From a phrase to a fable is a small step, as we have seen in the example of the cat and the mice. The parables of Christ are only extended metaphors. Surely nobody has ever been expected to believe the actual details of his parables factually true? He rarely specified ‘which man’ had ‘which vineyard’ or the exact place where the talent was hidden; what was true to his listeners was the setting, the recognizable human characteristics, the common experience – the essential truths, valid for his audience.
Folk tales belong to the same category as the parables – not just the fables and moral exempla, but all of them. They are the currency of common experience, extended metaphors that reflect the image of reality. They go with the metaphorical, often witty language the countryman is still capable of extemporizing, rely though he may on the old sayings for much of his time. George Eliot observed this ability with accuracy in the last century, and gives brilliant examples of it. ‘Some folks go on talking, like some clocks go on striking, not to tell you the time, but because there’s something wrong with their insides.’ I can vouch for it that in spite of radio and television, the ability still exists, though it may not for much longer, lacking, as it does now, constant example. In my childhood, local preachers told many a folk tale from the pulpit, as a moral example, using the metaphorical vernacular to do so. How many politicians or trade union leaders would nowadays employ the same simple expedient to get their meaning over quickly and succinctly? None, more’s the pity! Instead, they learn the current dreadful, meaningless jargon, and stupefy rather than enlighten their listeners. Not that they eschew metaphor altogether; but they have lost the knack of it, and muddle us with talk of ‘triggering thresholds’ and the like. Jargon is the replacement for the naturally metaphorical vernacular of the people. If their speech reflects their thinking, then there are many professionals and politicians, trade union leaders and civil servants who know not what they do. They are not merely neglecting a glorious heritage of wonderful language; they are obscuring the paths of truth.
I hope this lengthy digression has not led us too far from the main thread of my argument, which is that to be valid, a folk tale must have enough truth in it somewhere, even if it is only reflected truth, to enable the folk to believe it. If they thought it ‘fiction’ they would not repeat it. To my paternal grandmother, novels were suspect (though all her children were insatiable readers of the novel). ‘Fiction’ was Ties’, and Ties’ were sinful – but the same old lady was a mine of folk tale, especially with regard to the number of ghosts and apparitions she had personally encountered.
Nevertheless, no one can deny the fact that whatever germ of truth a tale begins from, it gets changed, shaped, altered by omissions, overloaded with additions, and embroidered with detail as it is handed along from generation to generation and from place to place. This is largely because story-telling is an art, and all artists are given some licence with their material. The good story-teller selects what elements he wants to suit his immediate audience, and then shapes his tale to please them, couching it in the kind of language he hopes will catch their attention and stir their emotions. The good storyteller enhances the basic, universal truth with his details; the bad one obscures it.
Let us take a specific example of a ‘folk tale’, and examine its history, as far as we know about it, and the changes time has wrought upon it. There are few children in the English-speaking world who, by the end of their schooldays, have not heard of the exploits of the Indian brave, Hiawatha; he belongs now to their world of heroes in the same way as King Arthur and Robin Hood do. How does this happen?
The choice of an example from the New World is deliberate, because it allows us to examine objectively a process that has been going on so long with regard to our own heritage that we are often quite unable to see the wood for the trees. When white men first heard Indian tales, they got them first hand – but the process of mutation then continued, in print, in much the same way as it had previously done in oral tradition.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864) was an American explorer and ethnologist who in 1822 became Indian agent for the tribes living in the Great Lakes district of North America. He married the granddaughter of an Indian chief, living with and among the Indians for a period of nearly thirty years altogether. He interested himself in everything concerning the folklore of what was a threatened if not already a vanishing people. (The term folklore was coined in 1846 to describe the study of traditions, beliefs, customs, rituals and superstitions of the ordinary folk everywhere.) Schoolcraft was able to observe much Indian lore at first hand; but it became clear to him that the origins of much of it lay far, far back in the history of the tribes, and that understanding of the observable lore was wrapped up in the oral traditions that had been handed down from generation to generation, retained in the memory of men whose chief duty to their tribe was to learn it, assimilate it, and in due course pass it on. (This was part of the shaman’s role in most primitive societies, an element of his priestly duty.)
Schoolcraft listened, collected, and wrote down what he heard. In 1847 he was authorized by Congress to make his research official. The result was a six-volume work entitled Historical and Statistical Information respecting the History, Conditions and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States. It is somewhat to be doubted if the matter contained in so formidable a work would ever have reached a wide public direct. But Schoolcraft had, in 1839, published a few of the Indian legends separately. They fell into the hands of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet, and inspired him to write what he himself called ‘The Indian Edda’ – The Song of Hiawatha. It is, to quote Longfellow himself:
founded on a tradition prevalent among the North American Indians, of a person of miraculous birth who was sent among them to clear their rivers, forests and fishing grounds, and teach them the arts of peace. He was known among the different tribes by the several names of Michabou, Chiabo, Manabozo, Tarenyawagon, and Hiawatha.
(He then acknowledges his debt to Schoolcraft, and tells the reader where to look for the original, heard by Schoolcraft from an Onandaga chief.) Then he goes on:
Into this old tradition I have woven other curious Indian legends, drawn chiefly from the various and valuable writings of Mr Schoolcraft.
The scene of the poem is among the Ojibways on the southern shore of Lake Superior, in the region between the Pictured Rocks and the Grand Sable.
Longfellow inserted this note, in 1842, at the head of the poem whose (un-Indian-like) rhythm caught the public fancy. Its popularity soared like a rocket, and it has, in the intervening 150 years, never been wholly out of favour; moreover, it has been translated into prose, art, music – even into comic-strip – as one purveyor of the tale has succeeded another in selecting what he needed for his work, not from Schoolcraft, but from Longfellow. Schoolcraft collected the basic elements of truth, as far as ‘the truth’ could be ascertained after centuries of oral tradition; but his account by chance reached a story-teller who, as an artist in his own right, used poetic licence on the original. All the god-hero’s other personae he eclipsed, leaving Hiawatha supreme: he changed the tribe, and gave the story a specific location of his own choosing; and he deliberately wove into the tale details from others belonging to different tribes. The result was not history, not the study of folklore, not education, but pure entertainment (though, as an educationist of long standing, I must here insert my lifelong conviction that you can’t have one of the last two without the other).
What Longfellow did was to reach down for the essentials of his story, trim away some details and add others, till the result was a sort of archetypal tale that could be understood by those who had no previous knowledge of the Red Man.
The attraction of Longfellow’s Hiawatha has since then probably been the bait that has lured many an anthropologist back to a more profound and academic study of the American Indian. Such a researcher would not look for historical truth in Longfellow’s poem (though he might very well find it. The Nati
onal Film Board of Canada have recently made a film of an Indian constructing a birch-bark canoe in the way of his forefathers. ‘Hiawatha’s Fishing’ describes the identical process step by step.) Neither would the anthropologist trust Longfellow, Schoolcraft, or even the Onandaga chief absolutely on matters of history, since common sense would tell him, if other evidence did not, that tales handed down over many generations must have lost much in the way of fact, and gained much in the way of embroidered detail. Nevertheless, they might serve to corroborate other historical evidence, and supply, as nothing else could, the intangible atmosphere of times gone by.
Let us now look at a similar example from our own country. I was brought up on the story of the ‘soldier’, Matcham, who gave his name to a little bridge spanning a brook on a road where now runs the A1 in Cambridgeshire. The version my father told was of a soldier who killed a drummer-boy who insisted on following him, and buried the body near the bridge, which lay at the bottom of a gentle incline. Then he went on his way, for many years, carrying his guilty secret with him, until a compulsion to visit the scene of his crime became too strong for him, and sent him back; and as the dreadful spot at last came into view from the top of the incline, the stones of the road gathered themselves together and rolled uphill to meet him. Terrified, he turned and fled from them, to give himself up to be hanged. This was to us a local story, Matcham’s Bridge being about fifteen miles from my native village. It had obviously been handed down orally, coming to me through about six generations, allowing thirty years to a generation. The story is given in the Reader’s Digest book Folklore, Myths and Legends of Great Britain (1973). In this account, Gervase Matchem (sic) was a sailor who committed his crime in 1780, but was compelled by an encounter with his victim’s ghost on Salisbury Plain to return and give himself up to justice. He was hanged in chains at Brampton Hut (now a hotel on the A1). There, one night, a gang of local youths dared each other to offer the corpse a drink. One of them accepted the dare, and as he held up the mug towards the corpse, a ghostly voice commanded him to ‘Cool it! Cool it!’ This version omits entirely the spine-chilling supernatural element of the stones rolling uphill (the bit that affected me most of all when I heard it as a child); and adds another ‘supernatural’ bit which I think must be a fairly recent updating of the tale. What had, in fact, happened to the story in the meantime?
Gervase Matchan (sic) made a full confession, before being hanged, to a local clergyman, the Reverend J. Nicholson of Great Paxton. In it, he recounted the story of his whole life, including the crime, and what followed up to the moment when he gave himself up. The case was, not unnaturally, reported in the newspapers of the time, though no doubt in garbled fashion.
From these reports Richard Harris Barham, better known to us as Thomas Ingoldsby, took the elements for his poem The Dead Drummer’, included in The Ingoldsby Legends (published in 1840, some sixty years after Matchan’s execution). Ingoldsby certainly took liberties with the original tale. In his poem, Matchan, under the assumed name of Harry Waters, encountered the ghost of his victim one night while crossing Salisbury Plain with a sailor called Spanking Bill. The sight of the spectre, and the sound of his drum, had, so it seemed, never left him since the foul deed had been done years before; but the apparition on the wilds of Salisbury Plain in the middle of a storm at the very spot on which the crime had been committed at last broke his nerve, and he poured out his dreadful history (in verse) to Spanking Bill. According to it, he had done well in the Army, gained much promotion, and was looked up to and honoured by all. Being selected to fetch the regimental pay, he had been given ‘young drum’ Andrew Brand, to accompany him. As they were crossing Salisbury Plain, the temptation to kill his young, innocent and trusting companion was too strong for him, and he yielded to it.
‘Twas done! the deed that damns me – done
I know not how – I never knew; –
And HERE I stood – but not alone, –
The prostrate Boy my madness slew
Was at my side – limb, feature, name,
‘Twas He!! – another – yet the same.
The reader can, if he has the patience, read the rest of Ingoldsby’s lumbering poem for himself; he can also read for himself the version I have retold as ‘Truth, and Murder, Will Out’, in this volume. It is taken from Legends and Traditions of Huntingdonshire (1878) and is derived from Matchan’s own confession. So now we have at least four variations on the story. Unlike Longfellow, Ingoldsby, in my view, did harm to the tale. Why, for instance, change the name of the drummer-boy from Benjamin Jones to Andrew Brand? Why move the crime from Alconbury to Salisbury Plain? Why omit the accusing stones? Why make the spectre on Salisbury Plain that of his victim, when in reality that last horror was reserved for the very moment when Matchan might have reached the security of other human companionship? Such alterations did nothing for the elemental or moral truth of the effects of a guilty conscience, and confused the truth of effective detail – though I must say the constant presence of the dead boy’s ghost and the beating of his drum in the murderer’s ears would have been exactly the sort of yeasty supernatural concoction the folk would have enjoyed hearing.
It seems to me, though, that the version I first heard had been refined by telling to the essentials of both kinds of truth. I give the added details of the actual gibbet as sent to Notes and Queries by the Reverend R. E. Bradley, who under the pseudonym of Cuthbert Bede was a fairly regular contributor to that paper, related to him by an old man who remembered Matchan’s corpse hanging in its chains.
The gibbet was at the scene of the crime, that is on the side of the old Great North Road, near the village of Alconbury – not at Brampton Hut, because the informant actually stated that it was ‘on the Buckden Road before Peacham’s Hut’. So there was no question of it being outside a hostelry. The ‘Cool it’ detail perhaps arose after the gibbet was erroneously placed in memory outside the inn known now as Brampton Hut.
Many of the stories retold in this volume can be found, sometimes in several different versions, in the collections of the dedicated antiquarians of the nineteenth century, or of such indefatigable modern collectors as Christina Hole and Ruth Tongue; they can be checked again in the comprehensive and erudite works of eminent folklorists such as Katharine Briggs, whose Dictionary of British Folk-Tales has a bibliography that should satisfy even the most persistent seeker after original sources. My task is to tell the tales and not to put anything but the tale itself between me and the reader. In writing down these tales again, I am simply assuming the mantle of those among the folk themselves who knew a good tale when they heard it, and enjoyed passing it on.
Folk tales are tales that belong to the folk, tales that they told each other. Whatever purpose occasioned the telling – in the first instance, perhaps it was no more than the passing on of a bit of news, to emphasize a moral or give a warning to the young, or simply to pass an idle hour – it also occasioned communication between people, and countered shared experience with shared emotion. The act of telling in itself raised the pulse-rate of life, and sent warmth along the arteries of the community. As to the matter a tale contained, it could be anything from a centuries-old legend based on history to the latest nine days’ wonder in the next village; the story of a departed local hero, or the latest bit of foolery and skulduggery by Billy Tibbs next door. My working definition of a folk tale is simplicity itself. It is a tale that ‘the folk’ have liked well enough to remember and go on repeating to each other until somebody has finally ‘collected it’ and written it down.
Those tales that interest them, the folk hold in memory. Those that make no impact on them, they are content to forget; but the talk goes on. In this way, stories that originate in one locality gradually migrate to other places far afield, with details marginally altered to suit fresh topography, custom and characteristics. In the leaky vessel of human memory, essential details only are retained, and the less important ones allowed to drain away like whey from the curds
of cheese. Moreover, in this process the details, like the fragrances in a pot-pourri, become so subtly intermingled that it is almost impossible to distinguish one from another, or to reallocate any to its origin. This widespread generality gives the academic researcher much trouble, and constrains him to categorize the material of his collection into groups with similar motifs, or to give a dozen variants of the same story with painstaking detail of how and where it was collected. To the folk themselves, such things do not matter – or, at least, did not matter until they saw in print that a story they had always thought of as theirs was said to ‘belong’ to another region far away. The people of Gotham, in Nottinghamshire, no doubt now claim as their very own the story of the wise fools who attempted to hedge in the cuckoo, that by so doing they could ensure for themselves eternal spring; but it is on record that the people of St Ives, in Cornwall, are known to taunt the men of nearby Zennor by asking superciliously, ‘Who built a wall round the cuckoo?’ (to which the correct reply is – ‘And who thrashed the hake for disturbing the mackerel?’); while up in the Lake District the people of Borrowdale still smart under the sting of being called ‘Borrowdale Cuckoos’, for the very same reason.
The Book of English Folk Tales Page 3