Afterword

HAVE WE REACHED THE END? WERE PIUS AND Alice the last storytellers in Newfoundland to tell fairy tales in a completely oral tradition? It is seductive to folklorists to believe they have witnessed, and recorded for posterity, the very last of anything; it can be self-aggrandizing, and a guess that often proves wrong. Nothing would please us more than to hear of other narrators in Newfoundland who continue in this tradition. The original contexts for performance, however, have disappeared. Forecastles of vessels, labor camps, and certainly most households have access to modern media. The imaginative space once taken up by tales is now shared with television, movies, novels, and other popular culture forms. The process has been going on for decades. Gerald Thomas noticed in the 1970s that the Port-au-Port narrators Blanche Ozon and Angela Kerfont tended to shorten the fairy tales they were telling him whenever it neared time for “the four o’clock story,” as they called the television soap operas they enjoyed (1992, 49). As early as 1966 Allan Oake, who had the largest repertoire in Folktales of Newfoundland, told John Widdowson that he rarely told stories anymore, only occasionally when a young fellow asked him (Halpert and Widdowson 1996, 2). While the private, or family, storytelling tradition continued longer, as with Alice, by the 1990s Pius was probably one of very few to continue the community as well as family storytelling tradition.

The fairy tale in Newfoundland, while possibly still being told rather than read in some families, is now well into its “second life” (Carrassi 2017, 3–4) as a more self-conscious and public performance. As is often remarked, folklore tends to be recognized and celebrated when it is perceived as dying out. Festivals have raised awareness of storytelling as an art form and Alice was sought out to perform alongside professional narrators. Her book Fables, Fairies & Folklore (1991), written with her brother Michael, was already part of the process in which tale-telling became a recognized element of cultural heritage. While several talented storytellers have emerged in Newfoundland and Labrador in the twenty-first century, it is unlikely that any are telling fairy tales that they learned through oral transmission, as opposed to published or archived examples.

An exception is Anita, who tells some of Pius’s tales, and to a degree the actor Andy Jones, who has developed a series of stories from Folktales of Newfoundland into stage performances using puppets. These are brilliant interpretations, full of subversive humor. Jones listened to Halpert and Widdowson’s field tapes in the Folklore and Language Archive at Memorial University and no doubt hears the voices of the original tellers while he narrates his own versions (Jones 2003, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2016). He has embodied the tales, taken them into himself, just as Pius did from his sources and Alice from her grandmother. They are now “his” to tell and he continues the tradition, even though the “handing over,” of which Noyes (2009) wrote, happened via audiotapes of tellers long dead. Jones respects the beautiful language of the original tellers recorded in the 1960s and 1970s. Pius’s and Alice’s tales likewise hold intrinsic value as a record of the artful way English has been spoken in Newfoundland.

Nevertheless, there is a difference when a tale is performed from a stage to a separated audience who are strangers to each other and the performer. The tale told in a kitchen or on a schooner was “bespoke”; it fitted its listeners in a way that no mass-produced garment ever could. Of course, the fit is closest when a tale is told in the family. In the “Black Bull” Kitty was a tomboy, as the listening Alice was, and the grandmother in the tale fretted about the girls’ happiness, as Mary Strang McCarthy must have done when thrust into the role of guardian after Alice’s mother died. Tales spoke to their tellers as well as their listeners.

In the more public contexts of Pius’s storytelling, where relatives and other members of a small community would gather in the kitchen, traditionally a space anyone could enter without invitation, the tales could still fit their hearers quite intimately. When Pius told of the “Maid’s” strategy to outwit her suitors, holding the shovel, the latch, and the calf’s tail, real-life local episodes came to mind. Anita’s journal for May 31, 1980, records:

After we had a game of cards [two local women we’ll call Y and Z] started talking about [X] and his night rambles. Apparently he often gets half drunk and visits women whose husbands are away. [Y] told how he came to her place one night, “not half so drunk as he made out,” and started to make advances. After a while she thought of a way to get him out of the house—she told him she’d get him a cup of tea first, only she had no water. She asked him to go to the well for her. As soon as she got him outside the house, she locked the door and turned off the lights. He couldn’t very well attract attention by banging on the door, so he went on his way. We all found the story hilarious, especially Mr. Power.

Pius could use a tale to make an oblique moral commentary on someone’s behavior, a point that wouldn’t be lost on his local hearers. With the more recent willingness to speak out, even in small rural communities, against spousal abuse and sexual violence, the coded criticism of such behavior is less necessary; things can be said openly. It would be good to think that this important function of fairy tales is declining. But taking on the broader popular culture of our time remains a relevant use for these stories. Jones’s adaptation of “Peg Bearskin” skewers the preoccupation with women’s appearance by having the Prince transform at the end of the story into someone “just as big, ugly and hairy as Peg” (2003, n.p.). But the oral tale in its natural small-group context has a flexibility in its text and a directness of address to individual hearers that are simply not available to theatrical performers playing to a wider audience. Public storytelling from a stage can be inspirational, cathartic, as each of us listeners becomes lost in the tale, and all credit to those who perform tales in more formal settings. But it is not the same thing as the kitchen tale.

This is an observation, not a criticism. What is sad is that something has died out of the world without the great majority of people knowing that it ever existed, or what they have lost. Even beyond North America and Europe the oral fairy tale is challenged by bourgeois prejudice. In Calcutta, for example, middle-class parents prefer that grandmothers not tell their children the embarrassing old fairy tales they learned in the villages when they were young; rather, they should read to them from versions of the Grimms’ tales, or even Disney. Thereby they expect their children will gain cultural capital that will smooth their way into international business (Roy 2013).

That we are never at the end of things, but always in transition, is an idea that works well in considering the life of the fairy tale. It is changing, as it always has, but its themes will continue, though in new media and new contexts, for as long as people need its help in imagining their way out of adversity. We hope you have enjoyed this encounter with two remarkable narrators who cherished and renewed these transformative tales.