Folk Tales of the United Kingdom continues with three more tales of England and Scotland as Joseph Jacobs collected them in his English Fairy Tales (London, 1890). They are read here complete, exactly as written.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
In Teeny-Tiny, a teeny-tiny woman takes a teeny-tiny bone from a teeny-tiny grave for her supper soup — and a teeny-tiny voice from the cupboard asks three times for it back. In The Cauld Lad of Hilton, the brownie of Hilton Hall turns the house topsy-turvy by night and works tidy for a bowl of cream, until the servants repay him with a gift no brownie can accept and stay. And in Whittington and His Cat, poor Dick Whittington walks to London to find its streets paved with gold, sends his penny cat to sea, and hears the bells of Bow Church call him back: Thrice Lord Mayor of London.
A note on the tales as written. Two carry a moment of the old tales' colour, worth naming plainly. In The Cauld Lad of Hilton the narrator's aside describes the reported folk custom of guarding buried treasure with the blood of a newly slain kid or lamb — a custom described in passing, in the teller's own voice; nothing of the kind is done in the tale, whose brownie is laid by nothing more warlike than a new cloak and hood. In Whittington and His Cat, Dick's cat does at the King of Barbary's court what cats are for: in a few minutes she clears the palace of the rats and mice that plagued it, which is the making of Dick's fortune; and the ill-tempered cook's basting of Dick's head and shoulders with her broom belongs to the tale's beginning, before Alice's kindness and Dick's own good heart answer it. Teeny-Tiny carries no note at all — the voice gets its bone back with a word.
Chapters
0:17 Teeny-Tiny
2:24 The Cauld Lad of Hilton
4:58 Whittington and His Cat
From English Fairy Tales (1890), collected by Joseph Jacobs — public domain. Tales of England and Scotland as Jacobs collected them; no Irish tales appear on this shelf. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.
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