Legends of Paul Bunyan

by Harold W. Felton, Richard Bennett (Illustrator), James Stevens (Foreword)

Paul Bunyan is a true American folk character, created in logging camp bunkhouses by men who spun exaggerated stories that combined hard work and fantasy. While the origins of Paul Bunyan and his sidekick Babe the Blue Ox are hazy, many storytellers have over the years contributed their own takes to produce an existing body of work—a true American legend—that matches the size of the lumberjack himself.
Collected in colorful and engaging sections such as “Paul the Man,” “Paul and the Animal Kingdom,” and “The Wonderful Big Blue Ox, Babe,” Legends of Paul Bunyan features more than thirty authors celebrating the largest lumberman, including stories by such Bunyan luminaries as James Stevens and W. B. Laughead, as well as such literary icons as Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg.

445 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

Reviews

[C.A. Simonsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

A very comprehensive collection of short myths and verses about the mighty Paul Bunyan. Would make a good volume for parents to read to their children at bedtime.

Must have been difficult for Paul to find a decent pair of boots year after year.

[Matt Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want a collection of raw Paul Bunyan stories before they were bastardized for children's literature, this is a great, exhaustive collection. I loved it. Be forewarned, there is racism and other things you'd expect for stories from that era, but not a huge amount that distracts too much.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thorough collection of Bunyan stories. Some not exactly politically correct but in a way it's good to read some of these that are less sterile and Disnefied.

[Morgan Kjellman]

So, Paul Bunyan was kind of the legend who created everything beautiful in the world. He started as a folk lore that turned into a legend because of the talent he had and how many people have heard about Paul Bunyan. People described him as a lumberman who was giant and created the Puget Sound and the Grand Canyon and everything else that attracts tourists. He was described as a gentle giant who had an ox named Babe and could chop down the forest with one swing of his ax.
I think people are taking Paul and turning him into kind of a god because in this book, he was again and again talked about how he was everyones hero and how he made America beautiful and the place that everyone wanted to be at. Obviously, it is make believe but it is strange that a make believe character could become a lot of peoples hero and that it turned an average story of folk lore into a story about a legend.
If I were to ever teach, I would probably use this as an example that the world can be beautiful. With all the bad things that have been happening, there is quite a lot of good also. I would mention how Paul is a legend in peoples eyes because they believed that he created all the beautiful and keeps making more beautiful despite the world being so dark.

[Chad Gorshing · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was wanting to read some Americana/American heritage things and Paul Bunyan came to mind. This book was okay, it is a collection of other people submitting short stories they had heard or knew. Some of the little short stores, some just a couple paragraphs, where not all good. So it is a hit and a miss.

I am glad I have the book though, and will more than likely thumb through it from time to time. But I would like to find better Paul Bunyan books. I feel like knowledge of this American folklore is slipping through our fingers.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was a kid and we learned about tall tales in English class, I loved Paul Bunyan.

This is a wonderful compilation of stories and poems written about Paul Bunyan. I'm not as enchanted as I was as a kid, but some of the stories made me smile.

I think that Paul Bunyan stories are better in small doses; after so many tales, the magic pales. So if you like Paul Bunyan, I recommend this book, but read it in small sections and then put it aside for a while.

[Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lately, I’ve seen a little resurgence in interest in the prototypical “tall tale” icon of Paul Bunyan and his place in North American folklore, here in Minnesota and elsewhere, and I decided to pull out a a “classic” in Paul Bunyan lore that I’d had on my shelf for years without getting to, Midwest folklorist Harold W. Felton’s 1947 anthology, Legends of Paul Bunyan, republished by the Minnesota Historical Society in 2008. Felton collects various essays, poems, songs and other stories depicting Paul Bunyan from numerous writers published in various periodicals and other popular mediums from the 1910s to the 1940s, forming a lot of the basis of much popular culture depictions of the character through to today. Felton arranges these stories by motif, such as Paul’s childhood, food, animals, the various other characters appearing in his stories, his inventions, and his effect on US geography, among others, including many renditions that would become commonplace in later Paul Bunyan accounts. Though he shares a fairly deep bibliography, he does not go into the background of his selections, making it inconvenient to check the source of any given tale, poem, or song.

While quite tedious to contemporary standards, rife with quaint rustic dialects, cartoonish accents, and condescending (at best) depictions of ethnic groups, Legends of Paul Bunyan highlights what I learned in other works, as the professional Eastern writers whose pieces Felton collects, from The Atlantic to the New Republic, paint a sanitized, quaint, cutesy picture of the logging industry, homogenizing the “authentic” lore of the frontier to manufacture a hero figure for a nostalgic age. In his introduction, Felton makes this clear, quoting a 1944 article from Fortune Magazine which states, “Paul Bumyan’s task was not to create, invent, govern or reform. It was to clear the ground so that a new America could spread itself upon it. His size is the measure of the task that the pioneers undertook.” As a whole, the stories, strike a fanciful, idealized tone, comedic and good-natured throughout, and whatever contradictions they might include (Paul married or single, born in Maine or in Canada), they build a specific picture of the mighty lumberjack in the twentieth century US. For a more in depth examinations of the development and origins of the Paul Bunyan mythology and lumberjack, look at Out of the Northwoods by Michael Edmonds or Gentlemen of the Woods by Willa Hammitt Brown.

I talk more about other books I read discussing how the Paul Bunyan stories developed and their cultural resonance in the Northwoods and the American Midwest and how they are being reimagined and recontextualized today at Harris’ Tome Corner, here.