Carl Lindahl

Introduction: Representing and Recovering the British- and Irish-American Märchen

Throughout the twentieth century, folklorists devoted more energy to denying or downplaying the existence of the British- and Irish-American Märchen than to seeking out and learning from its narrators. This brief history of North American Märchen studies identifies some reasons for the academy's neglect of the genre, outlines the careers of the two early collectors (Vance Randolph and Leonard Roberts) most responsible for documenting oral Märchen traditions, and weighs the enormous influence of Richard Chase and his book The Jack Tales on both the academic community and the public at large. The essay also traces the efforts of Herbert Halpert and others to advance British- and Irish-American Märchen studies. It concludes by assessing important recent Märchen scholarship (as exemplified in books by William B. McCarthy, Charles L. Perdue Jr., and Herbert Halpert and J. D. A. Widdowson) and by describing the research of Perdue, Martin Lovelace, and Carl Lindahl included in this issue.

Carl Lindahl

Sounding a Shy Tradition: Oral and Written Styles of American Mountain Märchen

Past literary critics of the Märchen defined the genre by identifying it in terms of a relatively small number of presumably universal traits. This study considers the extent to which the Märchen of the Appalachian and Ozark regions embody three of those "universals": 1) a perfectly memorable plot constructed to convey an invariant meaning; 2) sharp, bright, and sparse imagery; and 3) a tone of magical wonder. I examine the published tales of the regions' best-known collectors: Richard Chase, Leonard Roberts, and Vance Randolph. Comparing Chase's written renditions to the oral performances of Sam Harmon, I find that Chase misrepresents and undercuts the Märchen aesthetics of the family from whom he claimed to have gotten his tales. I examine Leonard Roberts's published versions of tales told by Jane Muncy and, considering the oral testimony and performances of the Muncy family, conclude that Roberts's tales are largely faithful to the tellers' oral styles. I end with an appreciation of Vance Randolph, whose tales demonstrate a regional tendency to treat the Märchen not as a tale of wonder, but as a legend or a joke. None of the three universals posited by literary scholars effectively characterizes the oral styles of the American mountain Märchen.

Charles L. Perdue Jr.

Is Old Jack Really Richard Chase?

For many scholars and narrators, after Richard Chase published The Jack Tales in 1943 his name became synonymous with this type of narrative. Chase was an inveterate performer and told his collated versions of the tales throughout America; in some cases, he supplanted traditional tale tellers in their own communities. Though narrative scholars knew from the beginning that Chase's tales were bowdlerized compilations, original texts were not available for purposes of comparing and analyzing Chase's alterations. As a part of the WPA's Virginia Writers' Project, however, twenty-eight Jack tales were collected in Wise County, Virginia, in 1941 and 1942; these tales—unaffected by Chase's alterations—were discovered in the early 1980s. When analyzed in combination with the eleven Jack tales published by Isabel Gordon Carter in 1925, they make it possible to determine the nature of some changes made by Chase in his public presentations of "Jack tales." In this article, Perdue compares the distribution of particular traits in these published tales and determines that, in a number of ways, Richard Chase's Jack tales are less emblematic of the narrators he claimed to represent and more a reflection of himself.

Martin Lovelace

Jack and His Masters: Real Worlds and Tale Worlds in Newfoundland Folktales

This essay argues that the male-centered Märchen of Halpert and Widdowson's Folktales of Newfoundland offer models of behavior for young working-class men, particularly in their relationships with employers. Close reading of the tales shows them to be lessons in life as seen from the perspective of a subordinated social class: they tell young men "how to be" in order to get employment and protect themselves from exploitation. Advice is also given regarding whom to trust and how to conduct love relationships. A further conclusion of the study is that for a quintessentially maritime culture, Newfoundland's magic tales refer surprisingly often to an agricultural world as their implicit background. It is suggested that this reflects a continuity of culture between Newfoundland and the areas in southeast Ireland and southwest England from which its settlers came. The transference of working-class modes of self-presentation from the West of England to Newfoundland is argued on the basis of personal fieldwork and published literature.