Dwarves, Riddles and Talking Trees: How Ruth Tongue Used Famous Literature

"Undine," illustration by Rackham

​Ruth Tongue had an unusual approach to folktale collecting. By her own account and those of others who knew her, she generally collected her stories by remembering them from her early childhood or throughout her life. She was in many ways her own source. And her stories are unique. Beyond their distinctive tone, there are colorful fairies and monsters that are distinct from other collected folklore. As Bob and Jacqueline Patten wrote of Tongue's creatures, "Nowhere else are found the Apple Tree Man, the Conger King, The-One-With-The-White-Hand, Boneless, or Meet-on-the-Road."

Maybe she did make up the Conger King or Meet-on-the-Road. But after research, I believe that Tongue did not make up quite so many of her unique creatures as some have suggested. For instance, Boneless had appeared previously, listed among other monsters by Reginald Scot and, later, Michael Denham - although it received no description and remained mysterious. Tongue, however, published a story in which the Boneless was a kind of blob creature. She also published wholly unique stories explaining the Boneless' fellow bogeys, the Galley-beggar and the Bull-Beggar.

I believe that a number of Tongue's other creatures had similar histories - she did not make them up out of whole cloth. Instead, she borrowed ideas from scholars and fiction authors.

Tongue used not only folklore collections but fantasy books to bolster her credibility as a folklorist. Actually, it makes sense. Although she made much of her connection to Somerset, most of her formative years were spent elsewhere.

She was clearly well-read. In Forgotten Folk Tales, (p. 32), she mentioned James Fraser's Golden Bough, tying her stories into his worldview of comparative folklore.

The famous Katharine Briggs was Tongue's mentor and frequently relied on her as a source. Briggs categorized many of Tongue's stories and found parallels in other collections. Of Tongue's story "The Sea-morgan's Baby," in which a childless couple adopts a merbaby, Briggs wrote that it "suggests the tale given literary expression in Fouque's 'Undine.'" (xv) 
The 19th-century novella "Undine" was, of course, influenced by folklore - the myth of the watery fairy bride. But Briggs' method puts forward the case that there was also an older legend of a human couple raising a merchild, which led to both "Undine" and Ruth's "Sea-Morgan" story. It discounts the possibility that "Undine" itself influenced folklore. It also discounts a pertinent question - did Ruth really find the folktale that lay behind Undine, or was she inspired by Undine? 

Similarly, in Folktales of England, Briggs compared Tongue's "The Sea Morgan and the Conger Eels" to the Odyssey and to Rudyard Kipling's story "Dymchurch Flit." She had comparisons and supporting evidence for all of the tales; "The Hunted Soul" was "almost identical" to a story told by Anna Eliza Bray in The Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy (vol. 2, p. 114). 

Tongue picked this up and made similar cases. One example was her story "The Danish Camp,"  in which redheaded Danish invaders kidnapped English brides. One night, in the midst of their revels, the women rebelled and slew them all, with the exception of a single boy whose lonely song still rings through the hills. In the notes of Somerset Folklore, Tongue wrote, “Wordsworth remembers him in a poem.” She showed her literary expertise and the older existence of the tale.

Or at least, she tried to. Wordsworth's fragmentary poem "The Danish Boy," first published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), does bear a surface similarity to Tongue's story . . . insofar as it mentions a Danish boy.
In fact, Wordsworth wrote in his letters that the poem was "entirely a fancy."
He wrote further:
"These Stanzas were designed to introduce a Ballad upon the Story of a Danish Prince who had fled from Battle, and, for the sake of the valuables about him, was murdered by the Inhabitant of a Cottage in which he had taken refuge. The House fell under a curse, and the Spirit of the Youth, it was believed, haunted the Valley where the crime had been committed."

It seems that Ruth found the wrong Danish Boy. Wordsworth was not inspired by a legend of a Danish camp in England. He was creating a unique ghost story about a prince murdered for his wealth.

However, there is evidence for the story of "The Danish Camp" existing before Tongue, at least in fragments.

In her early work, such as Somerset Folklore (1965), Tongue's stories fit into established tale types. You could find other books telling the same stories. They showed her signature spark of storytelling, but they were also familiar, as would be expected for traditional folktales.

But were they too familiar?

One book that Tongue drew on and cited often was Tales of the Blackdown Borderland by F. W. Mathews (1923). Was she just citing it for textual support, or something more? According to Jeremy Harte, it was something more: Ruth "rescued" at least fifteen tales from this small book "and reattributed them to her childhood encounters." 
Tales which appear in both Mathews and Tongue include "The Fairy Market," "Blue-Burchies," the tale of Jacob Stone, the Hangman's Stone, "The Sheep-Stealers of the Blackdown Hills," the ghost story of Sir John Popham, "Gatchell's Devil," and "Robin Hood's Butts." Plotlines were identical right down to locations mentioned. 

Somerset Folklore also relied on “Local Traditions of the Quantocks” by C. W. Whistler, a 1908 article in Folklore. Stories which coincide are "Stoke Curcy," the tradition of hunting Judas, a tale of helpful pixies threshing wheat, “the blacksmith who shod the devil’s horse,” "The Devil of Cheddar Gorge," "The Broken Ped," "The Gurt Wurm of Shervage Wood," and the basic elements of "The Danish Camp."

Tongue's stories followed the same patterns as their predecessors, but tended to be "more engagingly told," as J. B. Smith put it. Her versions had more dialogue, smoother plot arcs, and her own signature style.

J. B. Smith pointed out that Tongue's story "The Croydon Devil Claims His Own" was also very similar to an older tale, "The Devil of Croyden Hill," published in the magazine Echoes of Exmoor in 1925. True, that is to be expected - but Smith listed multiple variants of the tale, each with their unique plot points. Tongue's was unique in that it wasn't unique.
Smith wrote that Tongue's version, unlike the others, "shows every sign of being a retelling of (C1), down to small details of topography. It also stands out from other tales in her Somerset Folklore in being unattributed, a fact hardly calculated to allay suspicions that it is an adaptation of (C1) rather than a tradition in the true sense."
There are some distinct Tongue-isms, such as the villain being a redhead, and the unusually supernatural ending (most of the stories have a skeptical theme).

So these stories are well-known folktales from legitimate story families, but sometimes the details are so close to other people's renditions that it becomes noteworthy. It has led J. B. Smith to suggest that these stories are prototypes and not parallels; Jeremy Harte to say that Ruth took "over ten out of the fifteen or so narratives in [Whistler's article], and refashioned them."

It was in Forgotten Folk Tales of the English Counties, Tongue's 1970 book, where she really branched out. These stories are strikingly unique not just in style but in plot. The whole basis of the collection was that these were tales that had escaped every other collector, and were only unearthed by Tongue.

Tongue seemed endlessly capable of finding a folktale to match any saying or term. "Lazy Lawrence," an old character and personifying term for laziness, showed up as the name of an orchard-guarding fairy horse. "The Grey Mare is the Better Horse," a saying about henpecked husbands, showed up as a Robin Hood tale (in which all of the wives are quite meek and docile, by the way). "Tom Tiddler's Ground," a children's game, showed up as a story about hidden fairy gold. Hyter Sprites, an obscure type of spirit, were not much known beyond their name existing in a few dictionaries - but Ruth provided a whole story of their antics and their ability to transform into birds.

There are a few stories that I think deserve special attention here. 
​
"The Grig's Red Cap"
This is one of the few times in which I believe Ruth catches herself in a direct lie.

In 1864, an editor of Transactions of the Philological Society theorized that a grig might be a fairy name, based on the word "griggling," a term for collecting leftover apples. After all, similar terms were "colepexying" and "pixy-hoarding."

A hundred years later, in Somerset Folklore, Ruth made the same case thinking along the same lines. As evidence, she also added in the story of "Skillywiddens," where the fairy is nicknamed Bobby Griglans. Tongue wrote that "It seems a reasonable inference that the grig is fairy of sorts [sic].”

In fact, the etymology is not as clear as it might seem. "Griggling" is most likely derived from "griggle," a word for a little apple. "Griglans" means "heather."

But a few years after that, in Forgotten Folk Tales, she gave the story "The Grig's Red Cap," on page 76, and notes "Heard from old Harry White, a groom at Stanmore, 1936. Also from the Welsh marshes, 1912." This implies strongly that Ruth is the one who heard the tale in 1912 and 1936 . . . despite seeming to guess at the grigs' very existence in 1965.

Was Ruth inspired by that old journal issue? Did she decide that grigs deserved their own story - even if she had to construct it herself?

The Asrai
The asrai was a water fairy who emerged from her lake on moonlit nights. A greedy fisherman kidnapped her, planning to sell her, but the delicate sprite could not bear sunlight. At dawn, she melted into a puddle of water -- while the fisherman would always bear her freezing cold handprint on his arm.

Katharine Briggs noted in The Fairies in Tradition and Literature that "The name is mentioned in Robert Buchanan's verses." Robert Buchanan actually wrote two poems about the asrai, although the plots bear no resemblance to Tongue's tale. Although Buchanan clearly took inspiration from folklore, the asrai seem to be his own creation. He is the only person ever to mention them until Ruth Tongue, and he developed their characteristics between poems. His asrai are pale beings who avoid sunlight – metaphorically melting away when the sun emerged and humanity became the dominant species. Tongue’s asrai are much more fishy in appearance, and literally melt if they encounter sunlight.

Tongue may have even subtly woven in a little etymology, saying that one person thought an asrai was a newt. Asgill is an English dialect word for newt.

The "asrai" name was not from folklore - but still, perhaps the plot was. There are plenty of English stories of fishermen encountering or netting mermaids. Closer still, the French "Dame de Font-Chancela" was a fairy who appeared on moonlit nights by a fountain. A lustful nobleman tried to carry her away on his horse, but she vanished from his arms just as if she’d melted, and left him with a frozen feeling that prevented any further escapades for some time. (You go, girl.) I don't know if Tongue read French, but the story was cited in various French books and could very possibly have made its way to England.

"The Vixen and the Oakmen"
In this tale, a fox is protected by the Oakmen, dwarfish forest guardians who live within the great oak. Other characters include a helpful talking hawthorn tree and a malicious, murderous holly. In her notes, Tongue drew connections to two fiction authors. "For other references, see Beatrix Potter, The Fairy Caravan... J. R. R. Tolkien makes dynamic use of similar beliefs in The Lord of the Rings" (18).

Again, Katharine Briggs happily put forward Beatrix Potter's books as evidence of tradition. She wrote in Dictionary of Fairies (1976) that "It is probable that [Potter's] Oakmen are founded on genuine traditions," and in The Vanishing People (1978), "Although [The Fairy Caravan] makes no claim to be authoritative the legend is confirmed by the collections of Ruth Tongue."

Major, major problem here - Potter was not inspired by folklore, but by her niece's imaginary friends, and she was blocked from writing more about them by copyright concerns, because her niece had gotten them from a book. The most likely candidate for the infringed-upon book would be William Canton’s works. In fact, Tongue included all of William Canton's oak-men books in her bibliography for Forgotten Folk-Tales, although she did not explain the connection. Briggs seems to have been unaware of Canton, or she would certainly have included him as "proof" of oakmen's traditional nature. Beatrix Potter's behavior undermines the idea that the oakmen could be traditional. But Tongue would not have known any of this. Only later was the full story published in Leslie Linder's History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter.

In addition, The Fairy Caravan's oakmen are seen around "the Great Oak" and care for animals. It's important to note that this book featured many local landmarks from the Lake District, where Potter lived. The Great Oak was "the great oak beside the road going to Lakeside, beyond Graythwaite Hall." (Linder p. 302)
Tongue attributes "The Vixen" to the Lake District, and she also wrote of the Oakmen living within "the great oak." Tongue doesn't just give oakmen a similar role to those of Potter. She uses the exact same phrase for their dwelling place, even if it is stripped of context. 

As for Tolkien, he did not write about oakmen, but he did, of course, have many sentient or moving tree characters. A sentient willow tries to kill people in Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, and Tongue wrote that "The Barren Holly is credited, like the Willow, with being a murdering tree". 

"The Wonderful Wood"
Oak trees are friendly to a mistreated girl. An evil king and army pursue her through the woods, but wind up mysteriously vanishing: "For the trees closed about and they never got out/ Of the wood, the wonderful wood."

Says Ruth: "Trees are believed to be very revengeful and murderous at times. See B. Potter, The Fairy Caravan... J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Pt 3, p. 19."

The reference to Beatrix Potter is probably the "Pringle Wood" that features in The Fairy Caravan: an ominous oak forest, home to unseen, malevolent  beings, which can only be navigated when magical protections are in place. (Also based on a real location, as it happens!)

The Tolkien reference is to The Two Towers and the Battle of Helm's Deep, where Saruman's fleeing army encounters the forest of sentient trees or "Huorns."
"Like a black smoke driven by a mounting wind... [the Orcs] fled.​ Wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees; and from that shadow none ever came again."

"In My Pocket"
A clever dwarf hides in a giant's pocket. He helps the giant solve a wizard's riddles so that they can win the wizard's sheep and escape imprisonment.
The final riddle which stumps the wizard:
"'Two for one' (and that was the giant),
'A small one for the rest' (and that was the brothers),
'And a little, little piece for my pocket' (and that was the good little dwarf)."

Says Ruth: "It is likely that this Norse tale did not come from a chapbook, but existed as oral tradition only. Perhaps Professor Tolkien came across a variant (see J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit). It might be traceable."

She is suggesting that Bilbo Baggins' famous riddling contest with Gollum, which ends with the trick question "What is in my pocket?" was inspired by her folktale.

Conclusion
Forgotten Folk Tales was written at the apex of Tongue's fame, and was the book where she showed her hand the most. She didn't just write about obscure creatures; she wrote about creatures which had only ever appeared in fantasy works.

Her previously collected folktales could be near-identical to those collected in other books. That was not so unusual. Indeed, it served as proof, footprints showing where and when else the stories had been recorded. Her sources could be vague enough to leave it unclear whether she had actually heard them herself, and no one would strongly challenge her.

I think that in 1970, she got cocky. Encouraged by Briggs, she decided that this applied not only to obscure folktale collections, but to fantasy writers. Whistler and Mathews and William Wordsworth were evidence that her stories were old and established. In the same way, Robert Buchanan, Beatrix Potter, and J. R. R. Tolkien could be evidence! Even when the similarities were much vaguer, they still showed that she had not made up these stories and that others really had "heard" them. In this backwards way, Tongue recast authors' original work as folktale collections. She denied them their creativity as authors.

And Briggs ate it up, and so apparently did others. A few reviews might have mildly pointed out that Tongue's sources were a little confusing, but it was not until after her death that people actually began to voice their doubts.

Sources

• Harte, Jeremy. “Ruth Tongue the Story-Teller.” 3rd Stone.
• de la Salle, Croyances et Legendes du Centre de la France, 1875, p. 118
• The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), 12.
• Patten, Bob and Jacqueline. ‘Ruth Tongue’, in Women and Tradition, ed. Hilda R. E. Davidson and Carmen Blacker 2001: 205–16.
• The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1827), 352.
• Smith, J. B. “The Devil of Croyden Hill: Kinship, Fiction, Fact, Tradition.” Folklore, Vol. 116, No. 1 (Apr., 2005), pp. 66-74
• Smith, J. B. “Notes on Dialect, Folklore and Creativity.” Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries. (2002) Vol. 35, pp. 98-103
• Transactions of the Philological Society, 1864. "A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect." p. 49.

Other blog posts

• Melting Mermaids: The Asrai
• The Oakmen of Beatrix Potter