The Riddle in the Tale E-Book

Taffy Thomas MBE

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 100

Beschreibung

We have been fascinated by riddles for as long as we have had language – think of the legend of the sphinx in Greek mythology. This wonderful book includes both magical riddle tales and simple challenges, with clues and answers hidden in intricate illustrations. Discover how the farmer saved his daughter by solving the fairies' riddles or how the old hen-wife helped the two brothers solve the mystery of their father's will. Have a read – you'll be hooked.

Leseprobe

THE RIDDLEIN THE TALE

THE RIDDLEIN THE TALE

RIDDLES AND RIDDLE FOLK TALES

TAFFY THOMAS MBE

ILLUSTRATED BY

STEVEN GREGG

For storytellers, story listeners,story readers and riddle lovers,Wherever you are!

First published 2017

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Text © Taffy Thomas MBE, 2017

Illustrations © Steven Gregg, 2017

The right of Taffy Thomas MBE 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 0 7509 8637 3

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

A Riddle

What strength and force cannot break through,

I with a gentle touch can do.

And many in the street would stand,

Were I not a friend at hand?

Can you solve this riddle to unlock the riddles and tales in this book?

CONTENTS

About the Author

About the Illustrator

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Michael Rosen

Introduction

The Riddle Song

The Stanhope Fairies

Filling the House

Riddles Good Enough to Eat

Happy Jack & Lazy John

The Ogre’s Riddle

Outwitting The Devil

In The Storyteller’s Garden Riddles Grow

The Riddle Fish

Racing for the Crown

Sam & The Piskie

Four Pairs Of Shorts

King James & The Bishop Of Worcester

The Greatest Gift

A Riddle Gallimaufry

The Fearsome Giant

Clever Manka & Princess Rose

Riddles Grow Out Of The Land

The Pot Of Gold

Counting Sheep

The King & the Storyteller

Answers

ABOUT the AUTHOR

Taffy Thomas has been living in the Lake District for well over thirty years. He was the founder of the legendary 1970s folk theatre company Magic Lantern, which used shadow puppets and storytelling to illustrate folk tales. After surviving a major stroke in 1985 he used oral storytelling as speech therapy, which led him to find a new career working as a storyteller.

He set up the Storyteller’s Garden and the Northern Centre for Storytelling at Church Stile in Grasmere, Cumbria; he was asked to become patron of the Society for Storytelling and was awarded an MBE for Services to Storytelling and Charity in the Millennium honours list.

In January 2010 he was appointed the first UK Storyteller Laureate at The British Library. He was awarded the Gold Badge, highest honour of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, that same year.

At the 2013 British Awards for Storytelling Excellence (BASE) Taffy received the award for outstanding male storyteller and also the award for outstanding storytelling performance for his piece ‘Ancestral Voices’.

More recently he has become patron of ‘Open Storytellers’, a charity that works to enrich and empower the lives of people marginalised because of learning and communication difficulties; he is also the patron of the East Anglian Storytelling Festival.

ABOUT the ILLUSTRATOR

The illustrations have been drawn by the Cumbrian artist Steven Gregg. Steven was born and raised in the Lake District and currently lives in Windermere. He studied graphic design at Nottingham Trent University and is now working in freelance illustration.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Folk Tale collections of Joseph Jacobs have inspired me to commit my own repertoire to print for future generations. Other literary inspirations include the farmer and author from my adopted Lake District, Beatrix Potter. If you revisit the tale of Squirrel Nutkin you will discover the tiny red mammal is a riddle expert.

It is a fact that this book, and all my previous ones, would not have been realised to this standard were it not for the intelligence and unerring support of Chrissy, my wife, my muse and my best friend.

I also need to thank all the like-minded storytellers, both in the UK and in other parts of the world, who have generously shared their material, their skills and their encouragement. This group range from my Scots traveller mentors to the giant that is Daniel Morden, always hugely enjoyable company and never not an inspiration.

Thanks to illustrator Steven Gregg for continuing to be involved and for the wonderful illustrations he produces for my books.

Special thanks to Britain’s favourite wordsmith, Michael Rosen, for finding time in his busy schedule to produce the perfect foreword. A bonus for this author and for you, my readers.

Also thanks to Nicola Guy and her team at The History Press for their patience, support and their commitment to published folk tales.

Lastly, thanks to my granddaughter, Ona, who acted as sounding board for my first draft, giving help and intelligent criticism. Also to all those, both children and adults, who for years have asked when I was going to find the time to produce a book of riddles and riddle folk tales. Well, finally I’ve found the time. So here it is. Enjoy!

FOREWORD

For all the thrills and wonder we get from films, TV, and online entertainment, our first and last link with each other is with face-to-face storytelling. There’s a strange rumour going round that it’s dead, that we don’t do it any more, that we don’t talk to each other any more. It’s not true. We not only still talk to each other, still tell each other stories, but we have to. Through telling stories, we make ourselves human: we put ourselves into the world around us. Now of course there are many kinds of stories – anything from a ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me today...’ to the Odyssey or Beowulf or the Ramayana.

Somewhere between these two poles of chat and epic comes ‘the tale’: the short, edgy, catchy tale that could be true, could happen to you, could have happened to her, could have been about him. There are hundreds of different types in many shapes and sizes: jokes, magical tales, mystery tales, wonder tales, wisdom tales; but at the heart of them all is one crucial thing: when someone tells it, do you listen?

This is where Taffy Thomas comes in. When he tells stories, we listen. Now, this is a book, not a teller of tales – but it’s a special kind of book. It’s one that cries out for anyone anywhere to take what’s written here and tell what you’ve read to others. It’s not stealing. It’s what storytellers have been doing for thousands of years. The reason why it’s not ‘stealing’ is that the moment you tell one of Taffy’s stories here, you won’t tell it in exactly the same way as he has. And that’s what this book is for. Yes, it’s for you to read, enjoy, think about and wonder. It’s for you to guess the riddles, admire the way the characters get out of the tricky situations they find themselves in, but it’s also a book about passing things on, keeping the tradition alive. You’ll see at the beginning of the stories, Taffy often says where and how he got hold of the story in the first place. He’s probably telling the truth ...

... but what if he wasn’t? What if you thought you’d like to tell one of the stories in this book? You could say you read it in Taffy Thomas’s book. Or you could say that you were on the last bus home and there was a man on the bus, sat on his own, singing to himself. You went over to him and asked if he was all right and he told you a story that went like this: ‘Once there was a ...’

Well, it could be true. It could have been Taffy ...

Michael Rosen

INTRODUCTION

How to write an introduction to this, my latest book, now that’s a riddle in itself. Perhaps I’ll go back to basics and keep it simple.

This is my collection of riddles and tales from the oral tradition where each tale is built around a riddle or a collection of riddles.

I think that riddles first came into my life in my childhood in the 1950s. We pulled each other’s legs with them in the school playground and read them on tiny slips of paper that spilled from crackers at the Christmas dinner table. My own father gently teased me by asking me how many beans make five? The answer, of course, is ‘a bean and a half and half a bean, a bean and a quarter and a quarter bean, a half a bean and a whole bean’. Smiling, he would tell me to add that up; you may choose to do likewise. Annoyingly he was right!

You see, for a riddle to work you need three people: a person who knows it, a person who can answer it, and, for maximum comic effect, a person who gets it wrong. Don’t worry, riddles aren’t important; but, as Mahatma Gandhi once wrote: ‘Everything we do is unimportant, but it’s really important we keep doing it.’ Eight hundred years before Gandhi wrote that, Leofric, the first bishop of Exeter, deemed them important enough to leave the manuscript for the Exeter Riddles Book on his death in 1072.

As a storyteller performing live I regularly tell my audiences I need their brains as well as their ears. Often a riddle can hook an audience and secure instant inclusion and participation. For some of my more archaic riddles, i.e. catkin or harebell, younger readers or listeners may have to work intergenerationally. As a proud grandparent I welcome this communication between young and old, and hope you do too.

What of my sources? As a jobbing storyteller I mainly gather my stories from a living oral tradition, although occasionally I collect from ‘guru google’, old books or wherever stories are shared. As a fellow patron of the Society for Storytelling once wrote, ‘all storytellers are honest thieves’.

I often say ‘stories have legs’ – so do riddles! As far as my ageing brain allows I include the sources of each tale in their introductions. However, some of this material, gleaned over fifty years, has rolled off my tongue so many times and in so many places that its route to me has been lost in the mists of time. My hope is that this collection is fun for my readers.

But what of the answers? In the tales most answers are revealed as part of the narrative. For the answers to the riddle sections, their answers are there visually in illustrator Steven Gregg’s beautiful title pages. If you come across a really tough riddle, the chances are that the one that follows will be much simpler. Read the tales, but share the riddle pages with others. If you are still stuck, the last section in the book is an answers page. But as long as you know how many beans make five, you’ll be all right.

Taffy ThomasThe Storyteller’s House, Ambleside 2017

Whenever I can, I startmy performance set ofriddle stories with aversion of this song, oftensung by my daughter.Wherever we include it,it never fails to please.So it seems right to beginthe stories in this bookwith my version of thesong:

I gave my love a cherry without a stone,

I gave my love a chicken without a bone.

I told my love a story without an end,

I gave my love a baby with no crying.

How can there be a cherry without a stone?

How can there be a chicken without a bone?

How can there be a story without an end?

How can there be a baby with no crying?