The chap-books, indeed, were no more than the dead leaves of romance; it took the vivid play of a child’s fancy to revive them; but whatever the ballad-maker touched,—fairy tale or legend or history,—he made a new thing of it: a story to sing or tell, but short enough to be sung or told many times over.
CHAPTER II
FAIRY TALES AND EASTERN STORIES
Unwritten fairy tales—“Child Rowland”—Traditional matter and printed books—The History of Thomas Hickathrift—Giants and Dwarfs—Logic and Realism in Tom Thumb—Lack of Magic in English Folk-tales—Whittington and his Cat—Perrault’s Contes—The partnership between Youth and Age—English versions—“Court” adaptations and “moral” fairy tales—Eastern stories—The “little yellow canvas-covered book”—Nursery criticism—Aladdin and Sinbad—The “Oriental Moralist”—Traditional tales moralised: Tom Thumb and Robin Goodfellow—The Two Children in the Wood—The Enchanted Castle.
Fairies were not altogether unknown in the Age of Reason, though the Royal Society kept no record of their delicate transactions. The little Betty of Steele’s paper, who terrified the maids with her accounts of “Fairies and Sprights”, must have learned them, as children do, from the “Grasshoppers’ Library”; for the pedlar had no such tales in print.
They were sometimes told as a mixture of ballad and fairy tale—a story with snatches of ballad rhyme. Children guarded them jealously, passing them on word for word, with none of the slips that a printer would have made.
Such a tale was “Child Rowland”, first set down by Jamieson in 1814,[18] as an old country tailor told it to him when he was seven or eight years old. But that old tailor had heard it in his own childhood, and so, doubtless had his great-grandfathers in theirs; for this tale of the three brothers seeking their lost sister, of her being stolen by the King of Elfland and kept under a spell, is the same that Shakespeare quoted in King Lear:
“Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still ‘Fie, foh and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man’.”