Biographies

Alice (McCarthy) Lannon (1927–2013)

Alice Lannon was full of humor, curiosity, and generosity and could make an absorbing story out of nearly any experience. She was born in the Fortune Bay outport of St. Jacques (population 141 in 1921) on October 22, 1927, to Julia and Tom McCarthy. She was the third of their four children; her brother Michael, born in 1932, was the youngest and they remained close throughout their lives. Their father was a teacher in the Roman Catholic school system and taught at English Harbour, Fortune Bay, and later Terrenceville (230 people in 1921), a community at the head of St. Mary’s Bay. Alice’s mother died when Alice was thirteen and her father’s mother, Mary (Strang) McCarthy (1863–1947) came from St. Jacques to help her son raise his youngest children. Even before this, once she became a widow Mary McCarthy had been in the habit of spending winters in her son’s home, with the result that all of the children in the family heard her tales.

Mary Strang was born at Lawn, on Newfoundland’s Burin peninsula, to Agnes Flannigan and Andrew Strang. Like many young outport women, she spent some time in domestic service, in her case in a lawyer’s household on the island of St. Pierre, France’s last North American colony, a short distance from Lawn by sea. Mary Strang’s aunt, Ellen Flannigan, who had told tales to her, never married. She too had been born at Lawn, around 1820, and would have been in her forties at Mary’s birth. The settlers of Lawn came from County Cork, and possibly other southeast Irish counties, brought to Newfoundland as young men and women by the English fishing and trading enterprise Newman’s from the late 1700s onward. The historical geographer W. Gordon Handcock called Lawn “one of the more prominent Irish communities” off the Avalon peninsula (1989, 89). We do not know how Ellen Flannigan earned her living, or if she was literate. Alice said that people had told Ellen the stories; she did not think she had read them (Lannon 2001).

Mary Strang could read and write, but not well; Alice noted that she sounded the k in knights, for example, and that she preferred to have others read to her. Alice, by contrast, grew up in a literate and educationally aspiring family. Her father always had a full bookcase and, as a teacher, regularly received a box of books from St. John’s for the school. A traveling library also came, there being nothing like a bookstore in St. Jacques or Terrenceville. The scarcity of books in rural Newfoundland in the 1930s—and much later—is hard to imagine now (see Rieti 1989). Clergymen, merchant families, teachers, and more prominent citizens, such as sea captains, had libraries and subscribed to periodicals, but the great majority had to get by without them. This does not mean they were uninterested: sailors brought reading matter home from voyages that carried loads of fish, lumber, or paper to Europe, Canada, and the United States, and those fortunate to have books were sought out by others. Reading aloud to a group was a sociable thing to do, like the recitation of poems committed to memory by the literate and nonliterate alike. Singers commonly boasted that they only had to hear a song once or twice and they “got it,” and the retentiveness of memory in those who lived in a predominantly oral culture is, again, hard for literate people to credit.

Alice could recite verses on the spur of the moment, and often did, to the surprise and edification of those around her: she told Barbara and Martin of how, on stepping out of an airplane in St. John’s, she had quoted aloud from Sir Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel:

She said she couldn’t understand how others, including her own children, could not commit poems to memory. Newfoundlanders of Alice’s generation were educated in schools, and homes, where getting poetry “by heart” was an expected accomplishment. A memoir of his Placentia Bay childhood, Growing Up with Verse (2002), by Leslie Harris, president of Memorial University from 1981 to 1990, offers an intimate account of the interweaving of literary culture and oral folk tradition. Harris, like Alice, had a foot in both worlds. Alice read avidly as a child, including Zane Grey westerns and serial stories in the Catholic Record. She never spoke of having read books of fairy tales, but when Barbara and Martin visited her in 2001 she was reading a Harry Potter novel. She joked that J. K. Rowling had stolen her idea of a flying car and told them of a dream in which her late husband’s spirit had returned and they had flown in her car to visit their children in Fort McMurray, Australia, Ottawa, and North Carolina.

For sixty-two years, however, Alice traveled no further than Grand Falls in central Newfoundland. She enjoyed her childhood visits to her grandmother’s home in St. Jacques where, despite its tiny population, there were rich and poor sides of the harbor: on the poor side she could run in bare feet, stay out later at night, and swim in the pond wearing one of her grandmother’s nightdresses. The family moved from English Harbour to Terrenceville in 1937, a larger but poorer community, where almost everyone was Roman Catholic and there was no social distinction. After her mother’s death, when Alice was in grade 8, she was sent to a boarding school in St. John’s, St. Bride’s College, a fee-paying Catholic girls’ school with a high academic reputation, for grades 9, 10, and 11. After this she entered St. Clare’s School of Nursing in St. John’s and worked as a nurse until her marriage to Michael F. Lannon (1920–1989) of Southeast Placentia and the start of their family of six children.

In her later years Alice traveled extensively, visiting her far-flung children and joining tours organized by the Catholic Church to devotional sites in Europe, such as Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her obituary states that “[e]very one of these trips created great fodder for her own stories such as ‘How I Stopped the Trains in Australia’ ” (“Alice Lannon Obituary” 2013). She was invited to tell stories in local schools and at storytelling festivals in St. John’s. While her fairy tales attracted professional storytellers and their audiences, and folklorists like Anita and Martin, she also had a large repertoire of fairy and ghost legends, a sampling of which appear in a book she produced with her brother Mike McCarthy in 1991: Fables, Fairies & Folklore of Newfoundland. She also coauthored Ghost Stories from Newfoundland Folklore (1995) and Yuletide Yarns (2002) with her brother, who was very well known in Newfoundland as an expert on local history and culture, a distinguished teacher and prolific writer. Three of Alice’s fairy tales appear in Fables and it is instructive to compare their written versions—created by Mike McCarthy from Alice’s longhand script—with the transcripts of oral performances given here. Broadly, Mike introduced a literary fairy-tale style and a more masculine shading. Neither mattered a whit to Alice, who would never have treated her versions as sacrosanct.

Alice told her tales primarily to the children in her family, unlike Pius, who had a more public status as storyteller to a full range of ages in his small community, but her stories are never only for children. They are not ponderously moralistic, or no child would have tolerated them for long; neither do they condescend to a child’s presumed level of understanding. They are full of humor and good sense. Alice’s heroines and heroes live as she did: boldly and generously.

Generosity was her most abiding characteristic. It was no surprise to find that her obituary mentioned her cream puffs, plates of fudge, and caretaking for the sick and elderly. She was enmeshed in the life of her community and a fund-raiser and donor to church-sponsored charities, such as Kosovo relief in the 1990s. She died, aged eighty-five, of cancer, on February 28, 2013. Her daughter Pat told Martin in an email that Alice had “delighted in storytelling to everyone who dropped by to see her” in the Palliative Care Unit in the three last days of her life.

Philip Pius Power (1912–1993)

Fisherman, singer, and storyteller Philip Pius Power was born in Clattice Harbour, Placentia Bay, on July 11, 1912. He was the great-grandson of Thomas Power, whose parents had emigrated from Waterford in Ireland to Prince Edward Island sometime before 1817. (The Power name, locally pronounced “Pooer,” is a close approximation of the Irish “Di Paor.”) In 1870, Thomas moved to Newfoundland. One of his sons, Philip Power, born June 13, 1854, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, married Catherine Greene from the Harbour Islands, Placentia Bay, in 1873 and had eight children. The eldest, Pius’s father William, was born in 1875. The family settled in various locations around Placentia Bay: Southeast Bight, Chandlers Harbour, and Clattice Harbour. At forty-three, William (Billy) married Catherine Brewer, then thirty-nine, in 1903 and settled in the southwest of Clattice Harbour. Mary Catherine (Min) was born in 1908 and survived into her thirties, when she succumbed to tuberculosis, and Philip Pius (Pius) was born in 1912.

Min and Pius enjoyed an extremely close relationship. In fact, he recalled seeing and talking to her on several occasions after her death. He remembered his sister with great fondness, saying that they spent all their time together as children until, at the age of fifteen, his summers were taken up with his father and grandfather in the cod fishery at Golden Bay, off Cape St. Mary’s. During the summer fishing season, from May till October, the men moved to various locations around Placentia Bay, living aboard their schooner, and fishing in smaller vessels they carried with them.

Pius’s mother, like many other outport women of that era, took an active part in the salt cod fishery, the family’s main source of income. She would also “make fish” (cleaning, drying, and salting fresh cod) for crews from other communities in Placentia Bay. In addition to these most strenuous responsibilities, she had her own work to take care of and her own house to run, mostly by herself, since the men of the family were away fishing. She kept hens, sheep, and cattle. She planted and tended gardens. She acted as midwife to many women in the community and she washed for her two bachelor brothers, Mick and John Brewer. (The Brewer brothers, who spent a lot of time in the Power household, were the source of many of the tales Pius would eventually pass on to another generation.) It is difficult to begrudge respect for a human being who could manage a life as full as this one, and it is clear that Pius very much admired his mother.

Pius married his childhood friend Maggie Hepditch in 1942. Maggie’s personal and economic circumstances were unusual. She was an active participant in a side of the fishery usually the sole province of males: catching fish. Her father was ill most of the time, and her only brother, Jimmy, was unsuited to any kind of manual labor. It was widely accepted within the community that since he had been “taken by the good people” in his childhood, he had a frail constitution. This manpower deficiency left Maggie in the position of being the chief breadwinner for the family. She chose to become a fisherman. She could manage a boat, set nets, haul lobster pots—almost anything that a man in the community could do.

Pius never hesitated to refer to this part of his wife’s life with evident admiration. Although they married relatively late in life, they had six children, five daughters and one son. Young Pius, following family tradition, went fishing with his father at the age of ten. Meanwhile, Maggie had enlarged her household to include her mother, a foster daughter, and Pius’s parents as well. She no longer had time to fish every day, but still kept a hand in during the herring and salmon seasons. Her daughters, once they were old enough, accompanied her to the salmon and herring nets. Until the early 2000s, four of these women held full-time fishing licenses and participated in the annual fishery on an equal basis with their husbands. One was employed as wharfmaster in Southeast Bight, the first woman in Placentia Bay to enter this male-dominated occupation.

Pius and Maggie never prevented their daughters from participating in what would have been considered male activities. Their parents departed from the norm in this regard; girls’ activities were usually confined to the domestic sphere. Yet this liberated attitude did not operate both ways. The men in the family did not occupy themselves with “woman’s work” to the same extent, although they did help with the gardens and the animals, and occasionally the knitting.

Pius and his father built a two-masted tern schooner, or jack-boat, in the 1940s, following in the tradition of his great-grandfather Philip Power, who plied the shipbuilding trade first in Prince Edward Island and then in Oderin, Placentia Bay. Pius and his son made repairs in the 1960s and remodeled her to carry engines. In this vessel, the Annie F and Mary P, always referred to as “the craft,” the two men carried out their fishing enterprise in the 1960s and ’70s. Generally, they left Southeast Bight in April, at the start of the lobster season, and returned sometime in the late fall, moving around the Bay catching herring, mackerel, lump fish, and cod. According to the season, they would use cod traps, seines, or gill nets. Their catch was usually bought fresh by a company operated by the Wareham brothers in Arnold’s Cove. They continued to salt and dry fish for the family’s use, but the markets for selling this commodity had dried up by then.

Since they lived aboard the craft in a manner that by then had become old-fashioned, they were somewhat of a curiosity to the other inshore fishermen, who had abandoned schooners many years before. The long-standing reputations of Pius, Maggie, and Pius’s father Billy as singers and storytellers often attracted others aboard in the evenings to share a drink and a few songs and yarns. The forecastle of the little vessel was often quite crowded, and the air almost blue with smoke from many pipes. Young Pius, while being a fine singer, did not tell tales, even though he knew them all practically by heart.

Pius and his father Billy, along with Pius Jr., remained in Clattice Harbour for three years after the community was resettled. Completely opposed to and disgusted with the resettlement program, they had originally intended to stay, but Maggie was completely alone when the men were away fishing and became nervous. Eventually, they decided to move to Southeast Bight, where three of the Powers’ daughters had married and one was going to school. When they moved to Southeast Bight in 1968, they took with them in the schooner all the animals from Clattice Harbour that their neighbors had abandoned there.

The Power family was known to have extraordinary gifts. Several of them could see and converse with the dead. Billy could contain fire; if he walked around a burning fire, it would not burn beyond where he walked. Pius’s mother Kate, a practicing bloodstopper, passed her gift on to her son. (The charm had to be formally delivered from female to male to female to “take.”) Pius himself was known and consulted as a healer and bloodstopper. Placentia Bay residents tell numerous stories of witnessing him “working his magic”—for example, on a severed artery resulting from a sledding accident and on a lightkeeper’s arm nearly cut off in a chainsaw accident. Maggie also had a broad knowledge of healing plants, where to find them, and how to prepare them.

Pius’s strong and complex belief system included Christian and non-Christian elements. He took note of the solstices and equinoxes as well as saints’ days. When ashore, he walked the Stations of the Cross every day during Lent. When giving the diagnosis of inoperable cancer, his doctor said: “This disease will be the end of you, but I can’t tell you how much time you have left.” Pius immediately quipped, “Well, my son, I can’t tell you how long you have left either.” He was calm and contained always, even facing his own death. When he knew he was near his end, lying on the daybed in the kitchen, he told Young Pius to bring the blessed candle (carried on the schooner, passed down from his father and grandfather). He said, “Sit me up on the daybed, light the candle, and I’ll blow out the candle. And when I blow out the candle, I’ll die.” Young Pius and Maggie reported that this was exactly what happened on March 11, 1993. His daughters Mary Clara Margaret and Kathleen remained in Southeast Bight, and Annie Frances lives in Arnold’s Cove Station. Pius Jr. died in 1996, and Maggie in 1998.

In addition to storytelling, Pius loved conversation, no matter the subject. He loved words and word play. He delighted in the sound of language. He admired witty repartee and never missed an opportunity to engage someone in a yarn. Inside his head were thousands of riddles, proverbs, songs, and poems, which he was always singing or quoting. He started in the morning when he woke up, teasing Maggie, making his grandchildren laugh, and talking to the dogs and cats—and especially the crows as he fed them. He sang constantly while he worked, on the water or ashore. Not much happened without some kind of rhyme to mark it or comment upon it.

He was never comfortable with the tape recorder, unless it was well out of his sight. It made him self-conscious, and although, fortunately, it didn’t stop him from performing, it made his flow of speech much less natural. He was at his best when speaking spontaneously. The tales in this book were told over and over again under all kinds of circumstances, but because of the recorder’s presence, they are somewhat less compelling and detailed versions than some Anita remembers. He loved to lie back on the daybed in the kitchen after supper with his pipe and tell his stories while the dishes were being cleared away or the children were being made ready for bed. Pius always told stories with his pipe in his mouth. This constant prop, coupled with many missing teeth, made him difficult to understand on first hearing. But after a short while, the cadences and flow of the story took over.

Aboard the schooner, anchored in some small cove, the day’s work done and supper finished, he’d fill his pipe and start the conversation. Other fishermen in the area might come aboard, and there’d be lots of news to exchange about the weather, the tides, and the price of fish; observations about ideal locations to cut timbers, keels, or planks for some ongoing boat-building project; who was in the Bay this season, who was sick, and who had died. The conversation turned from the everyday to remembrances of times past, to legendary men and what they had done, into elaborate jokes and tall tales. Someone might eventually ask for a particular song he liked to hear.

The obligation to share in creating the evening’s fun was passed around the forecastle. The old fairy tales were the last to emerge; after a couple, the evening would be over. That was the natural shape of an evening in which time was almost suspended, the only sounds those of the wind and the water and the conviviality of old friends. If people brought drink aboard, a social drop might be shared, resulting in a merry boisterousness. For the most part, except to “pass the compliment,” Pius did not drink, having, as he said himself, outgrown it in his youth.

His usual storytelling style was very animated, with lots of vocal dynamics and gesturing. He was not an actor and didn’t use different voices for his characters. Very much aware of the audience, he often incorporated individuals present into the story, calling them by name, referring to their habits or relatives. This usually elicited laughter. Sometimes one felt that a particular story was a private conversation with an individual. For example, once it became known that Anita planned to leave the Bight, he began to select more stories with loyalty and faithfulness as main themes, emphasizing these aspects. It was an ever so gentle and subtle way to comment on her chosen plan of action.

Sometimes he told stories picked up from television or from hearing his daughters reading bedtime books to their children. He narrated these in a more straightforward style, without the formulaic beginnings and endings. They often differed a great deal from the original. For example, when his granddaughter asked for “Cinderella” one night, he altered the ending. When the Prince comes with the famous shoe in hand, Ella, doesn’t much like the look of him in broad daylight and pretends that the shoe doesn’t fit. She decides she would rather have young Jack from over the road, content to stay in her own world with her own people.

The characters in Pius’s stories often reflect his personal values. He believed that quality came from inside, not from exterior manifestations of wealth or piety. He once related how, upon entering a parish hall for a “time” (a communal party or celebration with dancing and entertainment), a “good Christian woman” sneered at him because his appearance was disheveled and his hands were so sunburned they looked dirty. He responded, “Yes, ma’am, but I am very clean on the inside.” The female characters in his stories were capable, clever, and resourceful, as were the women in his own life, and could certainly make do without men when they had to. The male heroes, like Jack and Johnson, were not too proud to take an elder’s advice, treated the weak and the poor with respect and kindness, and had special relationships with animals. These were virtues that Pius sought to emulate in his own life.

Anita Best

I was born on the island of Merasheen in Placentia Bay on Newfoundland’s south coast in 1948, the year before Newfoundland joined Canada. My paternal ancestors came to Newfoundland from Somerset and Worcestershire, England, in the mid-1700s, and my maternal ancestors probably came from somewhere in the Lowlands of Scotland. My father, George Frederick, locally known as Big Fred, fought in the British Navy during World War II. He was the second youngest of eight sons in an extended family that conducted successful inshore fishing businesses in the community. With extensive fishing premises and two very sheltered harbors, they could easily obtain supplies. After the war he returned to Merasheen and rejoined his brothers. He married Elsie Reid from the neighboring community of Tack’s Beach in 1946. They had four children, Anita, Ralph, Brian, and Lloyd, who was born after the family moved to St. John’s.

Reluctantly, the Best family had packed up and moved there in 1958, before the centralization of Merasheen came into effect, fearing that they would be forcibly moved to an unacceptable location, as had happened in previous resettlement programs (see Merasheen 2003–2012). I recall taking the train to Argentia, and then the coastal boat to Merasheen, where I spent nearly every summer until the community was eventually resettled in 1968, working in my aunt Dora’s confectionery store.

When I was a child, television had not yet taken over as the primary source of entertainment, and for many homes on the island, electricity was provided by gas- or diesel-powered generators. Unaccompanied singing, dancing, and storytelling were the main pastimes, and when the nights grew longer and colder and the fishing season was over, people would gather in each others’ homes for evenings of songs and stories, and occasionally a dance.

During the fishing season, since Merasheen was such a sheltered harbor, vessels from other communities would often come there during bad weather. I recall going with my father and uncles, as a small child, aboard Mr. Power’s schooner and heard Pius Power and his father Billy singing and telling stories. Billy was a memorable performer who loved to act out novelty songs such as “The Cobbler” to the delight of his audiences, particularly the children (see Dick Darling the Cobbler n.d.; Waltz and Engle 2018). He would often sit on a barrel on the deck of the schooner and perform for them during the day. During this somewhat idyllic childhood, I soaked up the songs and stories from the tradition bearers in my community: my parents; uncles Mack, Vic, and Cleve; cousins Lillian and Winnie; and neighbors Mrs. Kate Wilson, Mr. Mick Casey, and Mrs. Bride Fulford, among others. I later became involved as a performer of the traditions I learned from them in festivals and events across the country.

In 1969, after graduating from Memorial University, I became a classroom teacher, a career I followed for fifteen years. I also followed musical and storytelling pursuits with the folk-revival band Figgy Duff and other artistic friends who shared my nationalistic views about Newfoundland culture. Individuals whose families, like mine, had been resettled from Placentia Bay, including poet and playwright Al Pittman and the songwriting Byrne brothers Pat and Joe, were crucial to the Newfoundland cultural revival.

My father died in 1973. This event triggered a desire to collect and preserve the songs of Placentia Bay in particular. My travels eventually took me to Southeast Bight, where I again encountered Pius and his family, recently moved from Clattice Harbour. Southeast Bight had become the collection community for families from other resettled communities, such as Davis Cove and Darby’s Harbour, who did not want to leave their fishing grounds and resettle on the mainland. By then, I was familiar with the song collections of Maud Karpeles, Elizabeth Bristol Greenleaf, and Kenneth Peacock and had noticed that the songs of Placentia Bay and the Sou’west Coast were not well represented in these volumes. Eventually, I worked with Genevieve Lehr and Pamela Morgan on Come and I Will Sing You: A Newfoundland Songbook (Best, Lehr, and Morgan 1985), with songs mainly from those areas. My main folklore interests continue to be songs and stories, particularly ballads and fairy tales, which, in my view, draw from the collective human unconscious and the same oral sources, whatever the location or culture they inhabit.

In 1977, I moved to Southeast Bight where I married Pius Power Jr. We had one daughter, Kate, in 1979. During my stay in the Bight I fished with the Power family, substitute-taught at the local school, and became involved in community development. In 1984, I moved away and eventually joined the master’s program in the Folklore Department at Memorial University. Currently, I live in Norris Point in Gros Morne National Park, where I am a partner in one of their interpretation programs and a volunteer at the local community radio station. I continue to tour throughout Canada and the United States as a traditional singer and storyteller, working primarily with Newfoundland songs and stories. Other than collaborating with Pauline on an article about “Peg Bearskin” published in 2012 (with Emilie Anderson-Grégoire), this is my first publication on Newfoundland wonder tales.

Anita’s coeditors would like to draw attention to the fact that she has received several honors for her work in collecting and disseminating Newfoundland folksongs, including the Marius Barbeau Award from the Folklore Studies Association of Canada and an honorary doctorate from Memorial University. She was named to the Order of Canada in 2011.

Martin Lovelace

In 1999, when I first met Alice Lannon, I was fifty (she was seventy-two). I had been teaching in the Folklore Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland for almost twenty years but I had never recorded the kind of folktale that Alice knew: the magic tale, in which two young people, male and female, through magical events, overcome the hostility of powerful older characters and find happiness. My failure to realize what had become a near obsession owed much to my diffidence as a fieldworker: I could always find a reason not to knock at a door. The ambition had begun in the mid-1970s, while I was a graduate student, when Herbert Halpert entrusted me with compiling a motif list for each of the stories in the great collection of orally recorded folktales from Newfoundland that he and John Widdowson were preparing for Folktales of Newfoundland (1996).

I read Widdowson’s tale transcripts, made synopses, and got the stories into my head, then used the folklorist’s standard tools, Aarne and Thompson’s The Types of the Folktale (1961), a register of the distinct plots of tales, and Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1955–1958), a list of the small elements that persist in tales and float between them, such as “magic apple” (see Lovelace 1997). I worked in Halpert’s office, across the desk from him, for several hours most days, marveling at his comparative knowledge of world folktales and often hearing something about the people from whom he and Widdowson had recorded the stories. Of course I wanted to have that experience: to hear tales from someone who had learned them from some previous teller, who had them from another, and so on, back through time.

Before meeting Halpert on beginning an MA in folklore in 1972, I had never heard of a folktale. I grew up in England and spent my first eighteen years in Bridport, Dorset, a small coastal town that had long been the source of the twine, ropes, and netting used in Newfoundland’s fisheries. My father and his father had been managers in the small factories that in the earlier twentieth century were run more like craft workshops than anonymous industrial plants. Much production was accomplished by women working from home in the surrounding villages as a supplement to their farm worker husbands’ meager wages. We were not wealthy either: West Dorset was a very poor part of England in my childhood, as it had been in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when many young men from the region almost accidentally emigrated to Newfoundland to work in the cod fishery. Sometimes they were bound by their labor agreements to work two summers and the intervening winter before they could return to England; others went from spring to fall and the return of the “Newfoundland men” was highly anticipated.

I knew nothing of this history while growing up; it was never mentioned in school, and it was only after I too had accidentally emigrated to Canada, and Newfoundland in particular, that I learned that members of my family had fled Dorset at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, not caring to be enlisted, and had settled in Greenspond, Bonavista Bay, where, like most men they were fishermen and carpenters. Later still I heard oral traditions in Bridport of wages in the net factories being paid partly in salt cod from Newfoundland, and of a particular allotment garden at Burton Bradstock, a village nearby, from which cabbage plants were dug up, wrapped in wet canvas, and carried off to Newfoundland each spring on the decks of the wooden ships that sailed out of Bridport Harbour. None of this was known to me when I left school and went to university to study English. There my sense of inferiority at coming from the kind of place that hayseed and yokel jokes were made about was somewhat assuaged by the discovery that being rural was a badge of authenticity in the folksong revival movement that was flourishing on university campuses in the late 1960s.

At the University College of Swansea in Wales, there was a thriving folksong club, and performances there by traveling stars such as Martin Carthy, Nic Jones, the McPeake family, and many others became the highlight of my week. A classmate, Glynis Barnes, seemed to know all these people and, after graduating in the same year I did, 1970, she enrolled in a master’s program at the Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies at the University of Leeds. I went to the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, to take an MA in English, but the Leeds folklore program intrigued me, and in 1971 I was interviewed for entry there by A. E. Green, who had recently returned from being the first hire in the new Folklore Department at Memorial University. He suggested that if I really wanted to study folklore (I thought I did) and also stay in Canada (which also appealed), I should apply to study at Memorial with Halpert.

I completed my degree in Alberta and in September 1972 arrived in St. John’s. After oil-rich Edmonton, the poverty in St. John’s was shocking, and my student stipend was far less: I thought I had made a questionable choice. Halpert seemed ogreish, with no evident respect for my new MA status—in fact, rather the reverse, as he obliged me to take an undergraduate course in anthropology as a corrective. I had naively imagined that folklore studies would be an appreciation of the literary forms of folklore: pastoral imagery in English folksong, perhaps. Halpert disturbed my literary assumptions, as did the other faculty, Neil V. Rosenberg and David J. Hufford. I learned that folktales are not super-organic phenomena floating freely but that they arise from individual narrators in actual communities, where they have real social functions.

Much later the most influential work for me, after Folktales of Newfoundland, was Bengt Holbek’s Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1987). A better choice for his title might have been “magic tale” since “fairy tale” is often taken to mean a sophisticated writer’s appropriation of an oral folktale. The gist of Holbek’s interpretation is that magic tales allowed people to imagine solutions to real-life social problems that were too disruptive to be addressed directly in small agrarian communities—such as when the older generation would give up the “keys of the kingdom,” or control of the farm, so that the young couple could inherit. Of all the many scholarly discussions of oral tales, Holbek’s is the most revelatory and deeply convincing. My questions to Alice were shaped by Holbek’s ideas, and by those of other tale scholars who were similarly impressed by them.

Fortunately for my quest to record magic tales, by 1999 I had been married for fourteen years to Barbara Rieti, another folklorist sojourner in Newfoundland and the author of two classic books on belief and legend in Newfoundland. After our son John was born in 1985, I accompanied her on several of her own field trips for her postdoctoral research on witch belief, later published as Making Witches (2008). Unlike me, Barbara is entirely fearless: there is no door on which she would not knock. She had met Alice during her PhD research on fairy belief and legend in Newfoundland, Strange Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland (1991), and arranged for us to visit Alice at her home in Southeast Placentia. The recordings we made were a joint creation of all three of us: Alice, Barbara, and me. It is very clear on looking at the video of Alice narrating that she tells the stories to Barbara more than to me–at least, that’s the direction of her gaze. So perhaps they are woman to woman, more than to us both, though maybe Alice did not care to look directly into the camera, which was closer to me. Interpretation is always subjective, and I claim no authoritativeness. I was, of course, delighted to be hearing these tales, and to be given her permission to record them and show them in my classes.

Anita Best was one of my most troubling students. I was still early in my teaching career in 1988, conscious of not knowing as much as I should, and of not being a Newfoundlander. And here in my graduate folktale course was Anita, a major singer in the folksong revival scene in Newfoundland and beyond, an accomplished song collector who had already recorded a large group of magic tales from Pius Power Sr., her father-in-law, while living in the outport Southeast Bight. I was in awe of her. For reasons best known to herself, the thesis she planned to write for me never took shape. Over the years I occasionally prodded her to get back to the project, but at last, I am proud to be writing with her as we seek to bring the tales of two remarkable narrators to a wider audience.

Pauline Greenhill

Born in 1955 in Peterborough, Ontario, I grew up with books, music, and fairy tales. As a child I was not a fan of the Grimms’ collection, but I loved all the Andrew Lang color “fairy books.” And I also received the anthology Fairy Tales from Many Lands (Herda 1956) as a gift from my visiting English grandmother in November 1957. My favorite story, the last in the book, was “Clever Brother Hare,” an African tale whose tricky eponymous hero outwits the lion who threatens to eat him, saving not only his own skin but those of his family and many other animals. However, like many other urban Canadians, I thought that fairy tales were only a thing of the past, except when sanitized with all the wicked fun removed by the likes of Walt Disney.

I learned otherwise when I started my MA in folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1977, and that is where I met coauthors Anita and Martin. I continued my studies in the PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin in 1981. There I worked mainly with ballad scholar Roger deV. Renwick, but I also met Kay Turner, with whom I collaborated on Transgressive Tales: Queering The Grimms (2012), which included an article on “Peg Bearskin”—one of the tales included here—written in collaboration with Anita and Emilie Anderson-Grégoire. I have taught women’s and gender studies at the University of Winnipeg since 1991. That university and the department became my intellectual home. Though most of my work on fairy tales continues to look at their uses in all kinds of media, I am secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) happy that this book returns to one of the great enthusiasms of my childhood: stories collected from oral tradition that express a sense of wonder at the world and the beings found therein.

Graham Blair

Before settling down in St. John’s as a full-time printmaker and graphic designer, I completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in cultural anthropology and museum studies at the University of British Columbia. I focused on the anthropology of art, specifically how oral traditions—particularly the magical stories people tell about themselves—are made visually manifest. Much of my research concerned the First Nations of the Northwest Coast and the supernatural creatures and ancestral figures that traditionally adorn everything from totem poles and painted house fronts to ceremonial masks and even wooden feast bowls. But I also looked at contemporary stories told about the miraculous deeds of Hasidic rabbis, Chinese tales of Taoist masters, and Indian folk art representations of the monkey-god Hanuman from the great Indian epic poem the Ramayana.

When I came to Newfoundland to pursue a PhD in 2006, I was exposed to a whole new world of magical tales of the sort found in this book, and I took graduate-level folklore courses with Martin Lovelace as part of my studies. Though my doctorate never materialized, I have continued to work on various projects through the Department of Folklore, the School of Music, and the Research Centre for Music, Media, and Place (MMaP). I was very excited to work on the illustrations for this collection of magical tales because it combines so perfectly my interests and gave me an opportunity to visually explore an imaginatively rich aspect of Newfoundland culture. Who wouldn’t want to draw devils, giants, witches, and dragons?