A Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes

by Helen Creighton

These are the folk tales from Dr. Helen Creighton's life journey through the Maritime provinces, collecting songs and ghost stories and old cures and folk tales, Helen serves as our guide, introducing us to storytellers, setting the scene of the telling--and then she lets the person tell it as they told it to her. Some are long, really miraculous folk tales, others are the brief riddle or the tantalizing quick-telling that a folklorist can expect along the way. Helen kept it all. Read as a whole, the reality and intensity of those smaller pieces reveals their value in among the more finished, well-told tales.

249 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Dr. Helen Creighton was a prominent Canadian folklorist. She collected 4,000 traditional songs, stories, and myths in a career that spanned several decades and published many books and articles on Nova Scotia folk songs and folklore. She received numerous honorary degrees and was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1976

She and her family lived in Dartmouth, through the nearby Halifax explostion. Being a young lady through the two wars, boarding military officers and couples, she was inspired to serve but with medical ineligibility, became an ambulance driver helping doctors and dentists bring medical care to remote regions. She travelled extensively out of Canada, with the Author's Association as well as to visit her medical doctor brother; including English instruction in Mexico.

Loyal to the rustic and remote providers of her wealth of songs and stories, Dr. Creighton got several of them on television and radio, proudly delivering royalties to them. She kept her parents' home, shared with borders who were like family.

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sixty-seven presented folk tales in A Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes (originally published in 1993 and with all of the featured accounts gleaned from Helen Creighton’s personal journey through the Maritime Provinces of Canada, collecting songs, stories, superstitions, folk remedies etc.) are definitely interesting and in my humble opinion also generally more than sufficiently engaging (and indeed, this certainly and nicely pertains equally to both longer and shorter tales, and even to those accounts that exist in A Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes as merely choppy fragments, as incomplete snippets of longer thematics and motifs).

And yes, I do very much appreciate that Creighton's collected stories for A Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes have not been stylistically edited, altered or polished, that she is presenting them as is so-to-speak, read pretty much verbatim as to how Helen Creighton was originally told these tales (and not specifically meant for children either, but rather for and told in mixed companies of both adults and children), with Creighton also serving as the reader's guide guide for A Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes, introducing both storytellers and their accounts to her audience, and basically letting each of the tellers relate story or stories in the same manner as they were originally recounted (and with Dr. Creighton as a folklorist and collector therefore and delightfully, wonderfully reminding me of 19th century German collector Franz Xaver von Schönwerth and how his unstylised and unedited collection of Upper Palatinate folklore reads as considerably more earthy and authentically rural than the repeatedly polished and also rather urban Kinder- und Hausmärchen of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm).

Five stars for how everything Helen Creighton has been told while out collecting and recording her stories has (supposedly) been pretty much completely transferred into A Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes and has not been rendered more "readable" and more supposedly child friendly, and yes, the stories do not at all feel stylised and which I have found and do find marvellous and pleasantly surprising (as these unadorned and not rewritten and changed folktale accounts are not only glorious but also far more often the exception rather than the rule). But yes, I do (and even with my reading pleasure regarding A Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes) have to lower my rating to our stars, as I do wish Michael Taft and Ronald Caplan's introduction could be a bit more solidly folkloric in nature, would list thematic motifs and ATU numbers where applicable and would also include a list of titles for further reading (and research).

[Courtney Boal]

Didn’t need to add this to Goodreads did I