Folktales in Pre-Industrial England

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).