Scotland has a unique heritage of folk tales and
fairy tales. Many of these are of Gaelic origin and must have drifted
across the Highland Line in earlier days to become part of the Lowland
oral tradition in Scots. However, in general, folklore in Scotland has
its origins in the medieval North Sea community. Until the end of the
eighteenth century, such stories were part of the extensive oral tradition
in Scots, which developed when the Scots language was still, for most
people, seen as adequate for every purpose of life.
It is not now possible
to discover exactly what the language of many of the stories in this
tradition was like, since most of them are now recorded in English.
Written versions in Scots were not always available and versions were
published in English, sometimes in stilted Victorian English, largely in
order to capture the larger international market. The occasional
guidwyfe or henwyfe was often introduced in an English
syntactical context, to add a Scots frisson or flavor
and to locate the origin of the story.
In an age subject to
headlong globalisation, leading to the destruction of natural communities
and trust everywhere, we should beware of discarding as provincial and
irrelevant, traditions which characterise the essence of Scotland’s
being. Accordingly, I have made renderings of twenty-six Scottish folk
tales in a narrative, non-localised Scots, based on surviving linguistic
models, such as the language of traditional Scots songs. In some of
these tales, their European origins are clearly evident. The Wal at
the Warld’s End is a medieval version on the Frog Prince theme,
there is a Sleeping Beauty in The Weidae’s Son an the Streinger,
Snow White reappears in a glass coffin in Gowd Tree an Siller Tree,
Rumpelstiltskin becomes Whuppitie Stourie and Cinderella and her
slipper is transmogrified into Rashiecoat at the Kirk, instead of
the Ball.
The origin of some of these stories is evidently
pre-European and some familiar themes are recognisable in ancient Sanskrit
documents.
Titles of Folk Tales
