Folk & Fairy Tales: A Book Guide

This book guide to folk and fairy tales follows an important tradition of handy booklists, and is the first to cover this particular area since Mary Steele’s Signal Bookguide Traditional Tales in 1989. Mary Steele in turn acknowledged a debt to Elizabeth Cook’s groundbreaking study The Ordinary and the Fabulous: An Introduction to Myths, Legends and Fairy Tales (1969, 2nd ed. 1976), with its invaluable annotated ‘Short List of Books’.

The trouble with any such list is that books go out of print so quickly, and therefore Booktrust’s commitment to publicising the best of what is currently available in the field must be applauded. This book is in general well-balanced, and will be invaluable to teachers, librarians and storytellers seeking to interest the young in the traditional literatures of the world.

The book opens with a foreword by Kevin Crossley-Holland, who stresses the responsibility writers take on when they work with orally-transmitted tales. The first of these, he says, ‘is to inhabit rather than plunder the world of traditional tale’. Many of the writers who have taken this responsibility as a sacred charge, including Crossley-Holland himself, Geraldine McCaughrean, and Naomi Lewis, are well represented here. But there are gaps that tell us a great deal about the current publishing climate. There is not a single book here, for instance, by the greatest contemporary transmitter of folk material, Alan Garner; his retellings are all out of print, from the magisterial Hamish Hamilton Book of Goblins (1969) on.

There are books here covering a wide geographical, cultural and historical range, from Robert Leeson’s My Sister Shahrazad: Tales from the Arabian Nights (Frances Lincoln, 2003, 0 7112 1767 X) to Elizabeth Laird’s When the World Began: Stories Collected in Ethiopia (Oxford University Press, 2001, 0 19 274189 6) to Joseph Jacobs’s classic English Fairy Tales (Everyman’s Library, 1993, 1 85715 917 9). But if there is one presiding genius of the genre, it is clearly Hans Christian Andersen. This gawky Danish pauper – an ugly duckling if ever there was one – blossomed into a literary swan, and the powerful wingbeats of his unique imagination dominate this book. There are Andersen versions here from Ian Beck, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Meilo So, Marcus Sedgwick, Eve Tharlet, Dorothée Duntz, Mathew Price, Georges Lemoine, Naomi Lewis, Andrew Matthews, Margaret Clark, Anthea Bell, Anastasiya Archipova, Stephen Mitchell, Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank, and even a quirky retelling of one of his best-loved stories from the point of view of the pea in Mini Grey’s The Pea and the Princess. So it is only just that the book closes with a brief biography of Andersen himself, honouring the bicentenary of his birth in 2005.