Folk Tales of the United Kingdom continues with three 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 Yallery Brown, Tom Tiver, a young Lincolnshire farm lad, lifts a great flat stone in a moonlit field and frees the tiny golden-haired creature trapped beneath it, who promises to do all his work for him — and does it, and undoes the other lads' work besides, until Tom is sacked and, in his anger, thanks the creature and bids it leave him alone, and learns what a born fool's luck means. In Three Feathers, a laundry-maid serving seven years and a day for the bird-husband she may not see does all her washing by the virtue of his three feathers; when the butler, the coachman, and the footman each bring her their savings, she holds each man fast all night — to the shutters, to the clothes, to the brandy glass — and keeps her secret to the end of her service. And in Sir Gammer Vans, a tall tale of pure nonsense, the teller sails over the tops of the mountains in his little boat to ask a giant bottle-maker whether the little old woman is dead yet, and is shown a fox hatching eagle's eggs, an iron apple tree covered with pears, and the hare the dog killed yesterday, alive in a basket.
A note on the tales as written. Three moments of the old tales' colour are worth naming plainly. In Yallery Brown, the creature's spite is mischief against work and tools — the other lads' buckets upset, their tools blunted, their horses splashed — and no blow is struck at any person; Tom's lifetime of ill luck that follows, down to the closing lines that his children died, his crops rotted, and his beasts never fatted, is a few lines of summary, told and not enacted. In Three Feathers, the maid takes the men's savings on her promise and gives every penny back at the close; the men are held fast and laughed at, and the one scuffle she conjures lands master and men together in the pond, wet and unharmed. In Sir Gammer Vans, nothing could happen as told: the little old woman was "hanged last Saturday week for drowning herself in a shower of feathers," the dog's hare is alive in its basket, and the arrow breaks ribs on both sides yet passes clean through without touching — impossible nonsense, contradicting itself for the fun of it. No word has been altered in any of the three: no period slur occurs in these tales, and nothing in the telling called for one to be softened or set aside.
Chapters
0:24 Yallery Brown
15:05 Three Feathers
23:03 Sir Gammer Vans
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 Mira. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
British folk tales · English fairy tales · British folk tales audiobook · English folklore · Joseph Jacobs · English fairy tales audiobook · world folk tales · free audiobook
