I have not read a great deal of folklore, either for this project or indeed in my whole life, so I was pleased to track down a book from 1967, Tit for Tat, and Other Latvian Folk Tales, retold by Mae Durham, from the translation of Skaidrite Rubene-Koo. I believe I found a website giving the background to this collection: the two women worked together at UC Berkeley, and Mae Durham persuaded her colleague to transcribe and translate the fairy tales of her own culture, which she then tidied up for publication. Mae Durham was a librarian and children’s book collector of note. If you search online for Skaidrite Rubene-Koo you find a more grisly detail, that in 1972 her teenage daughter Aiko was abducted and killed. Nothing as brutal as that among these fairy stories, but they have their darkness.
What were the fairy tales of my youth, I was prompted to contemplate. I don’t remember many in books. I had a cassette with some traditional stories like Thumbelina on, but I was so indifferent to it that I stuck sellotape across the tab and recorded over it. Another cassette had Penelope Keith reading some of the wonderful stories from Pamela Oldfield’s collection The Terribly Plain Princess, about which Nick has written most evocatively here. Later, my brother and I were introduced to a magical book from my mother’s childhood, Whimsical Stories to Tell by Helen Williams, which contained modern (well, 1920s-era) fairy tales, including one that involved the pouring of some unpleasant-tasting medicine out of a window on to some raspberries, which were then consumed. But broadly speaking my childhood was one of A.A. Milne and Roald Dahl, not Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.
There are 22 stories collected in Tit for Tat, most of them not longer than three or four pages, and a good bunch they are too. Perhaps one doesn’t expect much in the way of scholarship from a 50-year-old book of fairy tales, but this one has an excellent notes section at the back written by the pioneering folklorist Alan Dundes, putting each story in context and identifying its place in the Aarne-Thompson index.
The Latvian flavour of the stories comes from the presence in most of them of barons, that old baron/peasant dichotomy we all know and love, and the religious element. ‘The Devil’s Partnership’ is a pleasing story of how the schism between God and the Devil occurred. Turns out it was all to do with crops: the two of them decide to divide up their potatoes and the Devil foolishly chooses the bit above ground; then they plant some wheat and the Devil, still stinging from the potato fiasco, again foolishly chooses the roots. The Latvian tellers of this story, no stupid people themselves, would be all too pleased to identify with God. The lively illustrations by Harriet Pincus depict the Latvians throughout as a big-nosed people. Whether this is an accurate representation or not I cannot say.
A handful of stories feature the familiar tropes of the bad daughter and the good stepdaughter, the courting of the fair Prince, the final enaction of karma. The karma can be brutal: ‘Out of the box fire shot forth, burning down the house, the cruel mother, and the pampered daughter,’ ends one story. By and large, modern gender politics can take a back seat. ‘The Bad-Tempered Wife’ has a henpecked husband cannily losing his wife down a hole and eventually claiming for himself the money she has found so he can live a peaceful life of solitude; in ‘The Silly Goose War’, a man’s foolish wife blabs to the Baron that they’ve come into some money, so he gaslights her until her maniacal ravings about bagels falling from the sky convince the Baron she is but a harmless madwoman. There are a few straightforward morality tales, some of them very pleasing. I thought ‘The Poor Brother’s Bad Luck’, in which a rich man, by wishing bad luck on his poor brother, brings it upon himself, was the pick.
My favourite stories were the unexpected ones. My tolerance of whimsicality varies. I didn’t warm to the stories in which, for instance, a pea germinates into a golden apple tree, or the Devil is baked into a loaf of bread, and goodness knows why, because written down they look tremendous, but some of the odder stories I adored. The one I loved best of all was ‘The Bird and the Man’, in which a man wonders what eternity is like, walks into a forest, gets distracted by the singing of a bird, and emerges from the forest to find a hundred years have passed. Nothing more than that, just a simple, fantastical story told with admirable unadornedness.
Or try ‘The Fox and the Cock’, the shortest of all the stories, and not the only one that evokes Aesop:
A fox caught a cock and started down the road with him. The maidservant, seeing this, cried out, ‘A fox is carrying off the cock! A fox is carrying off the cock!’
The cock looked up at the fox and said, ‘Why not tell the maid that this is none of her business?’
This advice pleased the fox, who, in turn, blurted out, ‘This is none of your business!’
As the fox opened his mouth to say these words, the cock – shwirr – was away and up a tree.
Ah, well. So, the fox continued his way down the road.
Somewhere Boy 