Lost & Found Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Nightdancing

  The Ingenious Edgar Jones

  For my parents

  Who set me out on the long roads with their blessing.

  &

  For Pascale

  Who came along for company.

  With special thanks to Linda Davis, a patron of this book.

  Three apples fell from Heaven

  One for the listeners

  One for the storyteller

  And one for those who told the tales before us

  CONTENTS

  By the Same Author

  Dedication

  Special Thanks

  Foreword by Hugh Lupton

  The King of the Birds

  The Riddles of the Crossroads

  The Twisted Oak

  The Wits of the Whetstone

  Little Stupid

  Little Dog Turpie

  The Roots of Fortune

  Johnnie-He-Not

  The Black Bull’s Bride

  Stealing the Moon

  The Troll King’s Sister

  Ashypelt

  Just Jimmy

  Little Sparrow

  The Coal Companion

  Notes on the Tales

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author and Illustrator

  Supporters

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  Joseph Campbell, in his commentary on Grimm's Fairy Tales, has written: ‘If ever there was an art on which the whole community of mankind has worked – seasoned with the philosophy of the codger on the wharf and singing with the music of the spheres – it is this of the timeless tale. The folk tale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.’*1

  Here is a new book of old stories. Elizabeth Garner has drawn from the great European and Russian wonder-tale collections, and the folk tales of the British Isles, and made an intertwined gathering of folk narratives. Like all of us who work with this material she’s allowed herself to be a medium, a conduit for the lost voices of all those who have carried the stories before her. It’s no small responsibility.

  Traditional stories have long histories. They’ve been fashioned over countless generations, each teller leaving a trace of himself or herself – a turn of phrase, an aside, an episode – embedded in the tale. For most of their long lives they have been told, held in the memory and turned on the tongue. They have been precipitated in oral cultures where the written word – if known at all – has been the province of the few. The countless tellers who shaped and carried the tales have largely been forgotten. They’ve slipped into the hallowed ranks of ‘anon’.

  What we’re left with are the names of the collectors: the folklorists, academics and poets who have set the stories – just as they were disappearing from common usage – onto the page. We talk of the Brothers Grimm, but we forget the tailor’s wife Frau Viehmann who ‘told her stories thoughtfully, accurately and with wonderful vividness’. We talk of Italo Calvino, but we forget the illiterate Sicilian grandmother Agaruzza Messia: ‘the more she talked the more you wanted to listen’. We talk of Katharine Briggs but forget the gypsy Eva Grey who ‘sweeps you along without pause from beginning to end, words pouring from her lips in a torrent, her hands, her eyes, her face, her whole body reinforcing their meaning and significance’. The permanence and respectability of the printed page has trumped the ephemeral moment of the word on the breath.

  An oral culture only carries what it needs. With no libraries or digital storehouses, it depends on the capacity of human memory. What can’t be held in the head and hand is cast aside. Survival skills and local knowledge are passed from parent to child, from craftsman to apprentice. And miraculously, alongside the practical stuff, the stories and ballads have been too precious to be discarded. The folk tale – that mysterious, funny, frightening metaphorical picture-narrative of magic and transformation – has been remembered. It has come down through the generations. It has been needed.

  I’ll leave the academics – psychologists, historians, literary critics and folklorists – to argue why this might be so. To anyone who’s heard one of the old tales told with skill, from the heart, the answer is simple: it touches us, it moves us. These ancient concentrations of human experience, distilled and matured over hundreds of years, have the power to awaken something essential. What is it – a half-remembered question, a veiled feeling, a loss, a longing, a deeper justice, an animate understanding, a precarious truth? Tolkien has called it a ‘consolation’. He cites, in particular, a story that appears in this collection as ‘The Black Bull’s Bride’:

  when the sudden ‘turn’ comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy… that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.

  Seven long years I served for thee,

  The glassy hill I clamb for thee

  The bluidy shirt I wrang for thee,

  And wilt thou not wauken and turn to me?

  And he heard, and he turned to her.*2

  Let’s look at another of the stories Elizabeth Garner has included in this collection. She calls it ‘Little Stupid’. It is one member of a family of tales and songs that appear and re-appear from Northern Europe to India. In the Aarne Thomson Folktale Index it’s listed as no. 780, ‘The Singing Bone’. It tells of a murder and the disposal of the corpse, it tells of a musical instrument that is made from the body parts (or a plant that grows from the grave mound) – sometimes it’s a flute, sometimes a fiddle, a harp or a set of bagpipes – and it tells of the terrible denouement when the voice of the victim sings its truth through the instrument’s music. The victim is usually the third son or the little sister, killed by jealous siblings. The image of a flute singing with a dead girl’s voice is arcane, it resonates with our inner storehouse of mythic dream-images (what Jung called the Collective Unconscious). But at the same time it chimes with a very contemporary fascination with forensic investigation. The DNA test that solves an old murder sets old bones singing. The faces of the older sisters or brothers when the truth is sung are the faces of those guards from Belsen or Auschwitz, suddenly exposed after holding their dark secrets for decades.

  An oral story only speaks to ‘now’, to the moment of telling. Its setting may be the secondary world of ‘once upon a time’, but its core concerns have always had to be contemporary. If it had been whimsy or nostalgia it would have been forgotten. The fact of its survival attests to its always having been, in some way, relevant. However much the external conditions of the world rearrange themselves, the human heart remains a constant. And this is what the folk tales address – love, death, betrayal, constancy, trickery, luck, jealousy, courage, transformation.

  All the tales in this collection have spent the greater part of their lives in the memories and on the tongues of storytellers. Elizabeth Garner grew up in a household that is steeped in story. The first time I met her (in the 1980s) was on a visit to her parents’ house in Cheshire. She must have been about eleven. She had a transparent apple and a silver saucer. She showed me how to spin the apple on the saucer. That was then. Now she’s a novelist, editor and teacher. In this book she has returned (like John Chapman in ‘The Roots of Fortune’) to the warp and weft of the old tales. In the tradition of Hans Andersen, James Stephens, Angela Carter and Neil Gaiman she’s taken the spindle and shuttle from the dead hands of the old forgotten tellers and woven – with the written word – a fresh cloth from their stories. Like all of us who work with this material she’s negotiating that fine line between the ancestors who stand behind and the eyes and ears of those who are meeting these gnarled and sappy stories for the very first time. It’s the job of each generation to make the old tales speak afresh, and i
n this collection she’s fashioned a vibrant web. Prepare to encounter beast-husbands, troll-wives, stout hearts, cannibalistic witches, the birds of the air, cruel sisters, shape-shifters, sun and moon, all the denizens of the Secret Commonwealth, the Devil, Death himself and (outwitting them all) the redoubtable Jack. The stories are illustrated and counter-pointed by Phoebe Connolly’s exquisite wood engravings.

  So take courage, traveller, the boat is trim and seaworthy, the new-sewn sail is taking the ancient wind, the tide is on the turn… but be careful, with a crew like this anything could happen. Bon voyage.

  Hugh Lupton

  * * *

  *1 Joseph Campbell – from ‘Folkloristic Commentary’, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

  *2 J R R Tolkien, from ‘On Fairy Tales’, Tree and Leaf, Allen & Unwin, 1974.

  THE KING OF THE BIRDS

  One morning all the birds of water, land and air came together in a forest clearing to decide which amongst them should be crowned The King of the Birds. Great Eagle stepped forward, wrapping his golden cloak of feathers around his chest.

  ‘Before we elect our sovereign leader,’ he said, ‘we must first consider what makes a bird a bird.’

  ‘I know! I know!’ squawked Proud Peacock, nodding his head as if his crown of bright blue plumage was proof that his station was already decided. ‘It is the fineness of our feathers.’

  His small grey wife hid her head beneath her wing as he fanned out his tail of a thousand eyes and shrieked.

  No sooner had Peacock said his piece than Prattling Parrot flew up to the lowest branch of a nearby oak tree, his emerald-green feathercoat outshining the new Spring leaves.

  ‘Vanity!’ he cried, in a voice stolen from the Bishop of the Lands. ‘Vanity of Vanities! The true measure of a worthy soul is the humility of character allied with an agility of the mind.’

  The harsh, honking laughter of Gobbling Goose rang through the air as Peacock folded his tail behind him and slunk into the shadows.

  Parrot gave a bow and puffed out his fine-feathered chest. ‘Surely, my flock, you deserve a King who can match the quickness of his wits to the wonder of his wings.’

  No sooner had Parrot said his piece than Bold Kingfisher swept down to the river, flitting and flickering, with his sky-blue back, his belly the colour of sunset and the grey glinting needle of his long beak plunging down into the water. He came up carrying a silver slip of a minnow and flew back to the clearing, placing the flailing fish on the ground before the crowd.

  ‘My dear companions,’ he said, ‘am I not already half-King within our company? Whereas poor Parrot has a title which holds no more value than an echo. He has won mankind’s favour with his mimicry and his coloured coat, but what has he gained? To be kept as a pretty pet, forever grateful for the meagre morsels cast upon the floor of his crafted cage?’

  On the branch above, Parrot shuffled back into the canopy as if he could conceal his shame within the embrace of the leaves.

  ‘Surely,’ said Kingfisher, flicking his beak with a swordsman’s flourish, ‘what makes a bird a bird is the skill of the hunt.’

  No sooner had Kingfisher said his piece than the air above trembled, and there, landing in the clearing in swift and soundless flight, was Wise Owl, folding his broad brown wings to his back. He turned his head this way and that, staring the chattering crowd into silence. There was a trembling mouse trapped beneath the curved crescent of his claw.

  ‘There is the hunter who dazzles with his flame-feathers,’ said Owl, ‘and there is he who uses the skills of stealth and swift execution. Tell me, is it the showman or the able assassin who makes the strongest leader?’

  Owl took the mouse up in the sickle hook of his beak and swallowed it down in one gulp.

  Kingfisher retreated to the riverbank, as quick as a flash of light. Chaffinch, Pipit and Goldcrest scuttled to the back of the crowd and hid behind the wide wings of Swan.

  No sooner had the tip of the mouse’s tail slipped down Owl’s gullet than Cunning Crow strutted forward and cocked his head.

  ‘No better champion of the forest floor, my friend,’ he said. ‘But the true hunter is he who ventures far beyond the limits of his own lands to seek his fortune.’

  Crow flew up to the wind-whipped top of the oak where he had his nest. From there he tipped out treasures. A blue ribbon, a silver coin and a golden ring all came raining down upon Owl’s head. Crow cackled from his perch.

  ‘He who steals from mankind is surely the quickest and cleverest of all the birds and should be crowned accordingly.’

  No sooner had Owl shaken aside his humiliation and soared up into the sky and away, than Savage Sparrowhawk came plummeting down the wind like an arrow, his tailfeathers folded like fletching, and he grabbed Crow’s nest from the treetop in passing. As he landed in the clearing, he crushed that bowl of twig and moss to dust beneath his talons. Chaffinch, Pipit and Goldcrest crept further inside Swan’s embrace. As Crow dragged his shattered home away, Sparrowhawk fixed the crowd with his yellow eye.

  ‘A True King is he who has a voice made for battle,’ he said, ‘who can call his clan to him over land and sea to fight at his side.’

  He opened his beak and gave out a piercing cry that echoed across the forest and back again.

  No sooner had Sparrowhawk spoken than Nightingale flew high above his head and began to sing. It was a song of joy and longing, laughter and tears, and it was as if the whole forest held its breath to hear it. But only for a moment. Before Nightingale could state his case, the other songbirds flocked to join him – if it was the sweetness of the tune that would gain the crown then they were not going to concede Kingship uncontested.

  Warbler, Songthrush, Blackbird and Woodlark jostled Nightingale aside, all pushing against one another for the most superior perch. The air was full of calls and whistles but as one competed with another there was no beauty to it, only conflicting cacophony.

  Then Great Eagle opened his beak and called out, ‘Enough!’

  The force of his cry threw the songbirds from their branch; they dusted themselves down and flitted away from the clearing as Great Eagle stepped forward once more.

  ‘My dear kinsfolk,’ he said, nodding his head this way and that, as if he were bestowing a blessing, ‘are you truly so ignorant of your own natures? I who have travelled far and wide across the lands can tell you true, none of the qualities over which you quibble and quarrel are what makes a bird a bird.

  ‘In the Kingdom of all that creeps and crawls, the insects of the forests and the scale-skinned creatures of crevice and crag, there is more pure shining colour etched upon their bodies than can ever be found upon our feathers.

  ‘In the wide-sweeping deserts and the cruel lonely mountains there are beasts of the land more practised in cunning and wilder at the hunt than we could ever claim to be.

  ‘And in the depths of the tumbling oceans, there live the Grey Ancient Ones, who have more beauty and sorrow in their songs than anything we could ever sing out to the sky.

  ‘There is only one thing, my friends, that makes a bird a bird and we carry it upon our backs.’

  With that, he drew himself up to his full height and shook out his wings. The span of them dwarfed the trunk of the oak and they shone as brightly as the sun.

  ‘So let it be decreed,’ said Great Eagle, ‘that he who can fly the highest shall be crowned The King of the Birds and let there be no further argument about it.’

  The air was alive with the sound of wings upon the wind as all the birds of the world rose up in a great flock.

  Laughing Lark flew straight and true, the morning dew on her breast falling away as she circled the boundaries of the clouds and sang.

  ‘Here I be! None better than me!’

  But she soon spun herself dizzy and fell back down to earth.

  Ragged Rook flew far, far, and further than far, until the forest below shrunk to a small speck of green that he could swipe aside with his cla
w. Beyond it stretched the reaches of the world – the deserts, the oceans, the rocky ranges of the mountains, the many Kingdoms and their castles.

  He cried out in mockery of his fellows flying below.

  ‘Caw, caw, caw, I can see it all!’

  But as he did so, he boasted all the breath from his body and fell back down to earth.

  One by one, all the birds tired and abandoned flight in favour of the sanctuary of solid ground.

  All except for Great Eagle, who had of course commanded a contest that favoured his own particular strength. He beat those huge golden wings, slow and steady, and climbed forever upwards, carried by the tides of the air until he reached the tallest of all the mountains. He held his wings as steady as a sail as he circled it three times, calling out.

  ‘I am The King of the Birds! I am! I am!’

  Then he felt something stirring in his tailfeathers.

  And there, flitting through the sky behind him, came Little Jenny Wren. She had hidden upon Great Eagle’s back for the long journey and her strength was unspent. She was quick and spry, and Great Eagle could not catch her as she flew up to the mountain top, the highest point of the known world. There she perched in victory and sang.

  ‘Here I sit! Highest it! Highest it!’

  And so it was that Wren was declared The King of the Birds.

  Great Eagle could not bear the shame of being tricked by such a small plain bird and he was quick to anger. He drew back a golden wing and struck a savage blow against Little Jenny Wren. She tumbled from her stone-throne perch, went plummeting down the whole height of the sky, tumbling to the forest floor, her wings clipped.

  Since that day, Wren has never been able to fly higher than a hawthorn bush, whilst Great Eagle can be seen soaring up to the curved dome of the sky, chasing clouds for his sport.