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Tales from the Cloud Walking Country.
Assembled here are seventy-eight stories from six of the "ballad-singingest, tale-tellingest" residents of the eastern Kentucky mountain country. Based on stories rooted in European traditions from German fairy tales to Irish hero stories to Greek myths, the tales had been handed down through generations of telling before Marie Campbell collected them in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Readers will recognize the story of Snow White in "A Stepchild That Was Treated Mighty Bad," while "Three Shirts and a Golden Finger Ring" recalls the fairy tale of the Seven Swans. "The Fellow That Married a Dozen Times" is a lively rendition of "Bluebeard." The narrators cautioned Marie Campbell again and again, "Tale-telling is nigh about faded out in the mountain country," but Tales from the Cloud Walking Country offers a lasting record of history, cultural heritage, language, and good, old-fashioned fun.
270 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1958
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 16, 2014
The "cloud walking country" being the eastern Kentucky mountains. And the tales are told as collected, in the voice of her informants -- indeed, the stories are listed by informant.
This can mean comments about where they learned them -- from an Irishman, or the time they heard it, only once, or how the mother told "The Three Girls with Journey-Cakes" and always the father would tell "The Three Boys with Journey Cakes" right after. Or what immediately made them say it -- a Bluebeard tale because of a man marrying for the third time -- with the comment that the man with three wives was just unlucky. Or just on the tale. One thought that a tale in which a farmer boy got educated and decide to marry the Queen of Rome -- was against farmer boys getting educated, since it said that they would stop working and get silly notions in their head. Another told a "Snow White" variant with a few differences -- there's a hound dog that's an important character -- and observed that the queen looked in her looking glass to see that her stepdaughter was more beautiful; she had heard folks say that the looking glass talked but she didn't hold by that. Or observing that the man with one eye and the woman with three had named their daughter One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes instead of pretty names, or how people would not call people by their proper and good, solid names, like one tale about Cold Feet, who really was John. Lots of lively commentary
It also means it shows, sometimes, why fairy tales tend to get smoothed out for collections. Some, not many, of the tales have plotting problems. Sometimes just going whoops -- I forget to tell you that the heroine got this or the hero had that. Sometimes forgetting major plot twists, or even how it ended. Twice the narrator flatly refused to finish the tale on the grounds it got all blackguardy.
But we get a fine selection of tales showing bits of local color. She has a series of notes in the back about analogs in Grimms and others, especially Irish ones, (though I caught that one was a variant of "The Battle of Birds" that she could not identify) and some unique ones. We have a princess in a rabbit skin dress -- "All Kinds of Fur" where the queen has three husbands, and does not outlive the last, who then wants to marry his stepdaughter -- and all sorts of tweeks on old tales. "Little Catskin" I thought I remembered, but either I elaborated it in memory, or I'm confusing it with another tale, or possibly another retelling because this one is a little sparse. Lots of interesting takes.
This can mean comments about where they learned them -- from an Irishman, or the time they heard it, only once, or how the mother told "The Three Girls with Journey-Cakes" and always the father would tell "The Three Boys with Journey Cakes" right after. Or what immediately made them say it -- a Bluebeard tale because of a man marrying for the third time -- with the comment that the man with three wives was just unlucky. Or just on the tale. One thought that a tale in which a farmer boy got educated and decide to marry the Queen of Rome -- was against farmer boys getting educated, since it said that they would stop working and get silly notions in their head. Another told a "Snow White" variant with a few differences -- there's a hound dog that's an important character -- and observed that the queen looked in her looking glass to see that her stepdaughter was more beautiful; she had heard folks say that the looking glass talked but she didn't hold by that. Or observing that the man with one eye and the woman with three had named their daughter One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes instead of pretty names, or how people would not call people by their proper and good, solid names, like one tale about Cold Feet, who really was John. Lots of lively commentary
It also means it shows, sometimes, why fairy tales tend to get smoothed out for collections. Some, not many, of the tales have plotting problems. Sometimes just going whoops -- I forget to tell you that the heroine got this or the hero had that. Sometimes forgetting major plot twists, or even how it ended. Twice the narrator flatly refused to finish the tale on the grounds it got all blackguardy.
But we get a fine selection of tales showing bits of local color. She has a series of notes in the back about analogs in Grimms and others, especially Irish ones, (though I caught that one was a variant of "The Battle of Birds" that she could not identify) and some unique ones. We have a princess in a rabbit skin dress -- "All Kinds of Fur" where the queen has three husbands, and does not outlive the last, who then wants to marry his stepdaughter -- and all sorts of tweeks on old tales. "Little Catskin" I thought I remembered, but either I elaborated it in memory, or I'm confusing it with another tale, or possibly another retelling because this one is a little sparse. Lots of interesting takes.
June 1, 2014
Eastern Kentucky tellings of mostly old European classic tales and local variations on Irish mythology. Amazing how much stuff here would be familiar to William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, or the Brothers Grimm, decked out in Appalachian garb and told by storytellers who got it straight from a living oral tradition now killed off by "communications."
Marie Campbell wrote these versions in Bloomington, Indiana, in the 1950's, based on her shorthand fieldnotes from the Kentucky mountains during the '20s and '30s, when she was a young teacher at the Hindman and Gander Settlement Schools. They're not direct transcriptions (which are usually lifeless on the page). Campbell avoids the annoying, patronizing spellings and weird renditions of "hillbilly dialect" common to printed versions of folktales at the time. The storytellers' individual voices and humanity still shine through.
What they tell are mostly hardcore, old-school European Märchen and fragments of myth cycles going back to Celtic Europe. It's fascinating to hear old Gaelic and German stories told in a familiar Appalachian voice, in a half-mythic/half-Southern setting. There's not much Kentucky here, but it's interesting to see Appalachia pictured afresh through the fabled world of golden fingers and golden apples, of Finn and Deirdre, king's sons dropping through holes to the netherworld, and of Cinderella as "Little Cat Skin" in a cabin.
Marie Campbell wrote these versions in Bloomington, Indiana, in the 1950's, based on her shorthand fieldnotes from the Kentucky mountains during the '20s and '30s, when she was a young teacher at the Hindman and Gander Settlement Schools. They're not direct transcriptions (which are usually lifeless on the page). Campbell avoids the annoying, patronizing spellings and weird renditions of "hillbilly dialect" common to printed versions of folktales at the time. The storytellers' individual voices and humanity still shine through.
What they tell are mostly hardcore, old-school European Märchen and fragments of myth cycles going back to Celtic Europe. It's fascinating to hear old Gaelic and German stories told in a familiar Appalachian voice, in a half-mythic/half-Southern setting. There's not much Kentucky here, but it's interesting to see Appalachia pictured afresh through the fabled world of golden fingers and golden apples, of Finn and Deirdre, king's sons dropping through holes to the netherworld, and of Cinderella as "Little Cat Skin" in a cabin.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews