If you’re reading this publication, and you haven’t been introduced to the work of Katharine Briggs, then we really should do something to amend that. (Ms. Briggs, Constant Reader of the ‘Edge’og. Constant Reader, Ms. Briggs.) This re-issue of <cite>The Fairies in Tradition and Literature</cite> provides an admirable place to start.
Katharine Briggs made a life’s work of researching world fairy traditions, with a particular focus on the British Isles, and her work always treads a wonderfully non-judgmental line between credulity and scholarship. All of Briggs’ books that I’ve read tend to follow one of two formats: her chosen structures are either the encyclopedic or the essay form. The present volume is one of the latter. In her essays, she tends to break fairy traditions down by category and analyze them in light of parallel or contrasting international versions, with example after example drawn from earlier collections of folk tales, songs or personal reminiscences.
Here she begins with a historical survey starting with Anglo-Saxon and medieval references, and she concludes with Kipling’s and Tolkien’s use of fairy motifs. In between the two, she manages to cover a remarkable amount of information. Small wonder that she made the rest of her career filling in details she could not possibly have covered in any one book.
Caveat lector: the most frustrating thing about her books is a certain tendency to drop in the occasional reference with no referent. In speaking of early tales written for children, she reminds us that “…for amusement children had to rely on the books which pleased… grown-up people… These were intended to amuse and were not twisted to edification; indeed some of them, like _The Witch of the Woodlands_, were very unedifying indeed.” But that titillating phrase is all we are about to learn of The Witch of the Woodlands here. In another chapter she gives us a quote about Sun-worship as described in Lincolnshire fairy tradition by one Mrs. Balfour, then adds cryptically, “…and the strange tale of _The Dead Moon_, also recorded by Mrs. Balfour, is a tale of Moon-worship.” It’s at times like these that I find myself wanting to shake the book by its figurative collar and demand a little more information. Even with that said, however, Briggs’ pages are always filled with lively snippets of personal narrative and, as a sideline, some delightful reproductions of local dialect.
As far as this edition goes… well, whoever designed the cover ought to be tarred and feathered. A sparkly star-tipped wand is the sole image accompanying the text, and it’s about as inappropriate a choice as might have been made. Had the designer troubled to read Briggs’ scathing chapters on “Whimsy” and “The Moralists”, in which Briggs’ native good manners and neutral tone give way to the most delightfully unkind descriptions I’ve seen in any of her books, perhaps we might have been greeted with something better. However, you can’t (as we all know) judge a book by its cover; and in this case, that’s a very good thing indeed. This distressing design may succeed in selling more copies of this volume, but it won’t sell them to people who are actually likely to read and appreciate the work.
And who might that be? Anyone who’s interested in unadulterated traditions of fairy beliefs. Anyone who wants to write about the fey with an eye to older roots than the Victorian gauzy-winged sparklers whose legacy we see today in such ghastly profusion at any Renaissance Faire. Anyone who wants to understand more of what we foolish mortals have to say about ourselves in the way we see our Good Neighbours.
Anyone who makes a habit of reading a publication like this one. (Assuming there is any other publication like this one, which is a somewhat doubtful proposition.)
This is not, for my money, Briggs’ finest work. I preferred her The Vanishing People and her classic An Encyclopedia of Fairies. To be fair, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature is one of her earlier works, covering a nearly impossible breadth of fairy traditions from after the time of Shakespeare. As such, the worst I can honestly say of it is that it leaves me profoundly wishing someone would reissue her first book: The Anatomy of Puck addressed the fragmentary surviving traditions we have from the 16th century and before, and it’s the one I’m dying to read.
Even so, time spent with the inimitable Ms. Briggs is never time wasted. Read her chapters on “Forgotten Gods and Nature Spirits”, “Regional Differences”, or “Fairy Morality” …and you may find a hundred years have passed in a night while you abode in a landscape of unearthly enchantment.
(Routledge, 1967)
