The Penguin Book of English Folktales: A Review for New Storytellers

There comes a moment in a new storyteller’s life when you realise the stories you want to tell have been sitting on a shelf all along, in a plain Penguin paperback with a cracked spine. Neil Philip’s The Penguin Book of English Folktales is one of those books. It is not glamorous. It does not promise to turn you into a performer. What it does is hand you a pile of English stories, stripped back and ready to be spoken — and that is more useful than it sounds.

What the book actually is

The collection gathers tales recorded by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collectors and presents them in plain modern prose. If you know Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales, you will recognise the family: wonder tales, sly drolls, local legends, and stories in which the Devil is outwitted by a cobbler. As with any Penguin classic, there is an introduction, a long run of stories, and notes and sources at the back identifying where each tale was recorded.

That last part matters more than beginners expect. A folktale rarely has one true text; it has dozens of tellings. Seeing that a story came from a particular county, told by a particular person, frees you from treating the printed page as scripture. You are allowed to change it.

Is it readable?

Mostly, yes — and the reason is that these tales were built for the ear long before they were built for the page. Sentences are short. Plots move. A protagonist meets an obstacle on the second line and is out of the woods by the seventh.

Where it snags is dialect. Some tellers’ voices come through in spelling and grammar: odd contractions, rhythms that belong to a specific county. Read silently, this can feel bumpy. Read aloud, it often comes alive. If a phrase stops you, say it out loud three times; if it still stops you, replace it with your own words and move on. Nobody is marking you on fidelity.

Two things worth knowing: some tales are short enough to read in ninety seconds, and a few end abruptly or grimly. That is the tradition being honest, not the book being careless.

What’s inside: the tale selection

• Wonder tales. Tasks, youngest sons, impossible bargains. “Tom Tit Tot”, “Cap o’ Rushes” and “Mr Fox” sit in this territory, and their structures are clean enough that you can see the joins — exactly what you want when learning.
• Drolls and noodle tales. Short comic stories about foolish decisions and clever escapes. Useful for mixed audiences, because they run on punchlines rather than atmosphere.
• Cumulative tales. Stories that build by repetition. Excellent with young listeners, since the repetition does the memory work for you.
• Local legends. Tales tied to a place — a village, a bridge, a standing stone. The easiest stories to make your own, because you can stand up and say where they happened.
• Ghost and Devil stories. Darker and wittier than you might expect, and often very short. Handle with care at family events.

What you will not find much of is the ornate, authored literary fairy tale. This is the folk voice: plain, blunt, occasionally strange.

How useful is it for beginners?

Very, with one caveat. It is a source book, not a teaching book. There is no guidance on holding a room, where to pause, or how to land an ending. You get texts.

For a new teller that is a good deal. The stories are short enough to learn in a week, they have clear shapes, and most survive being told by someone still finding their feet. Three tales from this book will fill your first twenty minutes.

Five ways to work with it

1. Read the tale aloud once, standing up. Notice where your voice drops; that is usually where the story wants a pause.
2. Write a five-line skeleton: who wants what, who blocks them, what it costs, how it ends. Learn the skeleton, not the wording.
3. Tell it to one person before you tell it to ten. A single listener will show you where the plot sags, often just by looking confused.
4. Change one thing on purpose — a setting, a name, a detail — so the story becomes yours rather than a recitation.
5. Note which tales worked. After a year you will have a short list worth more than any anthology.

One caution: the collectors’ language occasionally uses words a modern audience will not know, and some tales carry casual violence that lands differently now. Read before you perform, and if a detail distracts your listeners more than it serves the story, cut it.

Where it falls short

The notes are scholarly rather than practical, so you get sources and tale types but no guidance on pronunciation or delivery. There is also little sense of how these stories sound in the mouths of people who grew up with them; you get the words, not the manner. For that you need living tellers — a storytelling club, a festival, a library session. The book is the script. The telling happens elsewhere.

Start here

Pick three tales: one short droll, one wonder tale, one local legend. Learn the droll first, because it teaches timing without demanding atmosphere. Then the wonder tale, which teaches structure. Save the legend for when you can say, “this happened nine miles from here,” and enjoy the silence that follows.

Keep the book by the kettle rather than on the shelf of important things. Dog-ear it. Write in the margins. These stories have survived centuries of being altered by whoever told them last; they will survive you.

Photo: Nothing Ahead / Pexels