Joseph Jacobs opens his preface with a defensive flourish, anticipating surprise that England still harbored enough traditional tales for a second volume. He admits to having rewritten most of the stories, adopting what he calls “the traditional English style of folk-telling,” complete with “Wells” and “Lawkamercy” and other archaisms that contemporary critics might dismiss as vulgarisms. This editorial note is not a reading guide but an observation of how the book itself announces its method: Jacobs is unapologetically a re-teller, not a mere transcriber. He freely deletes or adds incidents, prosifies ballads, and softens dialect—all in service of filling children's imaginations with “bright trains of images.” The reader encountering these tales should expect a crafted, literary voice rather than a raw ethnographic record.

The Compiler's Confession

Jacobs’s preface is unusually candid about his editorial liberties. He anticipates criticism from folklorists who revere the “sacred text” of originals, but he defends his changes by appealing to a higher cause: the entertainment of children. He mentions having “introduced or deleted whole incidents,” given “another turn to a tale,” and finished off incomplete stories. This is not a neutral collection; it is a conscious reshaping of oral material into a readable, engaging form. The reader should note that the tales are not presented as authentic transcriptions but as Jacobs’s versions, filtered through his sense of what a fairy tale should sound like. The archaic touches—the “Wells” and “Lawkamercy”—are deliberate stylistic choices meant to evoke a rustic, old-fashioned flavor, even if they were already anachronistic in 1894.

A Tale of Swans and Snakes

One of the longer excerpts, from a story involving a castle, a sleeping princess, and a series of enchanted brothers, illustrates Jacobs’s method in action. The prose is brisk and colloquial: “He got on his legs, and walked quietly by all those giants, lions, fiery serpents, and all manner of other frightful things too numerous to mention, while they were fast asleep.” The narrator uses direct speech liberally, with characters exclaiming “Ha! ha! ha!” and addressing each other as “my boy.” The plot follows a familiar pattern—a quest for golden apples, a magical horse, a time limit, and a kiss that nearly wakes the princess—but the telling is marked by specific, homely details: the hero exchanges garters and watches with the sleeping princess, and the cook lies “all-fours on her back on the middle of the floor, with the knife in one hand and the fork in the other.” These touches ground the fantasy in a concrete, slightly absurd reality.

Repetition and Rhythm

Jacobs’s tales often rely on formulaic phrases and repeated structures. In the excerpt, the hero calls out “Swan, swan, carry me over, for the name of the old Griffin of the Greenwood” three times, each time with slight variation. The swans carry him over “in a crack.” The phrase “neck or nothing” appears, and the hero’s escape is timed to the minute. This rhythmic repetition is characteristic of oral storytelling, and Jacobs preserves it even as he rewrites. The reader will encounter many such refrains throughout the collection—chants, rhymes, and patterned exchanges that give the prose a chant-like quality. They are not accidental; they are the bones of the folk tradition, left visible beneath Jacobs’s literary polish.

Illustrations as Interpretation

John D. Batten’s illustrations are an integral part of this edition. The frontispiece shows “Janet casts the Flaming Sword into the Well,” a scene from one of the tales. Batten’s style is detailed and dramatic, with strong lines and a sense of motion. The illustrations do not merely decorate the text; they interpret it, emphasizing moments of action or transformation. Readers should pay attention to how Batten visualizes the fantastic elements—the swans, the giants, the sleeping princess—because his choices reflect a late-Victorian aesthetic that blends medievalism with a touch of the grotesque. The pictures are part of the book’s overall design, which includes a playful “Knock at the Knocker” invitation on the title page, suggesting that the volume is meant to be entered like a fairy-tale castle itself.

Jacobs’s collection is best approached as a work of literary craft rather than folklore scholarship. The tales are not raw data but artful retellings, shaped by a single editor’s hand. Readers who enjoy comparing versions will find much to notice: how Jacobs simplifies or complicates a plot, where he adds a comic aside, or how he handles dialect. The book rewards attention to its small verbal details—the repeated phrases, the odd archaisms, the moments of earthy humor. It is a book to be read aloud, preferably with a sense of play.