Many years later, he slays a dragon, but at the cost of his own life. There are similarities to an Irish and Scottish tale, “The Hand and the Child,” to the Bear’s Son subtype of ATU 301 (The Three Stolen Princesses), and to the widespread motifs of underwater worlds and dragon-slaying-but nobody could call Beowulf a folktale.

Again, there are plenty of marvels and enchantments in the Arthurian tales (often modeled on French sources), which Sir Thomas Malory wove together into Le Morte d’Arthur (printed in 1481). Others are found in the late medieval verse romances Sir Guy of Warwick and Sir Bevis of Hampton, about English legendary heroes, and Huon of Bordeaux, a translation from French; the latter is the earliest text to mention Oberon, king of the fairies. Walter Map’s light-hearted miscellany De Nugis Curialium (Courtiers’ Trifles, c. 1190) includes two anecdotes that have features well attested in international fairy lore. One tells how Herla, a (nonhistorical) early king of Britain, agreed to visit the underworld realm of a pigmy, where he was lavishly entertained. Upon returning to the human world, Herla found that almost 200 years had passed; those of his retinue who had dismounted had crumbled to dust (Motifs F377 and F378.1). Map’s second story tells how Wild Edric, a historical English aristocrat contemporary with William the Conqueror, caught a fairy woman in a forest; she consented to be his wife provided he never taunted her about her origins, but years later he broke this taboo, and she vanished (Motif F302.6). William of Newburgh’s History of the Kings of England (c. 1198) seriously asserts that, in Yorkshire, a man passing a certain hillock was offered a drink by the fairies feasting inside. He stole their precious cup, escaped pursuit, and gave the cup to King Henry I (1100-33), who in turn gave it to the King of Scotland. This is a perfect early example of the migratory legend ML 6045, Drinking Cup Stolen from the Fairies.

Two anonymous medieval poems entirely devoted to magical fantasy are “Sir Orfeo” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” both from the fourteenth century. The former, which claims to be based on a Breton lay (a narrative poem), tells how Queen Heurodys is abducted into a sinister fairy world that is also a world of the dead, and how Orfeo sees her riding among a troupe of hunting fairies, follows them, and wins her back from the otherworld by his music (Motif F322.2). The latter tells how a gigantic Green Knight offers to let Gawain behead him if Gawain in turn allows himself to be beheaded a year later (a motif found also in medieval Irish tales); the bargain is accepted, but the Green Knight picks up his severed head and rides off. Gawain’s courage, chastity, and truthfulness are further tested when he reaches the castle of the magically disguised knight and his enchantress wife. Elizabethan plays provide evidence that some of the standard wonder tales were circulating in England during that period. The humor of George Peele’s significantly titled Old Wives’ Tale (1595) depends upon the audience’s recognition of a medley of fragmented fairy-tale plots. These include a king’s daughter held captive by an enchanter and rescued by her two brothers (also used by John Milton in his masque Comus, 1634); a dead man (Motif E341) who helps the man who paid for his funeral to rescue a princess but tests him by asking that she be cut in half (ATU 505, The Grateful Dead); and a pair of half-sisters who go to a well in which floating heads ask, “Stroke me smooth and comb my head” (ATU 480, The Kind and the Unkind Girls).

In William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1599), Benedict jokingly quotes the tag, “It is not so, nor “twas not so, but indeed God forbid it should be so,” saying it is from an old tale. To explain this, a scholar in 1821 put on record the story “Mr. Fox,” which he had learned from his great-aunt; it is an excellent cante fable version of ATU 955, The Robber Bridegroom. Its popularity in England is confirmed by about a dozen shorter variants found as local legends. Folktale allusions probably also underlie the Fool”s words in King Lear (1623), “Child Rowland to the dark tower came, / His word was still Fie foh and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man.” The couplet is a common tag in tales about the killing of giants, but the first line is mysterious. In 1814, Robert Jamieson claimed that it refers to the story of the two brothers rescuing their sister, but the ballad he offered in evidence is no longer accepted as genuine.

Shakespeare had a decisive-some would say, damaging-influence on the way fairies were portrayed in English literature and art. When he put them on stage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96), and gave a playful description of Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet (1597), wherein he spoke of them as very small, pretty, harmless creatures. His Puck (aka Robin Goodfellow) is still a mocking trickster, as in folk tradition, but never dangerous. Although Shakespeare must surely have known folktales, he never borrowed a plot from them.

Complete m€archen begin to reach print in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A chapbook entitled Jack and the Giants (c. 1750-60) is the earliest surviving version of the story of “Jack the Giant-Killer,” a medley of “stupid ogre” and giant-killing episodes (including ATU 328, The Boy Steals the Ogre’s Treasure; and ATU 1088, Eating/Drinking Contest), set in the reign of King Arthur. It was widely known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as literary allusions prove; some episodes were localized in Cornwall. A lively oral telling, dating from 1909, is given in Ella M. Leather’s The Folklore of Herefordshire (1912). Equally popular was Jack and the Beanstalk (ATU 328A), but the surviving chapbooks (1807) are poor texts, so the best version is a recreation from childhood memories by the folklorist Joseph Jacobs in 1890. In Norfolk, a cycle of local tales about Tom Hickathrift was printed in a chapbook (c. 1660) and is still orally current; the tales describe his huge strength, which terrified every farmer he worked for, and how he fought and killed giants.

The History of Tom Thumb the Little is a booklet of 1621 by “R. J.” (probably Richard Johnson, 1573-1659?), but there are allusions to the story (ATU 700, Thumbling) several decades earlier. All of these publications catered to readers who liked down-to-earth stories, with humor and violence; none of the more romantic wonder tales were printed. Native English versions of the latter certainly existed, but before anybody thought of collecting and printing them, a flood of foreign ones appeared-first those of Charles Perrault, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont; then those of the Brothers Grimm; and finally those of Hans Christian Andersen. Selections from these were soon translated and printed in chapbooks and other cheap editions, as were a few stories from the Arabian Nights; they became thoroughly integrated into English popular culture, where their foreign origins were rapidly forgotten. The native wonder tales lived on, precariously, as oral stories told among working-class people, and sometimes by nursemaids to children of middle-class families, but publishers and scholars ignored them until late in the nineteenth century.