Folk Tales of the United Kingdom continues with four more tales of England and Scotland as Joseph Jacobs collected them in his More English Fairy Tales (London, 1894). They are read here complete, exactly as written.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
In The Stars in the Sky, a tiny lassie who would weep all day to have the stars in the sky to play with sets out to find them — past the mill-dam and the brooklet, dancing with the Good Folk, riding Four Feet to No Feet at All — to climb the stairs without steps. In The Wise Men of Gotham, the men of Gotham fall out over sheep that are not there, hedge in a cuckoo so she will sing all the year, send their cheeses to market by themselves, set out to drown an eel, trust the rent money to a hare, and cannot count themselves twelve. In Hereafterthis, Farmer Jan's wife, whose well-meant help goes wrong at every turn, gives the bag of groats that holds the rent money to a robber who comes to the door calling himself Hereafterthis — and Jan takes the house-door on his back, and they set out to find him. And in My Own Self, a widow's little son in the North Countrie, who will not go to bed when he is told, gets the fairy playmate he wished for — a tiny girl whose name is the same as his own — until a red-hot cinder teaches him what his mother could not.
A note on the tales as written. Four moments of the old tales' colour are worth naming plainly. In The Stars in the Sky, the climb up the bright stair and the fall from it are the lassie's dream-journey: she wakes at once, unharmed, weeping by her own bedside at home. In The Wise Men of Gotham, the eel is cast into a second pond "to drown" and simply lives there instead, and the courtier's counting is done with farce whacks over the shoulders, each man groaning — blows of comedy, and the twelfth man is found. In Hereafterthis, the drowning of the ten cows in the pond and the choking of the pigs at the trough each take a single clause of the wife's folly, told as mishap and answered by Jan's patience; the robbers are frightened away by a falling door and are not harmed. In My Own Self, a red-hot cinder falls by accident on the fairy child's foot — one clause, and the tale's pivot — and her mother shakes her by the ear in one clause more and is gone up the chimney. No word has been altered in any of the four: no period slur occurs in these tales, and nothing in the telling called for one to be softened or set aside.
Chapters
0:20 The Stars in the Sky
7:40 The Wise Men of Gotham
16:42 Hereafterthis
24:13 My Own Self
From More English Fairy Tales (1894), collected by Joseph Jacobs — public domain. Tales of England and Scotland as Jacobs collected them; no Irish tales appear on this shelf. Narrated by Madame de Pamplemousse. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.
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