A World of Folk Tales [antikvár]

IntrodaetionI once met a man up in the Arctic who told me what folk tales meant to him. There we were, some half dozen grown men, sitting in the half dark of a walrus tent, washing down whale meat with a potent green brew, swapping folk yarns. This man, a wizened old Eskimo, was saying that when he was a lad no one for hundreds of miles around could read or write; there were no nurseries or schools, no radio or television, no newspapers or books, no churches or bibles. But there were folk tales. When the children came home to their tents from a hard day on the ice, they enjoyed the happiest times of their short lives: the treasured hour of storytelling.'Grannie or Grandad would sit closer to the fire, pull a rabbit skin rug round them and begin a story,' the old Eskimo told me. 'The stories taught us to understand and love the beauty of life, to be brave and to fight evil. And now, when I recall my cold and hungry childhood, I wonder what life would have been like for little children if it had not been for those wonderful stories.'I've never forgotten those words. They opened my eyes to the importance of folk tales in the lives of everyone not so long ago. How lucky we are to have enough to eat, to be warm or cool as the fancy takes us, to have plenty of leisure time and a choice of many activities to fill it, and how lucky we are to be able to read in our own tongue tales from all over the world.Some people may be tempted to look for a meaning in these tales. But perhaps we should not try to be too wise. One lesson that my twenty years' wandering in folk tale realms has taught me, is that the tales have many, many meanings. The one feeling that does