M.R. James, Tales from Lectoure (Haunted Library, 2006)
A popular quotation in the writing world is that there are only twelve (or seven, or ten, depending on who you ask) original stories in the world, and that each narrative thereafter is just a re-telling of one of the twelve. Late nineteenth-early-twentieth century medieval scholar M.R. James proved this with Tales from Lectoure. Tales is a collection of six fairy tales James translated from a French collection, Contes populaires de la Gascogne, and presented in a pair of lectures with his own introductions and notes. Originally compiled by Jean-Francois Blade, who hailed from the south-western French town of Lectoure, these stories have their own unique flavour, but most of them relate directly to, or are recognizable descendants of, existing myths, folktales, and fairytales.
The first tale, "The Young Man and the Great Beast with a Man's Head," is a slightly elaborated retelling of the "Riddle of the Sphinx" myth, where a young man, to defeat the titular monster, not only has to correctly answer three riddles, but also ask the creature three of his own. The monster's riddles are standard fare, but the story is tangled by the man's response, as his own riddles are heavily symbolic, philosophical, and metaphorical in nature.
James explains that the next tale, "Golden Feet," is another version of the tale of "Wayland the Smith" -- a gruesome, violent tale in keeping with the stories of the Brothers Grimm. A talented young man apprentices himself to a famous smith, but finds more than he bargained for when the smith chops off his feet and imprisons him for refusing to marry his daughter, the Queen of Vipers. The industrious hero fashions himself a pair of golden feet instead, and plans his escape with a mixture of cunning and brute force common to fairytale heroes. Meanwhile, "The Queen's Chastisement" plays out like a French version of Hamlet, a highly ritualized story wherein a prince is informed of his father's murder by his unforgiving ghost, and is forced to wreak revenge upon the murderer: his own scheming mother.
Part Two, the second lecture James gave, begins with "The Green Man," which stands as a departure from the previous stories as it is presented as the supposedly true account of an old man named Cazeau who was interviewed by Jean-Francois Blade for his compilation. Simple but sweet, it tells of Cazeau's childhood encounter with the legendary figure, and his attempts to repeat the experience afterwards.
However, the tales return to format quickly enough with "The Sword of Saint Peter." A prince and his mother, the Queen, are faced with a tough decision when their king and country are overcome by the King of the Pagans. While the mother is forced to marry the King of the Pagans, the prince has to pretend to be deaf and mute to escape execution. Naturally, as the boy grows up he decides to search for the only weapon that can help him defeat the King of the Pagans, the Sword of Saint Peter. In true fairytale fashion, in his travels he helps various creatures who return his kindness with aid, until he reaches his inevitable goal.
After that comes "The Prince of the Seven Gold Cows," a tale with confusing morals about a Prince who spends the entirety of his fortune giving lavish feasts to his friends and outrageous alms to the poor. The result? Once bankrupted, he is rejected by both the nobles who didn't take kindly to being shamed by his generous charity, and by the beggars who saw him as a wasteful party-boy. His salvation comes from a very amusing, but unexpected source.
The final story, "The King of the Ravens," is evidently an adaptation of the Cupid and Psyche myth. A ten-year-old girl is forced into marrying the King of the Ravens, who is really a human King under a spell. Honourably, he agrees to leave her alone until her seventeenth birthday, but in return she must not look upon him until that day or all will be lost. Naturally, her curiosity gets the better of her and the tale proceeds as expected.
With few exceptions, M.R. James translated each of these tales word for word, with minor changes in order to accommodate the more mystifying of the French colloquialisms, and one major change to the ending of one of the tales because of its particularly icky content (he removes a castration scene in favour of a scene where the character takes a vow of chastity). Like most fairytales, each story (with the exception of "The Green Man") has a highly ritualized narrative, almost cartoonishly casual violence, as well as a deeply religious undercurrent. At six tales, it's a fairly small collection, but for the readers of The Ghosts & Scholars M.R. James Newsletter (in which this booklet is a subscriber's supplement), it's sure to be an interesting treat for fans of James, who was a distinguished supernatural fiction writer in his own right.
