In the late nineteenth century many small, cheap books of dialect tales were locally produced for local markets. Dialect tales are a unique culture, created, told and enjoyed by local people.

LITERARY INVENTION

If rewriting is essential when presenting tales to today’s public, when does ‘crafting’ by a writer or editor become intervention? Grimm’s fairy tales show many differences between the 1812 and 1858 editions, a result of cultural and religious pressure to rewrite.

In A Peep at the Pixies Anna Elizabeth Bray (1790–1883) worked folklore into fictional stories. The stories are not folk tales, but they do give insight into some folkloric beliefs of the early 1800s.21

In H.J.Whitfield’s Scilly and its Legends (1852), amongst credible folkloric material, tales identified by the author as ‘legends’ are cleverly written historical fiction. In comparison, Emma Tiddy, a native of the islands, claims no folkloric credentials. Yet in her Maze of Scilly (1913) many of her tales are based on local tradition or incidents from real life, and they have a ring of credibility.

Robert Hunt was methodical about the presentation of his tales, which are usually direct and without unnecessary detail. On the other hand, William Bottrell often included folk beliefs, dialect and customs, to convey time, place and cultural context. He called himself ‘the Old Celt’, and it can be argued that he was projecting his vision of a distinctive Celtic Cornwall of the past. But even though Hunt and Bottrell were of their time and modulated their tales to meet cultural sensitivities, they told folk tales credibly.

Margaret Melville Balfour’s The Vanishing Mayor of Padstow is more debatable.22 Balfour, a niece of Robert Louis Stevenson, clearly knew Cornish legends and the geography and history of North Cornwall. She built stories round them that look like folk tales. However, her Arthurian tales The Watcher of the West, The Attorney and the Dragon and The Attorney and the Giantare flights of fancy. Her book has the subtitle ‘Other Truthful Narratives’. Perhaps this phrase was used to give the fictional tales more credibility.

The amount of ‘window dressing’ applied to the tales of Enys Tregarthen (Nellie Sloggett) is harder to assess. Her tales have ‘literary polish’, but they also have geographical references and detail remarkable for an author bedridden from the age of perhaps 17. My inclination is to accept that her tales are a broad literary representation of the folklore of North Cornwall, especially reflecting the author’s childhood years.

Milton included a story in his poem L’Allegro (1645). At a harvest, home participants celebrate ‘With stories told of many a feat, how fairy Mab the junkets eat’, the junkets being the intended reward of a goblin having threshed a barnful of corn in one night. This episode is similar to the tale of The Piskeys’ Revenge in Enys Tregarthen’s North Cornwall Fairies and Legends (1906) in which piskeys23 steal junket from a hard-working turf-cutter. Had Nellie Sloggett been reading Milton, or was this a tale, known to Milton, that survived in Cornish tradition for another 250 years?

Josiah Henry Harris (1847–1917), a respected Cornish author and journalist, published his whimsical Cornish Saints and Sinners in 1906.24 It is not claimed to be a book of folk tales, but it has many stories that look like them and Harris gives no disclaimer. Yet whilst some episodes are based on Cornish legend, many are fiction.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about historical fiction or good about a folk tale. However, where one masquerades as the other, we must listen or read critically and be careful in our deductions.

WHAT IS A STORYTELLER?

The experience of the Somerset storyteller Ruth Tongue prompts important questions about oral storytelling, relevant to Cornwall and the whole storytelling world. Ruth (1898–1981) was raised in Middlesex in a family that enjoyed stories, music and drama. As a young woman she visited Somerset and in 1954 she returned to settle in Crowcombe. There Ruth was at one with local people and their culture. She told tales and sang songs. In the 1960s she was ‘discovered’ by the folklorist Katharine Briggs, who helped Ruth with her own books, and together they edited Folktales of England (1965).25

But, for some folklorists, Ruth was a ‘problematic figure’.26 Her song repertoire was especially criticised. Many are versions of well-known folk songs. Some, however, were unknown and may have been poorly remembered from Ruth’s childhood, or written by her or a third party. That said, she lived in a remote area and had a much smaller catchment than folksong collectors such as Baring Gould or Cecil Sharp.

The authenticity of some of Ruth’s tales was also questioned. Critics questioned her unique material and delivery style. Ruth was criticised for not being rigorous with her sources.27 Some criticisms were of the Catch 22 variety. Tales documented elsewhere were ‘borrowed from a book’. Stories not found elsewhere were ‘fabricated’.

Ruth, then elderly, explained that many of her tales were heard in childhood and later rewritten from memory, her notes having been lost when her home, Wharncliffe Cottage, burned down in 1965.

In hindsight some of the comments seem harsh. The problem arose when Ruth was labelled a folklorist, which brought expectations of academic rigour and detachment. Ruth was anything but detached: she was a practical storyteller and folksinger, working alone in a remote village. She was ‘discovered’ in her 60s, in an age when most oral storytelling had died out. Her critics may not have understood how a community storyteller works. For most of us, creating, amending, localising and forgetting bits of stories is normal. Ruth’s critics labelled her, defined expectations of how she should act and criticised her for not meeting those expectations. That Ruth was old, female, eccentric, educated and from the home counties may not have helped.

We now know that terms allegedly invented by Ruth, such as calling the channel between the Quantocks and Wales ‘The Severn Sea’, were widely used in the nineteenth century. Tales she supposedly invented have been found elsewhere. Of about twenty-one published by Ruth, at least twelve are versions of known stories, four use familiar folk tale elements and five are remotely linked to folkloric material.

Several of Ruth’s tales may have links to Cornwall. The Conger King in The Sea Morgan and the Conger Eels may have been inspired by the giant conger in Harris’s Cornish Saints and Sinners.28 The ‘Grig’ in the tale The Grig’s Red Cap may be related to Hunt’s tale of Bobby Griglans.29 In Kernewek, Grug is a collective noun for ‘heath’ or ‘ling’. In the History of Polperro, Thomas Couch wrote that fairies of all classes wear ‘straw hats or little red caps’. The song Judas Was a Red-haired Man may reflect past wariness of red-haired people described by Hunt.30

The ‘Sea Morgans’ in The Sea Morgan and the Conger Eels and The Sea Morgan’s Baby may be related to the morgan described by Hunt, who repeated Keightley’s observation that ‘marie-morgan’ is Breton for ‘sea-woman’.31 This could also be linked to the Cornish use of ‘merry-maid’ for mermaid.

Ruth’s tale The Sea Morgan’s Baby,32 heard from a woman ‘in a Watchet teashop on a wet day in about 1916’, is an analogue of Hunt’s The Mermaid’s Vengeance,33 compiled from versions collected in Coverack, Sennen and Perranzabuloe, and said to be well-known on the Lizard and near Land’s End. How it got to a Watchet tea shop is unknown. Ruth told it 100 years and 150 miles from Hunt’s sources.

Ruth was a community storyteller and folk singer working alone in a remote community. Her repertoire largely comprised traditional material, using her own words and Somerset dialect. Some items she heard locally; some may have come from books. Some were ‘localised’, i.e. given local geography, names and other cultural characteristics. Some were probably half-remembered. Others were created from folkloric building blocks, perhaps by Ruth, perhaps by others. Her modus operandi was much as Bottrell described the nineteenth-century Cornish storyteller Anthony James, and not unlike most storytellers and folk singers in Britain today. However, Ruth’s critics had a vision of a native seer, impeccably and respectfully reciting the unchanging wisdom of the ancients. If we criticise Ruth, we criticise Anthony James, and we criticise every storyteller in the land today.

Ruth’s case should be taken as a prompt to study how community storytellers work and how stories survive the years, travel and evolve, especially in remote communities, such as those of Cornwall.

COMPETING CONCEPTS

Since von Herder first inspired the brothers Grimm, thousands of tales have been collected from oral sources or identified in literary works. For minority cultures, like that of Cornwall, von Herder’s proposal that language and tradition are central to a nation’s cultural heritage is significant. Cultural heritage can define communities that lie within or across modern political boundaries. That is a role of folk tales west of the River Tamar.

Similarities between folk tales has prompted scholars to classify and group them. Three indices are commonly used. The first, the ATU Index, was devised by Antti Aarne in 1910 and later expanded by Stith Thompson and Hans-Jorg Uther. The second is the more detailed Motif Index devised by Stith Thompson. A third index, Migratory Legends, was devised by Reidar Th. Christiansen in 1958.

Classification enabled scholars to begin to understand the mobility, antiquity and evolution of stories. Whilst some similar tales may have grown independently, due to commonalities in human experience, this is unlikely in most cases. The geographical location and chronological sequence of related tales confirm that stories are a most portable culture, and they travel and evolve with distance and time.

For example, in varying forms, today’s Sleeping Beauty (ATU 410) may be traced back in time past the Grimms (Dornrönschen, 1814), Perrault (La Belle au Bois Dormant, 1697) and Basile (Sun, Moon, and Talia, 1634) to the anonymous fourteenth-century tale Perceforest, in which the Princess Zellandine is cursed and falls asleep while spinning. Other elements of Perceforest can be traced to the classical Greek tale Jason and Medea. In the foreword to the anthology A Choice of Magic (E.P. Dutton, 1971), the Cornish-based Ruth Manning-Sanders mentions a tale known in Russia, Georgia, Rumania, Greece, North Africa, Portugal, France, Norway, Chile and elsewhere.

Also, as the dates of the collections named span many generations, it is likely that much of the evolution was through the oral processes of storytelling, as well as rewriting by the collectors and editors.

At first sight, association of tales with specific cultures may seem counter-intuitive in the face of the mobility of folk tales. However, classification also helps scholars understand how, after stories have moved from one area to another, they may be localised and become part of a different community’s cultural identity.