The Watkins Book of English Folktales

With a foreword by Neil Gaiman, this comprehensive, entertaining and authentic collection of English folktales is perfect for fans of Madeline Miller, Philip Pullman and the Brothers Grimm.

This is a golden treasury of over one hundred English folktales captured in the form they were first collected in past centuries. Read these classic tales as they would have been told when storytelling was a living art – when the audience believed in boggarts and hobgoblins, local witches and will-o’-the-wisps, ghosts and giants, cunning foxes and royal frogs. Find “Jack the Giantkiller”, “Tom Tit Tot” and other quintessentially English favourites, alongside interesting borrowings, such as an English version of the Grimms’ “Little Snow White” – as well as bedtime frighteners, including “Captain Murderer”, as told to Charles Dickens by his childhood nurse.

Neil Philip has provided a full introduction and source notes on each story that illustrate each tale’s journey from mouth to page, and what has happened to them on the way. These tales rank among the finest English short stories of all time in their richness of metaphor and plot and their great verbal dash and daring.

Neil Philip is a writer, folklorist and poet. Among his many books are The Cinderella Story, Mythology (with Philip Wilkinson),The New Oxford Book of Children's Verse, The Tale of Sir Gawain and The Adventures of Odysseus. Neil has contributed to numerous journals, including The Times and Signal: Approaches to Children's Books, and has also written for stage, screen and radio. His work has won the Aesop Award of the American Folklore Society and the Literary Criticism Book Award of the Children's Literature Association.