Ruth Lyndall Tongue is a strange figure in the field of English folklore. She is little known in modern popular culture. Within the folklore niche, however, her work is both controversial and incredibly widespread. Her stories, which are colorful and memorable, appear in many folktale anthologies. She was a born storyteller. (And she never missed an opportunity to sing her own praises. She referred to herself in one interview as “the last of the folk-lorists.”)
Katharine Mary Briggs was one of the most influential folklorists of the 20th century and president of the Folklore Society from 1969 to 1972. It was she who discovered Tongue and brought her to temporary fame. Although that fame faded, and Ruth's name was even misspelled in her obituary, the books they worked on together became essential reading for anyone interested in English folklore. They entered popular culture through fantasy novels and the artwork of artists like Brian Froud.
What's wrong with Ruth Tongue? If you've read my blog, you'll know I am always coming back to her. Basically: she's been called everything from a prodigy to a fraud. She was popular for a while in life, but after her death, academics began to turn more scrutiny on her work. In some cases her work has made things more confusing for later researchers.
Everything she published went through her process of storytelling. This is obvious from her signature style and recurrent themes. Her songs don't have the feel of old ballads. As pointed out by Bob and Jacqueline Patten and many others, even reviewers like Margaret Dean-Smith who struck a positive tone, her songs are closer to contemporary popular songs. Her stories, too, are written in modern style. There are inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Her sources are so vague as to be evasive.
Ruth collected stories from all sorts of sources, but many of them she wrote down years after hearing them. Some memories were triggered by reading books, or simply came back to her decades later. In her book The Chime Child, she described remembering a song which she had first heard in early childhood: "it had become deep buried by other songs until one glorious September day in 1964, when up on Brean Down overlooking a quiet sea creeping shorewards, the whole song threw off the dust of fifty years and became a lovely and loved thing to others." (pp. 59-60)
Much of her material had never been seen before. Her stories were strikingly unique and she was always brimming with more, which made her invaluable to Katharine Briggs.
Ruth is but one example of “folklorists” who embellished or embroidered stories. Some polished their material to make a better story. Others edited to support their own beliefs and prejudices. For Ruth, I think it was partly to tell a better story, but also because it was a way to get the attention for which she longed. It earned her friends who looked after her in her later life.
A lot of the material she produced may have been entirely her own work. This is not itself a problem. The problem is that she passed it off as traditional beliefs and legends which she had heard from other people.
With every Ruth Tongue story, you have to filter through, trying to figure out what elements came from older folklore and what came from her imagination. That said, her stories are memorable, haunting, and usually a lot of fun. She was a truly skilled storyteller.
So what's the purpose of this page?
Some of Ruth Tongue's tales are backed up by other sources, and I want to document that as much as possible. Writers like Jeremy Harte and John B. Smith have suggested these stories might have been borrowed and repackaged from those sources, which would be difficult to prove. In other places, Ruth speaks of traditions like the Apple-tree Man, things which appear nowhere outside her books. And then there are a few blatant contradictions.
Things to Note
1) She was a Chime Child.
In the article "Odds and Ends of Somerset Folklore" (Folklore, Vol. 69, No. 1, 1958), she described the Somerset tradition of "chime children" - children born between midnight and cockcrow on a Friday. These children possessed powers of psychic understanding, healing, affinity for animals, and resistance to black magic. Ruth was a chime child, or so she said. Her date of birth was Monday, February 7, 1898. I found her birth date in Women and Tradition, which backed up my own research on genealogy sites.
Nevertheless, she claimed that her birth date was "an Open Sesame to many carefully guarded secrets." People who would normally never breathe a word of their traditions were perfectly willing to open up to a mystically powerful woman like Ruth. As a child, she wandered through the countryside and was privy to discussions of ancient heathen rituals (no idea what her parents, a strict minister and his wife, were doing in the meantime).
She is the first source for the term "chime children." However, the concept of birth during the "chime hours" was common. Accounts varied on what attributes these children might have - from psychic powers to being free from ghosts.
2) Her stories have distinctive themes.
Ruth often describes unusual fairies and monsters. According to Patten, "Nowhere else are found the Apple Tree Man, the Conger King, The-One-With-The-White-Hand, Boneless or Meet-on-the-Road." (A "Boneless" actually does appear in the Denham Tracts, but we have no way of knowing whether it resembled Ruth Tongue's "Boneless" in the slightest.)
There are frequent common themes that run through her tales. Animals talk. Trees and other inanimate objects are personified and can talk or move around. The supernatural is everywhere and people must protect themselves with salt, iron, running water, and “criss-cross.” Red hair is a villainous trait. "Judas was a Red-Headed Man," as one song ran, which she included in Somerset Folklore. The bullying butcher's boy in "The Croydon Devil Claims His Own" is redheaded.
In her most frequent story arc, one person respects the magical forces and is rewarded, while another is disrespectful and is punished.
3) She leaves her sources vague.
In The Chime Child, she describes the collection of one song like this:
"I had just finished a Folk Song Recital in London, and made my way back to sink exhausted into my dressing-room chair, when there came a hearty bang on my door which opened, and an elderly sea captain came in. He was smart, grey-haired, scarlet-faced, and as full of enthusiasm as a young westerly gale - and he had a ballad for me."
This captain's family knew an ancient ballad which they had treasured and never sung to anyone else, ever - but as soon as he heard Ruth's recital, he broke tradition and charged in to entrust the song to her. The song must be saved for posterity, and only Ruth could save it! He taught her his ballad (which she memorized perfectly in minutes) and then he headed out without leaving his name. Like so many of Ruth's sources, he is forever anonymous.
In many cases, when explaining where she collected something, Ruth gives maybe a year and/or a location, very occasionally a name. Bob and Jacqueline Patten in Women and Tradition suggest that she left her sources anonymous in order to respect their privacy and some superstitions. On the other hand, Cecil Sharp, a folk-song collector working around the same time and in the same places, had very thorough citations.
A disproportionate number of Ruth's stories are dated to her childhood or even her infancy. Recording them late in life, she may not have remembered the storytellers' names. She grew up surrounded by a family that frequently told each other stories, and this was at a point when she wouldn't have been concerned with citing sources. Only much later would she try to specify sources, leading to the vague attributions which have drawn skepticism.
Ruth Tongue addressed this issue at least once, in a 1968 letter to the editor of Folklore after a slightly critical review. As she explained, she had lost all of her notes in a 1966 house fire, and had to rely on some guesswork. This did not explain why the same issue plagues everything she wrote.
Even with stories collected at later dates, it's impossible to tell with many of her notes whether she was writing things down at the time or much later. She didn't care about taking accurate notes - if she lost a page, she'd just jot it down from memory later (see Patten).
Sometimes she used contemporary fiction as proof of a wider tradition. For instance, she often cited J. R. R. Tolkien and Beatrix Potter. Potter mentioned oakmen, so she must have been inspired by the same legend Tongue wrote about - and so on.
Katharine Mary Briggs was one of the most influential folklorists of the 20th century and president of the Folklore Society from 1969 to 1972. It was she who discovered Tongue and brought her to temporary fame. Although that fame faded, and Ruth's name was even misspelled in her obituary, the books they worked on together became essential reading for anyone interested in English folklore. They entered popular culture through fantasy novels and the artwork of artists like Brian Froud.
What's wrong with Ruth Tongue? If you've read my blog, you'll know I am always coming back to her. Basically: she's been called everything from a prodigy to a fraud. She was popular for a while in life, but after her death, academics began to turn more scrutiny on her work. In some cases her work has made things more confusing for later researchers.
Everything she published went through her process of storytelling. This is obvious from her signature style and recurrent themes. Her songs don't have the feel of old ballads. As pointed out by Bob and Jacqueline Patten and many others, even reviewers like Margaret Dean-Smith who struck a positive tone, her songs are closer to contemporary popular songs. Her stories, too, are written in modern style. There are inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Her sources are so vague as to be evasive.
Ruth collected stories from all sorts of sources, but many of them she wrote down years after hearing them. Some memories were triggered by reading books, or simply came back to her decades later. In her book The Chime Child, she described remembering a song which she had first heard in early childhood: "it had become deep buried by other songs until one glorious September day in 1964, when up on Brean Down overlooking a quiet sea creeping shorewards, the whole song threw off the dust of fifty years and became a lovely and loved thing to others." (pp. 59-60)
Much of her material had never been seen before. Her stories were strikingly unique and she was always brimming with more, which made her invaluable to Katharine Briggs.
Ruth is but one example of “folklorists” who embellished or embroidered stories. Some polished their material to make a better story. Others edited to support their own beliefs and prejudices. For Ruth, I think it was partly to tell a better story, but also because it was a way to get the attention for which she longed. It earned her friends who looked after her in her later life.
A lot of the material she produced may have been entirely her own work. This is not itself a problem. The problem is that she passed it off as traditional beliefs and legends which she had heard from other people.
With every Ruth Tongue story, you have to filter through, trying to figure out what elements came from older folklore and what came from her imagination. That said, her stories are memorable, haunting, and usually a lot of fun. She was a truly skilled storyteller.
So what's the purpose of this page?
Some of Ruth Tongue's tales are backed up by other sources, and I want to document that as much as possible. Writers like Jeremy Harte and John B. Smith have suggested these stories might have been borrowed and repackaged from those sources, which would be difficult to prove. In other places, Ruth speaks of traditions like the Apple-tree Man, things which appear nowhere outside her books. And then there are a few blatant contradictions.
Things to Note
1) She was a Chime Child.
In the article "Odds and Ends of Somerset Folklore" (Folklore, Vol. 69, No. 1, 1958), she described the Somerset tradition of "chime children" - children born between midnight and cockcrow on a Friday. These children possessed powers of psychic understanding, healing, affinity for animals, and resistance to black magic. Ruth was a chime child, or so she said. Her date of birth was Monday, February 7, 1898. I found her birth date in Women and Tradition, which backed up my own research on genealogy sites.
Nevertheless, she claimed that her birth date was "an Open Sesame to many carefully guarded secrets." People who would normally never breathe a word of their traditions were perfectly willing to open up to a mystically powerful woman like Ruth. As a child, she wandered through the countryside and was privy to discussions of ancient heathen rituals (no idea what her parents, a strict minister and his wife, were doing in the meantime).
She is the first source for the term "chime children." However, the concept of birth during the "chime hours" was common. Accounts varied on what attributes these children might have - from psychic powers to being free from ghosts.
- "Chime Hours and Chime Children." Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog.
2) Her stories have distinctive themes.
Ruth often describes unusual fairies and monsters. According to Patten, "Nowhere else are found the Apple Tree Man, the Conger King, The-One-With-The-White-Hand, Boneless or Meet-on-the-Road." (A "Boneless" actually does appear in the Denham Tracts, but we have no way of knowing whether it resembled Ruth Tongue's "Boneless" in the slightest.)
There are frequent common themes that run through her tales. Animals talk. Trees and other inanimate objects are personified and can talk or move around. The supernatural is everywhere and people must protect themselves with salt, iron, running water, and “criss-cross.” Red hair is a villainous trait. "Judas was a Red-Headed Man," as one song ran, which she included in Somerset Folklore. The bullying butcher's boy in "The Croydon Devil Claims His Own" is redheaded.
In her most frequent story arc, one person respects the magical forces and is rewarded, while another is disrespectful and is punished.
3) She leaves her sources vague.
In The Chime Child, she describes the collection of one song like this:
"I had just finished a Folk Song Recital in London, and made my way back to sink exhausted into my dressing-room chair, when there came a hearty bang on my door which opened, and an elderly sea captain came in. He was smart, grey-haired, scarlet-faced, and as full of enthusiasm as a young westerly gale - and he had a ballad for me."
This captain's family knew an ancient ballad which they had treasured and never sung to anyone else, ever - but as soon as he heard Ruth's recital, he broke tradition and charged in to entrust the song to her. The song must be saved for posterity, and only Ruth could save it! He taught her his ballad (which she memorized perfectly in minutes) and then he headed out without leaving his name. Like so many of Ruth's sources, he is forever anonymous.
In many cases, when explaining where she collected something, Ruth gives maybe a year and/or a location, very occasionally a name. Bob and Jacqueline Patten in Women and Tradition suggest that she left her sources anonymous in order to respect their privacy and some superstitions. On the other hand, Cecil Sharp, a folk-song collector working around the same time and in the same places, had very thorough citations.
A disproportionate number of Ruth's stories are dated to her childhood or even her infancy. Recording them late in life, she may not have remembered the storytellers' names. She grew up surrounded by a family that frequently told each other stories, and this was at a point when she wouldn't have been concerned with citing sources. Only much later would she try to specify sources, leading to the vague attributions which have drawn skepticism.
Ruth Tongue addressed this issue at least once, in a 1968 letter to the editor of Folklore after a slightly critical review. As she explained, she had lost all of her notes in a 1966 house fire, and had to rely on some guesswork. This did not explain why the same issue plagues everything she wrote.
Even with stories collected at later dates, it's impossible to tell with many of her notes whether she was writing things down at the time or much later. She didn't care about taking accurate notes - if she lost a page, she'd just jot it down from memory later (see Patten).
Sometimes she used contemporary fiction as proof of a wider tradition. For instance, she often cited J. R. R. Tolkien and Beatrix Potter. Potter mentioned oakmen, so she must have been inspired by the same legend Tongue wrote about - and so on.
Ruth's Bibliography
- Folktales of England (with Katharine Mary Briggs). 1965.
- Somerset Folklore. 1965.
- The Chime Child, or Somerset Singers: being an account of some of their songs collected over sixty years. 1968.
- Forgotten folk tales of the English counties. 1970.
She also published numerous articles in the journal Folklore.
Forgotten Folk Tales of the English Counties (1970)
This was Ruth Tongue's last book, filled with stories reconstructed from her surviving notes after a devastating house fire. It includes ninety tales.
Billy Biter and the Round Parkin
Summary: Billy Biter is a little tailor, married to the abusive drunkard Hepzibah. The local wise woman gives Billy some parkin - a kind of local gingerbread - to take home. There is a ferocious dragon living near his home which takes some of the parkin and develops a taste for it. Hepzibah (who is not just a terrible wife but a terrible cook) tries to make her own gingerbread and creates a huge, round blob of it. When she carries it outside, the dragon eats both Hepzibah and parkin. The sticky parkin glues his mouth shut, allowing the villagers to kill him. His bones form the peninsula of Filey Brigg.
Ruth had previously published this story in Folk Lore, vol. 78, 1967.
Evidence: This may be an obscure tale-type of its own where the dragon is incapacitated or killed by food.
In a possibly apocryphal section of the Biblical book of Daniel, the Babylonians worship a dragon. Daniel kills it by feeding it a lump of pitch, fat and hair, which causes the dragon to burst. (Zimmermann suggests that this is a mistranslation, and Daniel originally fed the dragon barley-cakes.)
In the late-12th-century Chronicle of Poland by Wincenty Kadlubek, the Wawel dragon is killed by being fed a calf skin full of sulfur. Similarly, in the Orcadian tale of "Assipattle and the Stoor Worm," Assipattle kills the monster by diving down its throat with a lump of burning peat. The dead dragon’s body forms Iceland, the Baltic Sea, and the islands of Orkney, Shetland and the Faroes. Jacqueline Simpson collected a tale in 1971 where a man killed a Knucker (dragon) with a poisoned pie. A related tale has the hero feed the Knucker a pudding of prodigious size, which leaves the it incapacitated by stomach pains and easily killed. In "Fifty British Dragon Tales: An Analysis" (Folklore 1978), Simpson mentioned some tales where a dragonslayer distracted the dragon with a bowl of milk before killing it.
Despite the abundance of similar tales, I haven't yet found any other sources for a Filey Brigg dragon story.
Tom Tiddler's Ground (Westmorland/Somerset)
Summary: Out in a field, Tom Tiddler finds a lump of gold and lump of silver, but knowing they must be of the fairies, leaves them in a hole by the Fairy Thorn. He then finds a bag of pennies and keeps those to start a farm. When resources run low, he goes to the fairies to ask for some more help. However, "old Wizard Black" has stolen the fairies' money. Tom Tiddler fetches a huntsman and hounds who chase down the wizard in the shape of a fox, so the fairies have their vengeance and Tom's farm prospers.
Evidence: "Tom Tiddler's Ground" was a children's game where one player is the titular character. Other players run through his territory calling "I'm on Tom Tiddler's ground, picking up gold and silver." He chases them, and the last one to be caught is Tom Tiddler in the next round. Variants included Tom Tickler, Tom Tittler, Tom Tinder or Tom Tinker.
The phrase came to mean a place filled with riches, or simply a no-man's-land.
One suggestion is that Tidler comes from "the idler" or "t'idler" and the phrase means the ground of a sluggard (Dictionary of Phrase and Fable). Dr. Charles Mackay, in the Pall Mall Gazette, suggests that the name is actually from Celtic or Gaelic: tom for hill or mound, and tiodlach for gift, offering, or treasure. Thus, Tom-Tidler is "the hill of gifts or treasure."
Shua O! Shua O! Shoo, shoo, shoo! Shua O! Shua O!
Shoo, shoo, shoo! all ye birds,
Out of my master's ground, into Tom Tiddler's ground,
Shoo! all ye birds. Hilly-ho!
This stems from a time when the role of scarecrow was filled by little boys who would make noise to drive birds away from the crops.
Her bird-scaring call bears a close resemblance to another, collected by Cecil Sharp in 1904. This is the "Bird Starver's Cry" from East Harptree, Somerset:
Hi shoo all 'er birds!
Out of master's ground into Tom Tucker's ground
Out of Tom Tucker's ground into Tom Tinker's ground
Out of Tom Tinker's ground into Luke Cole's ground
Out of Luke Cole's ground into Bill Veater's ground
Hi shoo all 'er birds! Kraaal! Hoop!
Tiddler is close enough to Tucker or Tinker, and as already stated, the game has also taken the name “Tom Tinker’s Ground.” The song could have easily been garbled to the form Tongue transcribed, without the existence of any deep traditional connection.
The Vixen and the Oakmen (the Lake District, Cumberland)
Summary: A vixen travels through dangerous woods, avoiding the evil holly tree, to warn the oakmen that men are coming to cut the mistletoe from their Great Oak. Oakmen are kindly dwarves who serve as forest guardians.
Evidence: In folklore, oaks are a veritable hotspot of magical and fairy activity. Oakmen, however, are not to be found in any previous folklore collections.
Tongue mentions that J. R. R. Tolkien uses similar beliefs about trees in The Lord of the Rings, and Beatrix Potter describes oakmen in The Fairy Caravan (1952). Although Tongue suggests Potter took oakmen from folklore, research shows that Potter did no such thing. Oakmen were inspired by her niece's imaginary friends, which may have been inspired in turn by a children's book. Potter was blocked from writing more about oakmen because of copyright issues.
The book which inspired Potter's oakmen may have been by William Canton. Tongue was aware of Canton's work and included it in the bibliography of Forgotten Folk Tales, probably believing that both Canton and Potter were inspired by a single tradition. Leslie Linder's History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter, which would have clarified the issue, would not come out for another year.
There is one interesting similarity, in that Tongue's oakmen live inside "the great oak." The oakmen are also spotted around "the Great Oak" in The Fairy Caravan, but this references a specific tree in the Lake District where Beatrix Potter lived. The whole book is a love letter to the Lake District (see Linder, p. 302).
Verdict: Oakmen were probably created by William Canton.
Hyter Sprites (Essex)
Summary: Hyter John is an honest man who is kind to the hyter sprites. As a result, the mischievous fairy beings show him favor.
Evidence: Hyters, hight sprites, or hikey sprites existed in folklore before Tongue, and the tradition was recorded up until very recently. Their first known appearance in print was The Eastern Counties Collectanea by Walter Rye (1872): "Other spiritual visitants are the hyter sprites, a kind of fairy rather beneficent than otherwise."
In collected material, they ranged from invisible do-gooders to frightening bogeymen. Everyone had their own interpretation, but Ruth Tongue's is wholly unique. No one else mentioned green-eyed, sandy-colored fairies who turned into birds. On the other hand, sandy-colored hair and skin were attributes of the Suffolk "feriers" in Hollingsworth's History of Stowmarket (1844).
The Asrai (Cheshire and Shropshire)
Summary: Tongue gives two near-identical versions. A fisherman captures an asrai, a beautiful moonlight-loving water fairy. He plans to take her home, but at the first gleam of sunlight, she melts into water.
Evidence: Just like the oakmen, the only preceding mentions of asrai are from fantasy fiction. Robert Williams Buchanan wrote two poems about the asrai, strange elemental beings who lived beneath a lake. He developed their characteristics and backstory between poems. They bear no resemblance to the malevolent water monsters recorded in Shropshire folklore, and indeed Buchanan doesn't mention Shropshire at all. It seems likely that the asrai are his own original creation.
I have seen it spelled as azrai, azurai or ashray. Pierre Dubois, in Encyclopedia des Fees, wrote of a class of beauteous water fairies called "The Dancers of the Mist" or Danseurs de brume. He included asrais or "scarille" as an English subtype. He's the only source for scarille. You can read more on Dubois here. He drastically reinterpreted folklore creatures and his books should be taken as fantasy fiction, not authoritative works.
There are many stories of fishermen catching mermaids. A Welsh fisherman named Pergrin (Peregrine) captured a mermaid, but unlike the story of the asrai, took pity on her and released her. In return, she warned him before a storm could wreck his boat. (Rhys 1901) In a story from Conway, a mermaid is stranded on shore and dies, laying a curse on the fishermen who wouldn't help her. (Folk-lore and folk-stories of Wales, pp.331-332) In other Welsh stories, a man takes a water fairy as a bride, but when he breaks a taboo she returns to her home beneath the water.
In Albania, elves (called the Happy Ones or the Brides of the Mountain) are female spirits, vaporous and white, about the size of twelve-year-old children. In this they resemble Tongue's description of asrai but live in the mountains, not underwater. (Harmsworth History of the World, Vol. IV)
As of June 2020, I have found one remarkably similar tale: the French legend of the Lady of Font-Chancela. She was a wondrously beautiful fairy who used to frolic on moonlit nights by the fountain of that name. A local lord, seeing her otherworldly beauty, snatched her up and tried to ride away with her on his horse. Instantly, she vanished from his arms, leaving him with a frozen feeling that prevented any further kidnappings for more than a year (Laisnel de la Salle, Croyances et Legendes du Centre de la France, 1875, p. 118)
Verdict: Asrai were probably created by Robert Williams Buchanan. However, the story that Ruth Tongue tells bears a strong resemblance to a French legend recorded in 1875.
The Sea-Morgan’s Baby (Somerset, Severn Estuary)
Summary: a fisherman and his wife find a baby sea-morgan under a waterfall, accidentally left behind by per people. They raise as their own, but she is marked by her love for water and her constantly wet hair. The villagers turn on her once they learn what she is, but she hears a voice calling her from the ocean and cheerfully returns there. A wave carries her away and she is never seen again.
Evidence: According to Tongue, sea-morgan was the Severn Estuary term for green-haired water maidens who lure people out to drown with their songs. She told the story of "The Sea Morgan and the Conger Eels" in Folktales of England. The only Severn mermaid story I'm aware of is of the water goddess Sabrina.
Morgan is an old word for a water spirit. In Brittany there was the mari-morgan and in Wales, the Morgen (sea-born). In an Irish myth, a woman named Lí Ban is transformed into a mermaid also known as a Muirghen (sea-birth) or Muirgheilt (sea-prodigy). In Cornish, you have the morvoren. Tongue's "sea-morgan" is a straight translation of the Breton "mari-morgan."
There are numerous stories of humans adopting merchildren. A Breton tale similar to Tongue's appears under the title "La Fille de la Mary Morgan." A childless lord discovered an infant girl abandoned in a basket. He and his wife adopted her as their own, but she was a Mary Morgan, and would frequently disappear from her cradle. As she grew to adulthood, she began disappearing more and more frequently and for longer periods, and one day never returned at all. A cave in the vicinity was said to be the home of the Mary Morgan.
Green hair is an attribute of mermaids in Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland.
The Grig’s Red Cap (Middlesex)
Summary: Grigs are laughing little fairies in red caps. A man finds a grig's cap and puts it on, but the grig is hiding inside and beats him.
Evidence: "Merry as a grig" is a phrase of uncertain origin, probably connected to the similar idiom "merry as a Greek." A grig might be an unusually small thing or even a cricket.
In Transactions of the Philological Society (1864), an editor tentatively suggested that a grig was a fairy, based on the word "griggling," meaning to take apples left over from the harvest. Leftover apples are meant for the fairies; to collect these apples is called "cull-pixying," "colepexying," "pixy-hoarding," or "griggling;" thus griggling must also be connected to fairies.
In Somerset Folklore (1965), Ruth Tongue used the same thought process. In addition, she remembered a story of a fairy named Bobby Griglans. "It seems a reasonable inference that the grig is [a] fairy of sorts,” she concluded - and sure enough, she found a relevant story in time to include it in Forgotten Folk Tales a few years later. Time travel may have been involved, since she claims to have heard the story in 1936.
Some notes about etymology: Griggling most likely derives from "griggle," a word for a small apple - just like "scrumps" are little apples and boys go scrumping. And Tongue ignores the fact that in the story of Bobby Griglans, the author explains that "griglans" is a word for heather, and Bobby Griglans got his name because he lives in the heather. (Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England)
Verdict: Judging by her own writing, Ruth Tongue created the grigs.
The Hare and the Harbourer (two versions. Herefordshire/Monmouthshire)
Summary:
Version 1: A harbourer, or man who looks after the deer, lives in the forest with his dogs, including a mysterious spaniel. Nearby lies the river of the evil water spirit Nicky Nicky Nye. A farmer asks the harbourer for help, as his cows are being drained of milk. The farmer and harbourer lie in wait that night with the spaniel, and at midnight a "monstrous hare" shows up to attack the cows. It's the local witch in disguise. The spaniel catches the witch-hare and throws it into the river, where Nicky Nicky Nye catches it.
Version 2: The harbourer goes in search of a wife, despite the advice of the old wise woman White Mary. He marries a maiden who is lovely but spoiled and arrogant. Through her foolishness, she disturbs the magical barriers set up to guard against Nicky Nicky Nye. Her husband cures her of her arrogance with numerous beatings, and when her new baby is threatened by Nicky Nicky Nye, she and the spaniel drive the evil water spirit away for good.
Evidence: This tale also appears under the title “The Watchers by the Well” in A dictionary of British folk-tales in the English Language (Briggs 1970). In Shakespeare’s Storybook, Patrick Ryan suggested that it was one of the tales that inspired “The Taming of the Shrew,” but the only thing they have in common is glorified spousal abuse. The Taming of the Shrew really is closely based on a folktale, but the existing versions bear no resemblance to The Hare and the Harborer and are not tales of magic or monsters. (See Shakespeare's Folktale Sources by Charlotte Artese.)
The familiar Tongue characters are here: the local wise woman, the vain and naughty girl who learns a lesson, and the loyal animal helper. And then there's Nicky Nicky Nye, who seems to be a male specimen of the species of Peg Powler, Jenny Greenteeth, and Nelly Longarms. In various languages, you'll find the neck, nixie, nixe (German), nikker (Dutch), nøkke (Danish), näck (Swedish) and näkki (Finnish), as well as the horselike nykur (Icelandic) and draconic knucker (English). The Denham Tracts (1891) includes “nickies," and "Old Nick" is a name for the Devil. In fact, in this same collection, Ruth includes "The Man who went Fishing on Sunday," where the Devil is referred to as Old Nick and, when caught in a fisherman's net, drags him down into the depths of the lake.
The Grey Mare is the Better Horse (Nottinghamshire)
Summary: A cheating lawyer is in the process of selling off a town’s resources after the local lord’s death. All seems lost, but "Robin Hood" (the lord's heir in disguise) has a plan. When the lawyer arrives to sell their horses, Robin Hood boasts that those horses aren’t that great - “the grey mare is the better horse.” He bets that no one can buy the town’s wonderful mares, and the greedy lawyer takes the bet. The mares he’s referring to, however, are the local women, now pulling a plough up a field by themselves. The lawyer cannot hold up his end of the bet and the townspeople drive him off. (Ruth explains that “mare” was a common country term for a woman.)
Evidence: According to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1894), the phrase means that a wife holds sway over her husband. There is a story of a man who was buying a horse; his wife preferred a certain gray mare and badgered him until he bought that one.
This idiom goes back at least to 1529 in Dialogue of Images: "Here were we fallen in a grete questyon of the law, whyther the gray mare be the better horse." Although one writer thought the saying referred literally to gray mares, it has always been associated with female dominance and nagging wives.
Lazy Lawrence (Dorset)
Summary: Lazy Lawrence is a nimble, active fairy colt who guards the orchards. If he looks at you with his green eyes, you'll be paralyzed. A wizard sneaks into the orchard of an old woman who honors the fairies, but when he tries to steal her crops, Lazy Lawrence catches him and leaves him frozen in the orchard for an entire day.
Evidence: In Somerset Folklore, Ruth Tongue tied Lazy Lawrence to grigs, colt-pixies, and guardians of the orchard. Apparently she had found tales in Hampshire where he was a forest pony. She went on to publish this story.
In Dorset, the pexy, colepexy or colt pixy was a fairy which sometimes took the shape of a horse to lead people astray (Keightley, Fairy Mythology). At the same time, "colepexy" was a term for gathering the last fruit in the orchard, traditionally left for the fairies.
Lazy Lawrence was part of a proverbial saying. "Lawrence has hold of one" or "to have a touch of Lawrence" meant that someone was being idle. In the chapbook "The History of Lawrence Lazy" (1809, possibly in print in the 17th century), Lawrence is a slothful lad who receives a magic ring which he can use to put other people to sleep. It's unclear whether this originated the nickname of Lawrence for lazy people, or whether it's an example of an older tradition. "Lawrence" sayings became popular in the 19th century. In an 1860 poem, Lawrence is "that spirit bad" who causes laborers to sleep on duty - somewhere between person and personification.
In Ruth Tongue's version, Lazy Lawrence has nothing to do with laziness, but is a spirit guardian with the power to paralyze people.
Tom Cockle (Westmorland)
Summary: A family sadly leaves behind their home and their loyal house spirit, Tom Cockle. When they arrive at their new house, they find the spirit there waiting for them.
Evidence: This is actually a well-known tale type. Tongue's version is unusual in that the house spirit is benevolent and the family is overjoyed to find that he's accompanied them. In most stories, the house spirit is an obnoxious plague.
Other versions:
Silly Kit and Down-a-down (Huntingdonshire)
Summary: Kit is a childlike young woman with a cognitive disability, mocked by others and barred from church because she cannot make a "criss-cross" (Sign of the Cross). A cruel witch sends her to "Down-a-down," the fairy dwelling under the hawthorn tree. The Elfin King sends Kit on to the Hellmouth, plotting to use her as payment for the fairies "seven years' due" to the Devil. Jesus Christ accompanies her, watching over her as she playfully makes a daisy chain, and the forces of Hell flee. Returning home with her daisy chain, Kit is welcomed by the local children and allowed into the church.
Evidence:
The story was told to Ruth's aunt, Mrs. John Tongue, "before 1914." Ruth calls it "a fascinating mediaeval mixture of folk beliefs and monastic parable." It's repeatedly stated that Kit "lost her wits in Down-a-down" (i.e. Fairyland), she says that her mother left her under a hawthorn tree, and there's an idea that she has "only... half a soul." This harkens to the medieval idea that disabilities or developmental delays were caused by fairy changelings. Her inability to "make a criss-cross," and being banned from the church as a result, is similar to the concept that otherworldly creatures fear Christian symbols. After her divine encounter, Kit does not change, but society's attitude does. People now recognize her as "God's Innocent," tying into a different medieval attitude, that the intellectually disabled are closer to God.
The fairy tithe to Hell is found in three old stories - Thomas the Rhymer, Tam Lin, and the witchcraft trials of Alison Pearson - and in numerous modern literary tales.
I am not aware of any other stories where the term "Down-a-down" is used for a fairy habitation.
The daisy was well known as a symbol of childhood innocence, or alternately of Christ. In Somerset Folklore, Tongue remarks in passing that "ordinary daisy chains are sometimes felt to be a protection for children" (p. 33); this belief does not appear outside Tongue's work. Daisies play a similar role in two other stories from Forgotten Folk Tales. One is "Crooker", where daisies are listed among other protective herbs. The other, "The Daisy Dog" (Cornwall), has one scene with parallels to "Silly Kit" - an intellectually disabled man plants "a criss-cross of God's daisies" on a grave to protect it.
In My Pocket (Lincolnshire)
Summary: A stupid giant and a clever dwarf are hungry. The dwarf and his brothers kill a sheep, and the giant kills two rams. However, the giant and the dwarf are caught on the scene by the wizard who owns the flock. The dwarf hides inside the giant's pocket, and both take turns answering "not me" when the wizard asks who killed each sheep. Because they're technically telling the truth, the wizard can't harm them. Instead he challenges them to a riddling contest. The dwarf answers the wizard's riddle, and then poses one 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)."
The dwarf and the giant part ways after the giant greedily eats all of the sheep. The giant soon gets into a similar predicament again but, without the dwarf's advice, is forced to become the wizard's servant. (In an addendum to the tale, the giant is forced to move hills from Yorkshire to Lincolnshire.)
Evidence:
Tongue states that a woman called 'Grandmother' Carr told the tale "in our farm kitchen at Blyton Carr in the 1870s." (Note that Tongue was born in 1898, so this was a range of 19-28 years before she was born.)
Tongue calls it a Norse tale but doesn't explain this categorization. She suggests that it existed only in oral tradition, and that Tolkien used a variant in The Hobbit. She appears to be trying to claim Bilbo's riddling contest (with the trick question "What is in my pocket?") as a traditional folktale.
Despite the title, the words "in my pocket" don't appear in Tongue's actual story. Instead it's "for my pocket." One can only assume she was intentionally trying to draw the reader's attention to the Tolkien connection.
Billy Biter and the Round Parkin
Summary: Billy Biter is a little tailor, married to the abusive drunkard Hepzibah. The local wise woman gives Billy some parkin - a kind of local gingerbread - to take home. There is a ferocious dragon living near his home which takes some of the parkin and develops a taste for it. Hepzibah (who is not just a terrible wife but a terrible cook) tries to make her own gingerbread and creates a huge, round blob of it. When she carries it outside, the dragon eats both Hepzibah and parkin. The sticky parkin glues his mouth shut, allowing the villagers to kill him. His bones form the peninsula of Filey Brigg.
Ruth had previously published this story in Folk Lore, vol. 78, 1967.
Evidence: This may be an obscure tale-type of its own where the dragon is incapacitated or killed by food.
In a possibly apocryphal section of the Biblical book of Daniel, the Babylonians worship a dragon. Daniel kills it by feeding it a lump of pitch, fat and hair, which causes the dragon to burst. (Zimmermann suggests that this is a mistranslation, and Daniel originally fed the dragon barley-cakes.)
In the late-12th-century Chronicle of Poland by Wincenty Kadlubek, the Wawel dragon is killed by being fed a calf skin full of sulfur. Similarly, in the Orcadian tale of "Assipattle and the Stoor Worm," Assipattle kills the monster by diving down its throat with a lump of burning peat. The dead dragon’s body forms Iceland, the Baltic Sea, and the islands of Orkney, Shetland and the Faroes. Jacqueline Simpson collected a tale in 1971 where a man killed a Knucker (dragon) with a poisoned pie. A related tale has the hero feed the Knucker a pudding of prodigious size, which leaves the it incapacitated by stomach pains and easily killed. In "Fifty British Dragon Tales: An Analysis" (Folklore 1978), Simpson mentioned some tales where a dragonslayer distracted the dragon with a bowl of milk before killing it.
Despite the abundance of similar tales, I haven't yet found any other sources for a Filey Brigg dragon story.
- Simpson, Jacqueline. "Sussex Local Legends." Folklore, Vol. 84, no. 3 (1973), pp. 206-223.
- Zimmermann, F. "Bel and the Dragon." Vetus Testamentum. Vol. 8, Fasc. 4 (Oct., 1958), pp. 438-440
Tom Tiddler's Ground (Westmorland/Somerset)
Summary: Out in a field, Tom Tiddler finds a lump of gold and lump of silver, but knowing they must be of the fairies, leaves them in a hole by the Fairy Thorn. He then finds a bag of pennies and keeps those to start a farm. When resources run low, he goes to the fairies to ask for some more help. However, "old Wizard Black" has stolen the fairies' money. Tom Tiddler fetches a huntsman and hounds who chase down the wizard in the shape of a fox, so the fairies have their vengeance and Tom's farm prospers.
Evidence: "Tom Tiddler's Ground" was a children's game where one player is the titular character. Other players run through his territory calling "I'm on Tom Tiddler's ground, picking up gold and silver." He chases them, and the last one to be caught is Tom Tiddler in the next round. Variants included Tom Tickler, Tom Tittler, Tom Tinder or Tom Tinker.
The phrase came to mean a place filled with riches, or simply a no-man's-land.
One suggestion is that Tidler comes from "the idler" or "t'idler" and the phrase means the ground of a sluggard (Dictionary of Phrase and Fable). Dr. Charles Mackay, in the Pall Mall Gazette, suggests that the name is actually from Celtic or Gaelic: tom for hill or mound, and tiodlach for gift, offering, or treasure. Thus, Tom-Tidler is "the hill of gifts or treasure."
- "Namby-Pamby: or, a Panegyric on the New Versification" (c. 1720) mentions many games and songs including "Sitting on the Friar's Ground, Picking Silver, Picking Gold." So the oldest versions of this game may not have involved a Tom Tiddler at all.
- Dickens, Charles. Dombey xxxvi, (1848) "Now, the spacious dining-room with the company seated round the glittering table...might have been taken for a grown-up exposition of Tom Tiddler's ground, where children pick up gold and silver."
- Dickens, Charles. Tom Tiddler's Ground (1861) "'And why Tom Tiddler's ground?' said the Traveller. 'Because he scatters halfpence to Tramps and such-like', returned the Landlord, 'and of course they pick 'em up'.
- Charlotte Marie Yonge, Stokesley Secret (1861) - "I'm on Tommy Tittler's ground, Picking up gold and silver." (Contains a description of the characters playing the game.)
- The Glenbervie Journals (1910). "Ireland was then the Tom Tiddler's ground of parliamentary fortune-hunters."
Shua O! Shua O! Shoo, shoo, shoo! Shua O! Shua O!
Shoo, shoo, shoo! all ye birds,
Out of my master's ground, into Tom Tiddler's ground,
Shoo! all ye birds. Hilly-ho!
This stems from a time when the role of scarecrow was filled by little boys who would make noise to drive birds away from the crops.
Her bird-scaring call bears a close resemblance to another, collected by Cecil Sharp in 1904. This is the "Bird Starver's Cry" from East Harptree, Somerset:
Hi shoo all 'er birds!
Out of master's ground into Tom Tucker's ground
Out of Tom Tucker's ground into Tom Tinker's ground
Out of Tom Tinker's ground into Luke Cole's ground
Out of Luke Cole's ground into Bill Veater's ground
Hi shoo all 'er birds! Kraaal! Hoop!
Tiddler is close enough to Tucker or Tinker, and as already stated, the game has also taken the name “Tom Tinker’s Ground.” The song could have easily been garbled to the form Tongue transcribed, without the existence of any deep traditional connection.
- Sharp, Cecil. Journal of the Folk-Song Society, Volume 2. 1905. p. 48-49.
The Vixen and the Oakmen (the Lake District, Cumberland)
Summary: A vixen travels through dangerous woods, avoiding the evil holly tree, to warn the oakmen that men are coming to cut the mistletoe from their Great Oak. Oakmen are kindly dwarves who serve as forest guardians.
Evidence: In folklore, oaks are a veritable hotspot of magical and fairy activity. Oakmen, however, are not to be found in any previous folklore collections.
Tongue mentions that J. R. R. Tolkien uses similar beliefs about trees in The Lord of the Rings, and Beatrix Potter describes oakmen in The Fairy Caravan (1952). Although Tongue suggests Potter took oakmen from folklore, research shows that Potter did no such thing. Oakmen were inspired by her niece's imaginary friends, which may have been inspired in turn by a children's book. Potter was blocked from writing more about oakmen because of copyright issues.
The book which inspired Potter's oakmen may have been by William Canton. Tongue was aware of Canton's work and included it in the bibliography of Forgotten Folk Tales, probably believing that both Canton and Potter were inspired by a single tradition. Leslie Linder's History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter, which would have clarified the issue, would not come out for another year.
There is one interesting similarity, in that Tongue's oakmen live inside "the great oak." The oakmen are also spotted around "the Great Oak" in The Fairy Caravan, but this references a specific tree in the Lake District where Beatrix Potter lived. The whole book is a love letter to the Lake District (see Linder, p. 302).
Verdict: Oakmen were probably created by William Canton.
- Blog post: The Oakmen of Beatrix Potter
Hyter Sprites (Essex)
Summary: Hyter John is an honest man who is kind to the hyter sprites. As a result, the mischievous fairy beings show him favor.
Evidence: Hyters, hight sprites, or hikey sprites existed in folklore before Tongue, and the tradition was recorded up until very recently. Their first known appearance in print was The Eastern Counties Collectanea by Walter Rye (1872): "Other spiritual visitants are the hyter sprites, a kind of fairy rather beneficent than otherwise."
In collected material, they ranged from invisible do-gooders to frightening bogeymen. Everyone had their own interpretation, but Ruth Tongue's is wholly unique. No one else mentioned green-eyed, sandy-colored fairies who turned into birds. On the other hand, sandy-colored hair and skin were attributes of the Suffolk "feriers" in Hollingsworth's History of Stowmarket (1844).
- Loveday, Ray. Hikey Sprites: The Twilight of a Norfolk Tradition. 2009.
- Rabuzzi, Daniel Allen. “In Pursuit of Norfolk's Hyter Sprites.” Folklore, vol. 95, no. 1, 1984, pp. 74–89.
The Asrai (Cheshire and Shropshire)
Summary: Tongue gives two near-identical versions. A fisherman captures an asrai, a beautiful moonlight-loving water fairy. He plans to take her home, but at the first gleam of sunlight, she melts into water.
Evidence: Just like the oakmen, the only preceding mentions of asrai are from fantasy fiction. Robert Williams Buchanan wrote two poems about the asrai, strange elemental beings who lived beneath a lake. He developed their characteristics and backstory between poems. They bear no resemblance to the malevolent water monsters recorded in Shropshire folklore, and indeed Buchanan doesn't mention Shropshire at all. It seems likely that the asrai are his own original creation.
I have seen it spelled as azrai, azurai or ashray. Pierre Dubois, in Encyclopedia des Fees, wrote of a class of beauteous water fairies called "The Dancers of the Mist" or Danseurs de brume. He included asrais or "scarille" as an English subtype. He's the only source for scarille. You can read more on Dubois here. He drastically reinterpreted folklore creatures and his books should be taken as fantasy fiction, not authoritative works.
There are many stories of fishermen catching mermaids. A Welsh fisherman named Pergrin (Peregrine) captured a mermaid, but unlike the story of the asrai, took pity on her and released her. In return, she warned him before a storm could wreck his boat. (Rhys 1901) In a story from Conway, a mermaid is stranded on shore and dies, laying a curse on the fishermen who wouldn't help her. (Folk-lore and folk-stories of Wales, pp.331-332) In other Welsh stories, a man takes a water fairy as a bride, but when he breaks a taboo she returns to her home beneath the water.
In Albania, elves (called the Happy Ones or the Brides of the Mountain) are female spirits, vaporous and white, about the size of twelve-year-old children. In this they resemble Tongue's description of asrai but live in the mountains, not underwater. (Harmsworth History of the World, Vol. IV)
As of June 2020, I have found one remarkably similar tale: the French legend of the Lady of Font-Chancela. She was a wondrously beautiful fairy who used to frolic on moonlit nights by the fountain of that name. A local lord, seeing her otherworldly beauty, snatched her up and tried to ride away with her on his horse. Instantly, she vanished from his arms, leaving him with a frozen feeling that prevented any further kidnappings for more than a year (Laisnel de la Salle, Croyances et Legendes du Centre de la France, 1875, p. 118)
Verdict: Asrai were probably created by Robert Williams Buchanan. However, the story that Ruth Tongue tells bears a strong resemblance to a French legend recorded in 1875.
- Blog post: Melting Mermaids
- Check out my article in Shima: "Melting in the Daylight: The Asrai’s emergence in modern myth." Shima, 17(2), 265–276. 10.21463/shima.198
The Sea-Morgan’s Baby (Somerset, Severn Estuary)
Summary: a fisherman and his wife find a baby sea-morgan under a waterfall, accidentally left behind by per people. They raise as their own, but she is marked by her love for water and her constantly wet hair. The villagers turn on her once they learn what she is, but she hears a voice calling her from the ocean and cheerfully returns there. A wave carries her away and she is never seen again.
Evidence: According to Tongue, sea-morgan was the Severn Estuary term for green-haired water maidens who lure people out to drown with their songs. She told the story of "The Sea Morgan and the Conger Eels" in Folktales of England. The only Severn mermaid story I'm aware of is of the water goddess Sabrina.
Morgan is an old word for a water spirit. In Brittany there was the mari-morgan and in Wales, the Morgen (sea-born). In an Irish myth, a woman named Lí Ban is transformed into a mermaid also known as a Muirghen (sea-birth) or Muirgheilt (sea-prodigy). In Cornish, you have the morvoren. Tongue's "sea-morgan" is a straight translation of the Breton "mari-morgan."
There are numerous stories of humans adopting merchildren. A Breton tale similar to Tongue's appears under the title "La Fille de la Mary Morgan." A childless lord discovered an infant girl abandoned in a basket. He and his wife adopted her as their own, but she was a Mary Morgan, and would frequently disappear from her cradle. As she grew to adulthood, she began disappearing more and more frequently and for longer periods, and one day never returned at all. A cave in the vicinity was said to be the home of the Mary Morgan.
Green hair is an attribute of mermaids in Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland.
- "Undine," by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque (1811)
- "The Pincoya's Daughter." Folk Tales from Chile by Brenda Hughes (1962). Adapted into the picture book Mariana and the Merchild: A Folk Tale from Chile by Caroline Pitcher (2000).
- The Lost Merbaby by Margaret and Mary Baker (1931). Original fiction, children's story.
- Revue des traditions populaires. Vol. 16 (1901) pg. 203. "La Fille de la Mary Morgan."
- Sébillot, Paul. Le Folk-lore de France. 1904. p. 121
The Grig’s Red Cap (Middlesex)
Summary: Grigs are laughing little fairies in red caps. A man finds a grig's cap and puts it on, but the grig is hiding inside and beats him.
Evidence: "Merry as a grig" is a phrase of uncertain origin, probably connected to the similar idiom "merry as a Greek." A grig might be an unusually small thing or even a cricket.
In Transactions of the Philological Society (1864), an editor tentatively suggested that a grig was a fairy, based on the word "griggling," meaning to take apples left over from the harvest. Leftover apples are meant for the fairies; to collect these apples is called "cull-pixying," "colepexying," "pixy-hoarding," or "griggling;" thus griggling must also be connected to fairies.
In Somerset Folklore (1965), Ruth Tongue used the same thought process. In addition, she remembered a story of a fairy named Bobby Griglans. "It seems a reasonable inference that the grig is [a] fairy of sorts,” she concluded - and sure enough, she found a relevant story in time to include it in Forgotten Folk Tales a few years later. Time travel may have been involved, since she claims to have heard the story in 1936.
Some notes about etymology: Griggling most likely derives from "griggle," a word for a small apple - just like "scrumps" are little apples and boys go scrumping. And Tongue ignores the fact that in the story of Bobby Griglans, the author explains that "griglans" is a word for heather, and Bobby Griglans got his name because he lives in the heather. (Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England)
Verdict: Judging by her own writing, Ruth Tongue created the grigs.
The Hare and the Harbourer (two versions. Herefordshire/Monmouthshire)
Summary:
Version 1: A harbourer, or man who looks after the deer, lives in the forest with his dogs, including a mysterious spaniel. Nearby lies the river of the evil water spirit Nicky Nicky Nye. A farmer asks the harbourer for help, as his cows are being drained of milk. The farmer and harbourer lie in wait that night with the spaniel, and at midnight a "monstrous hare" shows up to attack the cows. It's the local witch in disguise. The spaniel catches the witch-hare and throws it into the river, where Nicky Nicky Nye catches it.
Version 2: The harbourer goes in search of a wife, despite the advice of the old wise woman White Mary. He marries a maiden who is lovely but spoiled and arrogant. Through her foolishness, she disturbs the magical barriers set up to guard against Nicky Nicky Nye. Her husband cures her of her arrogance with numerous beatings, and when her new baby is threatened by Nicky Nicky Nye, she and the spaniel drive the evil water spirit away for good.
Evidence: This tale also appears under the title “The Watchers by the Well” in A dictionary of British folk-tales in the English Language (Briggs 1970). In Shakespeare’s Storybook, Patrick Ryan suggested that it was one of the tales that inspired “The Taming of the Shrew,” but the only thing they have in common is glorified spousal abuse. The Taming of the Shrew really is closely based on a folktale, but the existing versions bear no resemblance to The Hare and the Harborer and are not tales of magic or monsters. (See Shakespeare's Folktale Sources by Charlotte Artese.)
The familiar Tongue characters are here: the local wise woman, the vain and naughty girl who learns a lesson, and the loyal animal helper. And then there's Nicky Nicky Nye, who seems to be a male specimen of the species of Peg Powler, Jenny Greenteeth, and Nelly Longarms. In various languages, you'll find the neck, nixie, nixe (German), nikker (Dutch), nøkke (Danish), näck (Swedish) and näkki (Finnish), as well as the horselike nykur (Icelandic) and draconic knucker (English). The Denham Tracts (1891) includes “nickies," and "Old Nick" is a name for the Devil. In fact, in this same collection, Ruth includes "The Man who went Fishing on Sunday," where the Devil is referred to as Old Nick and, when caught in a fisherman's net, drags him down into the depths of the lake.
The Grey Mare is the Better Horse (Nottinghamshire)
Summary: A cheating lawyer is in the process of selling off a town’s resources after the local lord’s death. All seems lost, but "Robin Hood" (the lord's heir in disguise) has a plan. When the lawyer arrives to sell their horses, Robin Hood boasts that those horses aren’t that great - “the grey mare is the better horse.” He bets that no one can buy the town’s wonderful mares, and the greedy lawyer takes the bet. The mares he’s referring to, however, are the local women, now pulling a plough up a field by themselves. The lawyer cannot hold up his end of the bet and the townspeople drive him off. (Ruth explains that “mare” was a common country term for a woman.)
Evidence: According to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1894), the phrase means that a wife holds sway over her husband. There is a story of a man who was buying a horse; his wife preferred a certain gray mare and badgered him until he bought that one.
This idiom goes back at least to 1529 in Dialogue of Images: "Here were we fallen in a grete questyon of the law, whyther the gray mare be the better horse." Although one writer thought the saying referred literally to gray mares, it has always been associated with female dominance and nagging wives.
- "What! shall the graye mayre be the better horse, And the wanton styll at home?" (A treatyse shewing and declaring the Pryde and Abuse of Women Now a Dayes. c. 1550.)
- "She is, (quoth he), bent to force you perforce, To know that the grey mare is the better horse." (Dialogue of Proverbs, John Heywood (1546).)
- Hulme, Frederick Edward. Proverb Lore: Many Sayings, Wise Or Otherwise, on Many Subjects, Gleaned from Many Sources. 1902. p. 238.
Lazy Lawrence (Dorset)
Summary: Lazy Lawrence is a nimble, active fairy colt who guards the orchards. If he looks at you with his green eyes, you'll be paralyzed. A wizard sneaks into the orchard of an old woman who honors the fairies, but when he tries to steal her crops, Lazy Lawrence catches him and leaves him frozen in the orchard for an entire day.
Evidence: In Somerset Folklore, Ruth Tongue tied Lazy Lawrence to grigs, colt-pixies, and guardians of the orchard. Apparently she had found tales in Hampshire where he was a forest pony. She went on to publish this story.
In Dorset, the pexy, colepexy or colt pixy was a fairy which sometimes took the shape of a horse to lead people astray (Keightley, Fairy Mythology). At the same time, "colepexy" was a term for gathering the last fruit in the orchard, traditionally left for the fairies.
Lazy Lawrence was part of a proverbial saying. "Lawrence has hold of one" or "to have a touch of Lawrence" meant that someone was being idle. In the chapbook "The History of Lawrence Lazy" (1809, possibly in print in the 17th century), Lawrence is a slothful lad who receives a magic ring which he can use to put other people to sleep. It's unclear whether this originated the nickname of Lawrence for lazy people, or whether it's an example of an older tradition. "Lawrence" sayings became popular in the 19th century. In an 1860 poem, Lawrence is "that spirit bad" who causes laborers to sleep on duty - somewhere between person and personification.
In Ruth Tongue's version, Lazy Lawrence has nothing to do with laziness, but is a spirit guardian with the power to paralyze people.
- Smith, J. B. "Towards the Demystification of Lawrence Lazy." Folklore 107 (1996): 101-05.
- Tongue, Ruth. Somerset Folklore.
Tom Cockle (Westmorland)
Summary: A family sadly leaves behind their home and their loyal house spirit, Tom Cockle. When they arrive at their new house, they find the spirit there waiting for them.
Evidence: This is actually a well-known tale type. Tongue's version is unusual in that the house spirit is benevolent and the family is overjoyed to find that he's accompanied them. In most stories, the house spirit is an obnoxious plague.
Other versions:
- "The Boggart." Keightley, Thomas. The Fairy Mythology (1828), pp. 307-308. It seems this story was originally published by Thomas Crofton Croker.
- "Nissen flytter med." Thiele, J. M. Danmarks folkesagn. (1843). p. 263. Translated by Thomas Keightley as "The Nis Removing."
- "Der Bauer mit seinem Kobold." Grimm, Jacob. Deutsche Sagen, vol. 1 (1816), p. 93, no. 72. From a story printed in 1689.
- "The Boogies an' the Saut-box." Jackson, G. F. Shropshire Folk-lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings. 1883.
- "The Two Shepherds." Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands vol. II. 1890. p. 104. This is the most impressive example, as the "bouchan" follows someone all the way from Ireland to America. The bouchan is also more benevolent than the other examples.
Silly Kit and Down-a-down (Huntingdonshire)
Summary: Kit is a childlike young woman with a cognitive disability, mocked by others and barred from church because she cannot make a "criss-cross" (Sign of the Cross). A cruel witch sends her to "Down-a-down," the fairy dwelling under the hawthorn tree. The Elfin King sends Kit on to the Hellmouth, plotting to use her as payment for the fairies "seven years' due" to the Devil. Jesus Christ accompanies her, watching over her as she playfully makes a daisy chain, and the forces of Hell flee. Returning home with her daisy chain, Kit is welcomed by the local children and allowed into the church.
Evidence:
The story was told to Ruth's aunt, Mrs. John Tongue, "before 1914." Ruth calls it "a fascinating mediaeval mixture of folk beliefs and monastic parable." It's repeatedly stated that Kit "lost her wits in Down-a-down" (i.e. Fairyland), she says that her mother left her under a hawthorn tree, and there's an idea that she has "only... half a soul." This harkens to the medieval idea that disabilities or developmental delays were caused by fairy changelings. Her inability to "make a criss-cross," and being banned from the church as a result, is similar to the concept that otherworldly creatures fear Christian symbols. After her divine encounter, Kit does not change, but society's attitude does. People now recognize her as "God's Innocent," tying into a different medieval attitude, that the intellectually disabled are closer to God.
The fairy tithe to Hell is found in three old stories - Thomas the Rhymer, Tam Lin, and the witchcraft trials of Alison Pearson - and in numerous modern literary tales.
I am not aware of any other stories where the term "Down-a-down" is used for a fairy habitation.
The daisy was well known as a symbol of childhood innocence, or alternately of Christ. In Somerset Folklore, Tongue remarks in passing that "ordinary daisy chains are sometimes felt to be a protection for children" (p. 33); this belief does not appear outside Tongue's work. Daisies play a similar role in two other stories from Forgotten Folk Tales. One is "Crooker", where daisies are listed among other protective herbs. The other, "The Daisy Dog" (Cornwall), has one scene with parallels to "Silly Kit" - an intellectually disabled man plants "a criss-cross of God's daisies" on a grave to protect it.
In My Pocket (Lincolnshire)
Summary: A stupid giant and a clever dwarf are hungry. The dwarf and his brothers kill a sheep, and the giant kills two rams. However, the giant and the dwarf are caught on the scene by the wizard who owns the flock. The dwarf hides inside the giant's pocket, and both take turns answering "not me" when the wizard asks who killed each sheep. Because they're technically telling the truth, the wizard can't harm them. Instead he challenges them to a riddling contest. The dwarf answers the wizard's riddle, and then poses one 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)."
The dwarf and the giant part ways after the giant greedily eats all of the sheep. The giant soon gets into a similar predicament again but, without the dwarf's advice, is forced to become the wizard's servant. (In an addendum to the tale, the giant is forced to move hills from Yorkshire to Lincolnshire.)
Evidence:
Tongue states that a woman called 'Grandmother' Carr told the tale "in our farm kitchen at Blyton Carr in the 1870s." (Note that Tongue was born in 1898, so this was a range of 19-28 years before she was born.)
Tongue calls it a Norse tale but doesn't explain this categorization. She suggests that it existed only in oral tradition, and that Tolkien used a variant in The Hobbit. She appears to be trying to claim Bilbo's riddling contest (with the trick question "What is in my pocket?") as a traditional folktale.
Despite the title, the words "in my pocket" don't appear in Tongue's actual story. Instead it's "for my pocket." One can only assume she was intentionally trying to draw the reader's attention to the Tolkien connection.
Somerset Folklore (1965)
Tongue cites many older studies and collections in Somerset Folklore. Two in particular, pointed out by Jeremy Harte, are Tales of the Blackdown Borderland by F. W. Mathews (1923) and “Local Traditions of the Quantocks” by C. W. Whistler in Folklore vol. 19 no. 1. (1908). The first is a short book, the second a magazine article. In both cases, many of their stories reappear in Somerset Folklore. Tongue’s versions are beat-for-beat retellings of their predecessors, from the order of events down to geographical details. In most cases, she gives vague citations and leaves the reader with the implication that she heard the story herself.
Judas Was a Red-headed Man (song)
Summary: A spring carol about the custom of making twelve bonfires of hedge cuttings, representing Christ and the apostles. A thirteenth fire is made of weeds for Judas.
Evidence: Red hair has been associated with evil going far back into history. It was connected to the god Set in Egyptian mythology. In Shakespeare's As You Like It, Judas is red-headed.
The Danish Camp
Summary: Dowsborough in the Quantock Hills was once the site of a Roman camp, later taken over by the redheaded Danish invaders. They kidnapped women and dragged them off to the fort, but one night as they feasted and reveled, the women rose up and slew them all. One Danish boy was saved by one of the women, and you can still sometimes hear his lonely song coming from the hills.
Evidence: This story appeared in Whistler's article; he mentions the Danish invaders multiple times and describes an ancient hill fort where "a force of Danes was exterminated with the exception of one boy." Several pages later, he adds that some of the Danes married local women who eventually massacred them. I'm not clear on whether these two incidents are meant to be the same.
Ruth mentions that the surviving Danish lad appears in the poetry of William Wordsworth. She is probably referring to the fragment known as "The Danish Boy." It's certainly possible that Wordsworth was inspired by such a legend, but in his notes, he referred to the poem as "entirely a fancy." It was intended as the prologue to a ballad about a Danish prince who fled from battle and hid at a certain house, only for the greedy homeowner to murder him for his belongings. The young prince's ghost haunted the house, which lay forever under a curse.
The Gurt Wurm of Shervage Wood
Summary: A woodcutter sits down on a log to eat. When the log moves, he chops it in half, not realizing that it's actually a dragon.
Evidence: This tale appeared in Whistler, p. 35. Ruth said she'd gotten the story in 1911 from harvesters and a maidservant in Cothelstone and Ivyton. No names given.
The Broken Ped
Summary: A man finds a tiny broken ped, or shovel. Thinking it's a child's toy, he mends it and leaves it for its owner. It actually belongs to a fairy, and the man later finds the ped gone with a freshly baked cake lying in its place.
Evidence: A very widespread tale. Another version appears in Whistler, p. 49, and not only is the structure identical, but both stories take place on Wick Moor, in the Quantocks, near a hill called Pixies’ Mound (Whistler) or Pixy Mound (Tongue). This hill is evidently still around.
The only difference between stories is that in Whistler's version, the broken tool is a peel, and in Tongue's, it's a ped. Peel is a well-known term for a shovel-like baking tool, which explains why the grateful fairy’s gift is a cake. J. B. Smith suggests that “ped” was a misreading of “peel” - i.e., Tongue wrote the e and the l close together, and when working through her notes later, misread the word as ‘ped.'
As far as citations, Tongue's only note is "Stogursey, Quantock Coast."
The Fairy Market
Summary: A farmer sees the fairies to market and buys a pewter mug from them. As change they give him some dead leaves, which he courteously accepts. In the morning, he finds to his delight that the leaves have turned to gold and the mug to silver.
Evidence: Katharine Briggs cited this story from Ruth for her article "The Fairy Economy." It later appeared in Somerset Folklore. Another version of the story appeared in Mathews' Tales of the Blackdown Borderlands. Both stories follow the same structure, are from the Blackdown Hills and mention Taunton Market. Tongue's version is sugary sweet, but Mathews' version is funnier - while the "change" still turns to gold, the purchased pewter-pot turns out to be a mushroom.
Ruth Tongue cited several friends, as well as some haymakers in Bishop's Hull in 1910. She gives no names.
Blue Burches
Summary: A farmer visiting a shoemaker hears footsteps on the stairs, and then sees “a wisp of blue smoke" - the ghost known as Blue Burches. The shoemaker calms his frightened visitor and recounts the ghost's other escapades. For instance, he keeps the family’s sickly child awake with noise, but flees when the shoemaker throws a stick at him. Blue Burches sometimes appears in the form of a pig and often makes mischief. However, he is finally exorcised and driven into a pond in the form of a horse. He is gradually working his way back to the house, one cock-stride per year.
Evidence: A perfect retelling of "Blue Burchies" in Tales of the Blackdown Borderlands. Tongue gives it more of a formal plot and improves it with more direct and colorful dialogue, but everything is the same down to minor details.
Tongue said she had collected the tale from harvesters at Trull in 1907 and schoolfellows in 1909.
The Croydon Devil Claims His Own
Summary: A bully pretends to be the Devil for a prank, but comes to grief.
Evidence: J. B. Smith examines the central motif of this story. In many variants the prankster just gets a fright of their own, but Smith mentions a bloodier version which begins in the village of Rodhuish near Croyden Hill. Four ploughboys happen to meet at Roadwater Forge. One of them has brought a coulter to be sharpened. He’s superstitious, so the others begin to tease him, telling him that the Devil lurks in the nearby woods. One of the teasing boys sees the opportunity for a prank. He rides quickly home and grabs a bullock’s hide in which to wrap himself. The boy with the coulter, walking home, finds the disguised prankster sitting on a gate and blocking the way. He asks, “Be ‘e the Devil or ba-an’t he?” The “devil” only groans and shrieks, so the boy whacks him over the head with the coulter, killing him instantly. He then faces manslaughter charges. The author refers to the devil-slayer as “my old friend” and explains that eighty years later, at age ninety-eight, he still thought he had “killed the Devil.” The story, published in 1925, would presumably take place in the 1840s.
There are equivalent stories located in different places, with the false devil wearing different disguises and injured by different tools. Ruth Tongue's version, however, is almost identical. Shared elements include:
Judas Was a Red-headed Man (song)
Summary: A spring carol about the custom of making twelve bonfires of hedge cuttings, representing Christ and the apostles. A thirteenth fire is made of weeds for Judas.
Evidence: Red hair has been associated with evil going far back into history. It was connected to the god Set in Egyptian mythology. In Shakespeare's As You Like It, Judas is red-headed.
The Danish Camp
Summary: Dowsborough in the Quantock Hills was once the site of a Roman camp, later taken over by the redheaded Danish invaders. They kidnapped women and dragged them off to the fort, but one night as they feasted and reveled, the women rose up and slew them all. One Danish boy was saved by one of the women, and you can still sometimes hear his lonely song coming from the hills.
Evidence: This story appeared in Whistler's article; he mentions the Danish invaders multiple times and describes an ancient hill fort where "a force of Danes was exterminated with the exception of one boy." Several pages later, he adds that some of the Danes married local women who eventually massacred them. I'm not clear on whether these two incidents are meant to be the same.
Ruth mentions that the surviving Danish lad appears in the poetry of William Wordsworth. She is probably referring to the fragment known as "The Danish Boy." It's certainly possible that Wordsworth was inspired by such a legend, but in his notes, he referred to the poem as "entirely a fancy." It was intended as the prologue to a ballad about a Danish prince who fled from battle and hid at a certain house, only for the greedy homeowner to murder him for his belongings. The young prince's ghost haunted the house, which lay forever under a curse.
- "The Danish Boy," with notes.
- The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), 12
- Whistler, C. W. "Local Traditions of the Quantocks." Folklore, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Mar. 30, 1908), pp. 31-51
The Gurt Wurm of Shervage Wood
Summary: A woodcutter sits down on a log to eat. When the log moves, he chops it in half, not realizing that it's actually a dragon.
Evidence: This tale appeared in Whistler, p. 35. Ruth said she'd gotten the story in 1911 from harvesters and a maidservant in Cothelstone and Ivyton. No names given.
The Broken Ped
Summary: A man finds a tiny broken ped, or shovel. Thinking it's a child's toy, he mends it and leaves it for its owner. It actually belongs to a fairy, and the man later finds the ped gone with a freshly baked cake lying in its place.
Evidence: A very widespread tale. Another version appears in Whistler, p. 49, and not only is the structure identical, but both stories take place on Wick Moor, in the Quantocks, near a hill called Pixies’ Mound (Whistler) or Pixy Mound (Tongue). This hill is evidently still around.
The only difference between stories is that in Whistler's version, the broken tool is a peel, and in Tongue's, it's a ped. Peel is a well-known term for a shovel-like baking tool, which explains why the grateful fairy’s gift is a cake. J. B. Smith suggests that “ped” was a misreading of “peel” - i.e., Tongue wrote the e and the l close together, and when working through her notes later, misread the word as ‘ped.'
As far as citations, Tongue's only note is "Stogursey, Quantock Coast."
- Menefee, S. P. "A Cake in the Furrow." Folklore vol. 91, no. 2 (1980), pp. 173-192.
- Smith, J. B. “Notes on Dialect, Folklore and Creativity.” Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries. (2002) Vol. 35, pp. 98-103
The Fairy Market
Summary: A farmer sees the fairies to market and buys a pewter mug from them. As change they give him some dead leaves, which he courteously accepts. In the morning, he finds to his delight that the leaves have turned to gold and the mug to silver.
Evidence: Katharine Briggs cited this story from Ruth for her article "The Fairy Economy." It later appeared in Somerset Folklore. Another version of the story appeared in Mathews' Tales of the Blackdown Borderlands. Both stories follow the same structure, are from the Blackdown Hills and mention Taunton Market. Tongue's version is sugary sweet, but Mathews' version is funnier - while the "change" still turns to gold, the purchased pewter-pot turns out to be a mushroom.
Ruth Tongue cited several friends, as well as some haymakers in Bishop's Hull in 1910. She gives no names.
- Briggs, K. (1959). "The Fairy Economy. As It May Be Deduced from a Group of Folk Tales." Folklore, 70(4), 533-542.
Blue Burches
Summary: A farmer visiting a shoemaker hears footsteps on the stairs, and then sees “a wisp of blue smoke" - the ghost known as Blue Burches. The shoemaker calms his frightened visitor and recounts the ghost's other escapades. For instance, he keeps the family’s sickly child awake with noise, but flees when the shoemaker throws a stick at him. Blue Burches sometimes appears in the form of a pig and often makes mischief. However, he is finally exorcised and driven into a pond in the form of a horse. He is gradually working his way back to the house, one cock-stride per year.
Evidence: A perfect retelling of "Blue Burchies" in Tales of the Blackdown Borderlands. Tongue gives it more of a formal plot and improves it with more direct and colorful dialogue, but everything is the same down to minor details.
Tongue said she had collected the tale from harvesters at Trull in 1907 and schoolfellows in 1909.
The Croydon Devil Claims His Own
Summary: A bully pretends to be the Devil for a prank, but comes to grief.
Evidence: J. B. Smith examines the central motif of this story. In many variants the prankster just gets a fright of their own, but Smith mentions a bloodier version which begins in the village of Rodhuish near Croyden Hill. Four ploughboys happen to meet at Roadwater Forge. One of them has brought a coulter to be sharpened. He’s superstitious, so the others begin to tease him, telling him that the Devil lurks in the nearby woods. One of the teasing boys sees the opportunity for a prank. He rides quickly home and grabs a bullock’s hide in which to wrap himself. The boy with the coulter, walking home, finds the disguised prankster sitting on a gate and blocking the way. He asks, “Be ‘e the Devil or ba-an’t he?” The “devil” only groans and shrieks, so the boy whacks him over the head with the coulter, killing him instantly. He then faces manslaughter charges. The author refers to the devil-slayer as “my old friend” and explains that eighty years later, at age ninety-eight, he still thought he had “killed the Devil.” The story, published in 1925, would presumably take place in the 1840s.
There are equivalent stories located in different places, with the false devil wearing different disguises and injured by different tools. Ruth Tongue's version, however, is almost identical. Shared elements include:
- Boys meeting at a forge in Rodhuish.
- The Devil of Croydon Hill.
- The bullock's hide as disguise.
- The false devil sitting on a gate.
- The question "be he the Devil or no."
- The coulter (plowing implement) brought to be mended, turned into an impromptu weapon.
- The conclusion: this is a true story that took place "over a hundred years ago" (Tongue wrote this in 1965). She says, “I have met people who knew the old man ‘who had killed the Devil’ when he was a boy.”
- Smith, John B. "The Devil of Croyden Hill: Kinship, Fiction, Fact, Tradition." Folklore, vol 116, no. 1 (2005). pp. 66-74.
The Chime Child (1968)
This was a semi-autobiographical book containing songs collected from various folk singers.
Douglas Kennedy and Margaret Dean Smith (both influential scholars of folk dance and song) wrote reviews of The Chime Child.
Kennedy picks out the "evasive" and "cryptic" sources and asks, "In re-creating these songs for our pleasure, I wonder does she know where the old country singers leave off and where she herself begins?" He also points out the shifty dates. Ruth heard the song "Babel Tower" in 1901, when she was three years old, and the elderly singer died soon after, but Ruth places the song’s composition in 1828. "How does she know that?" Kennedy asks after some basic math.
This prompted the letter in which Ruth blamed the house fire for her vague sources. She also said that the date of the song's composition was common local knowledge, although she did not explain why she didn't include that information in the book to begin with.
Margaret Dean Smith’s review is positive, if a little cautious about definitions. According to Smith, there are traditional "folk songs" passed down through history, steeped in tradition. Then there are Ruth Tongue's folk songs, which are songs written by the (modern) folk of England. Not the same thing.
She also points out the modern language style and the influence of Non-conformist hymns.
Douglas Kennedy and Margaret Dean Smith (both influential scholars of folk dance and song) wrote reviews of The Chime Child.
Kennedy picks out the "evasive" and "cryptic" sources and asks, "In re-creating these songs for our pleasure, I wonder does she know where the old country singers leave off and where she herself begins?" He also points out the shifty dates. Ruth heard the song "Babel Tower" in 1901, when she was three years old, and the elderly singer died soon after, but Ruth places the song’s composition in 1828. "How does she know that?" Kennedy asks after some basic math.
This prompted the letter in which Ruth blamed the house fire for her vague sources. She also said that the date of the song's composition was common local knowledge, although she did not explain why she didn't include that information in the book to begin with.
Margaret Dean Smith’s review is positive, if a little cautious about definitions. According to Smith, there are traditional "folk songs" passed down through history, steeped in tradition. Then there are Ruth Tongue's folk songs, which are songs written by the (modern) folk of England. Not the same thing.
She also points out the modern language style and the influence of Non-conformist hymns.
- Dean-Smith, Margaret, 1968, "The chime Child, or Somerset Singers (Review)," Folk Music Journal 1, 274-275.
- Kennedy, Douglas. "The chime Child, or Somerset Singers (Review).” Folklore, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Summer, 1968), pp. 149-150
- Tongue, Ruth. “The Chime Child.” Folklore, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Winter, 1968), pp. 308-309
Folktales of England (written with K. M. Briggs)
The Apple-Tree Man
Summary: The Apple-Tree Man inhabits the oldest tree in an orchard. In this story, a poor man honors tradition on Christmas Eve by pouring cider around the roots of his orchard trees. In exchange, the Apple-Tree Man tells him where to find buried treasure.
Evidence: Apple wassailing is a long-held tradition. The tradition took place around Christmas Eve and involved singing and sprinkling cider over the roots of an apple tree (Notes and Queries). Ruth Tongue is the first person ever to mention the Apple-Tree Man. It sounds a little like the Oakmen, really, and shows the same tendency to personify trees and other objects.
Tibb's Cat and the Apple-Tree-Man
Contains the “tradition” of the Apple-Tree Man along with a discussion of St. Tibb’s Eve, a synonym for “never.” Tib’s Eve, also known as Tip’s Eve and other variations, was a well-known British saying.
Summary: The Apple-Tree Man inhabits the oldest tree in an orchard. In this story, a poor man honors tradition on Christmas Eve by pouring cider around the roots of his orchard trees. In exchange, the Apple-Tree Man tells him where to find buried treasure.
Evidence: Apple wassailing is a long-held tradition. The tradition took place around Christmas Eve and involved singing and sprinkling cider over the roots of an apple tree (Notes and Queries). Ruth Tongue is the first person ever to mention the Apple-Tree Man. It sounds a little like the Oakmen, really, and shows the same tendency to personify trees and other objects.
Tibb's Cat and the Apple-Tree-Man
Contains the “tradition” of the Apple-Tree Man along with a discussion of St. Tibb’s Eve, a synonym for “never.” Tib’s Eve, also known as Tip’s Eve and other variations, was a well-known British saying.
Sources
- Brown, Theo. “Ruth Lyndon Tongue (1898-1981).” Folklore 94, no. 1 (1983): 118–19.
- Davies, Sarah Joanne. “An Investigation into Attitudes towards Illegitimate Birth as Evidenced in the Folklore of South West England.” Thesis, Exeter School of Arts & Design Faculty of Arts & Education October 1999.
- Harte, Jeremy. “Ruth Tongue the Story-Teller.” 3rd Stone, 2001.
- Robert and Jacqueline Patten, ‘Ruth Tongue’, in Women and Tradition, ed. Hilda R. E. Davidson and Carmen Blacker 2001: 205–16.
- Simpson, Jacqueline, and Stephen Roud. A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford University Press, 2000.
