A Cavalcade of Goblins

by Alan Garner, Krystyna Turska (Illustrator)

From the first edition dust are goblins and demons, ghost, boggarts and dragons, dream creatures and wondrous beings from folklore, myth and legend; some heroic, some monstrous, some eerie, and some absurd - but all of them fascinating. Alan Garner, deservedly renowned as one of the most imaginative of all writers for young people, has explored widely in the realm of the magical, the supernatural and the inexplicable to assemble this distinctive collection of poems and stories. He has retold many of the traditional tales himself and complemented them with several modern poems. Perhaps the most unusual item of all is the story from the great Hindu epic Ramayana, so full of vivid happenings and fantastic characters that it sweeps the reader into a new and exotic world.The book includes stories from all over the world, from Russia, Wales, India, Japan, America and many other countries. Alan Garner provides riches indeed in a collection which is unfailingly entertaining and full of good things, discerningly chosen, and embellished with his own introduction, comments and notes.The many moods of the stories are reflected by the artist, Krystyna Turska, who has matched the remarkable range of the anthology with equally remarkable and distinguished illustrations.

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories, Childrens, Anthologies, Poetry, Folklore, Mythology

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Alan Garner OBE (born 17 October 1934) is an English novelist who is best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. His work is firmly rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.

Born into a working-class family in Congleton, Cheshire, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as 'The Edge', where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region. Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the nearby village of Blackden, where he bought and renovated an Early Modern building known as Toad Hall. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, was published in 1960. A children's fantasy novel set on the Edge, it incorporated elements of local folklore in its plot and characters. Garner completed a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), but left the third book of the trilogy he had envisioned. Instead he produced a string of further fantasy novels, Elidor (1965), The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973).

Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced The Stone Book Quartet (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984) and A Bag of Moonshine (1986). In his subsequent novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work. In 2012, he finally published a third book in the Weirdstone trilogy.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Garner

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly not about goblins, just a collection of supernatural tales (folk, fairy, myth, short story) that Garner liked.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a true book of wonder. It's an anthology mingling folklore and mythology, religious scripture, historical references, and poetry. Rather than a random hodgepodge, this combination has been skillfully woven into a cohesive work reflecting a magical worldview. Garner's adaptions of works from other sources are beautifully written and designed, and the writing of others -- mostly well-known poets like Wallace Stevens and Stevie Smith -- takes on new significance and mystery when placed in this context.

And mystery is at the heart of this book. I can't say how many times I have read and re-read this book, finding new depth and resonance each time. It is one of those rare gems one fortunately encounters in childhood and which continues to gain in depth as one matures. But there are passages I do not understand, and I doubt I ever will. Many of the stories are the products of world-views that are fundamentally alien to me, and therein lies much of this book's beauty -- it reveals the past as another world, one that can only be perceived from a distance.

The wide range of sources for the folkloric and scriptural material could be regarded as a model of multiculturalism. There is an emphasis on the British, Native American, and Japanese traditions, but this was also where I was first exposed to the Ramayana. This book has been around for a while now, but it still reads as fresh, astonishing, and frequently chilling. As a writer, I've been able to spook some pretty tough crowds, but there are passages in this which still chill me, despite their familiarity.

This is not a book for everyone, but there are few works as genuinely magical as this one. Very highly recommended.

[P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Halfway through reading this I stopped to buy a used copy because it's such a good collection. Although some stories aren't STRICTLY GOBLIN, I'm not going to let that stop me from enjoying them. Most of them I'd never read (though I'm no repository of folktale).

I mean, listen to THIS:

"...a huge beast sprang up in the island, and raced round about the island. To Maleduin it seemed swifter than the wind. And then it went to the height of the island, and there it performed the trick known as 'straightening of body', that is, its head below and its feet above; and so it continued; it turned in its skin, that is, the flesh and bones revolved, but the skin outside was unmoved. Or at another time the skin outside turned like a mill, both bones and flesh unmoved. When it had been doing this for a long while, it sprang up again and raced about the island, as it had done at first. Then it returned to the same place; and that time the lower half of its skin stayed still, and the other half above ran round and round like a millstone. That, then was its practice when it was going round the island."

(I did skip the condensed Ramayana because I have tried to read versions of that epic many times and have never gotten into it)

[Zahra Saedi · Rating 3 out of 5]

این کتاب جزو کتاب‌های اصطلاحا دم دستی‌ام بود. یک روز وقتی در چاپخانه معطل بودم، از طاقچه خریدم و شروعش کردم و بعد هر بار وقت گیر آوردم کمی خواندم.
کتاب مجموعه‌ای از افسانه‌های فرهنگ‌های متفاوت است، داستان‌های انگلیسی و ایرلندی غالب هستند اما مثلا داستان رامایانا، افسانه مشهور هندی هم در کتاب گنجانده شده. به جز داستان شعرهایی هم وسط کتاب آورده شده که من چندان دوست‌شان نداشتم. خود داستان‌ها هم اغلب درمورد پیروزی قهرمانان است اما گهگاه دیوها یا سرنوشت پیروز می‌شوند و پایان همه داستان‌ها شاد نیست.
از آنجا که زبان داستان‌ها ساده است به نظرم برای کودکان هم جذاب و مناسب است.

[Capn]

PUFFIN BOOKS
Editor: Kaye Webb
A Book of Goblins

'The woman stood in the middle of the floor. She was dressed in white, and had white hair. She opened her eyes with a small stick, and the upper eyelid fell back over her head like a hat.
'"I am two hundred and nintey winters," she said, "and I serve nine masters, and the house in which you stand is haunted by demons."'
This sinister old woman from the Japanese legend 'The Goblin Spider' is just one of the extraordinary beings Alan Garner has gathered in this anthology. In it you will meeet such oddities as Bash Tchelik, the winged Russian demon who could overcome whole armies, and Yallery Brown, the tiny, malignant old man who brought misery to the boy who helped him, and the man of snow who wed the Red Indian chief's daughter.
Awkward, capricious, inexplicable creatures they are, a law unto themselves and most of them ill company, striking an other-worldly chill when they interfere with human affairs, bringing disaster with them all too often.
Alan Garner has had a lifelong interest in myths and legends, and this collection of stories reflects both the width of his reading and his own very individual taste. An excellent book for anyone else who likes to travel a little beyond reality and enjoy a few shivers and shudders.
For readers of ten and over.

Contents:
Prayer John Day
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Gobbleknoll
John Connu Rider Andrew Salkey
Vukub-Cakix
Tops or Bottoms
The Voyage of Maelduin
The Fort of Rathangan translated by Kuno Meyer
Willow
The Term William Carlos Williams
Edward Frank and the Friendly Cow
Yallery Brown
Moowis
The Snow Man Wallace Stevens
The Lady of the Wood
A Voice Speaks from the Well George Peele
Bash Tchelik
The Dark Guest Ernest George Moll
The Goblin Spider
To the Tengu Goblins
The Secret Commonwealth Alan Garner
The Piper of Shacklow
The Adventures of Nera
A Letter
Halloween
Great Head and the Ten Brothers
The Trade that No One Knows
A Charm against Witches
Tarn Wethelan
All in Green went My Love Riding E E Cummings
Hoichi the Earless
Meeting in the Road translated by Arthur Waley
Ramayama
In the Strange Isle Michael Roberts
The Smoker
The River God (Of the River Mimram in Herfordshire) Stevie Smith
Wild Worms and Swooning Shadows Alan Garner
Loki
Baldur the Bright
The Beast Brian Patten
Glooskap
A Game Fleur Adcock
The Green Mist
Notes
Sources

[Anastasia Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading reviews, I think misunderstand the title of this collection. A goblin is not strictly the little creatures we now associate with fantasy imagery. While those are one type of goblin, "goblin" is also a catch-all term for any being that is mischievous and/or malevolent (those goblins don't truly act out of malevolence because morals are a human construct-they just "act").

So, while there are some tales in this collection that Western readers will find to be more of a straightforward notion of a goblin, mostly all the stories and poems are connected by encounters with beings that are tricky and nasty and frightening.

I found it to be an excellent collection and I plan to buy a used copy so I can come back to these deeply rich and complex examples of folklore from a variety of cultures.

[Richard Pierse · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this book is a bit of a misnomer. Unlike its companion books (A Book of Giants, A Book of Princesses etc.) this is not just a collection of stories featuring goblins. Instead, it is a wide-ranging collection of stories from mythologies around the world, including North American Indian, Japanese, Indian (a compressed version of the Ramayana) and Norse as well as stories from the British Isles. Most of the stories feature demons, witches or other supernatural creatures of some sort, though very few actually feature goblins. For me, the most interesting are the least well-known, though all are very well retold by the editor Alan Garner. The original sources are listed at the end of the book.

[Alec]

Took me a while to finish; I didn't want to binge through these stories a light speed as many of them are very old and worth spending a bit of time with. The title is quite misleading, although we do get treated to a few boggarts and goblins from other cultures, Garner also includes some really random and obscure stories that have nothing to do with them. One of my favourites was the Voyage of Maleduin, which is like an easier to read Gaelic version of The Odyssey. There were some really nice ghost fables from Japan that have reminded me I should probably pick up those Lafcadio Hearn stories soon. Nicely referenced in the back of the novel so you can explore some of the works further if you desire.

[S.J. McKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yallery Brown is one of the finest of the English folktales. I know this because I read it in Alan Garner's miscellany, A Book of Goblins, and he told me so. And I'd trust him to know.

It would be nice, to be in a position where you could put out a personal miscellany and it would get published...

[Grant Thomas]

A collection of poems, rhymes, and stories all about Goblins. I wonder if any are true.

[Rodney Sloan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goblins? More like witches, giants, tengu, dragons, faeries, and everything else. Oh, and some goblins. This is a real grab-bag of folklore, but it's worth reading just for that. The stories vary a lot, not only in their origin, but also in the language, length, and subject matter. Some hidden gems in here that I've not yet encountered elsewhere.

[Vasha7 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some fine things in this children's book, including a contribution from the editor.