Books Worth Reading #26 - The The Watkins Book of English Folktales by Neil Philip

This really is a beautiful book.

'This is a golden treasury of over one hundred English folktales captured in the form they were first collected. Read these classic tales as they would have been told when storytelling was a living art – when the audience believed in boggarts and hobgoblins, local witches and will-o’-the-wisps, ghosts and giants, cunning foxes and royal frogs. 

Find Jack the Giantkiller, Tom Tit Tot and other quintessentially English favourites, alongside interesting borrowings, such as an English version of the Grimms’ Little Snow White – as well as bedtime frighteners, including Captain Murderer, as told to Charles Dickens by his childhood nurse. Neil Philip has provided a full introduction and source notes on each story that illustrate each tale’s journey from mouth to page, and what has happened to them on the way. 

These tales rank among the finest English short stories of all time in their richness of metaphor and plot and their great verbal dash and daring.' 

That's the official blurb. But it's not hyperbole. This really is a must for anyone interested in British folklore. 

And isn't Captain Murderer the best name ever?