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    The Riddle in the Tale: Riddles and Riddle Folk Tales
    The Riddle in the Tale: Riddles and Riddle Folk Tales
    The Riddle in the Tale: Riddles and Riddle Folk Tales
    Ebook140 pages56 minutes

    The Riddle in the Tale: Riddles and Riddle Folk Tales

    By Taffy Thomas, Steven Gregg and Michael Rosen

    ()

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    About this ebook

    We have been fascinated by riddles for as long as we have had language – think of the legend of the sphinx in Greek mythology.This wonderful book includes both magical riddle tales and simple challenges, with clues and answers hidden in intricate illustrations. Discover how the farmer saved his daughter by solving the fairies’ riddles or how the old hen-wife helped the two brothers solve the mystery of their father’s will. Have a read – you’ll be hooked.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateNov 1, 2017
    ISBN9780750986373
    The Riddle in the Tale: Riddles and Riddle Folk Tales
    Author

    Taffy Thomas

    TAFFY THOMAS is a professional storyteller who gives around 300 storytelling performances across the country each year. One of the UK’s most loved storytellers, he was made an MBE in the 2000 New Year’s Honours List for services to storytelling and charity. In 2000-2011 he became the first laureate for storytelling, a role created to promote the power of stories. Taffy is the artistic director of the Northern Centre for Storytelling in Grasmere and the author of three collections of folk tales for The History Press. He lives in Grasmere, Ambleside.

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      Book preview

      The Riddle in the Tale - Taffy Thomas

      Rosen

      INTRODUCTION

      How to write an introduction to this, my latest book, now that’s a riddle in itself. Perhaps I’ll go back to basics and keep it simple.

      This is my collection of riddles and tales from the oral tradition where each tale is built around a riddle or a collection of riddles.

      I think that riddles first came into my life in my childhood in the 1950s. We pulled each other’s legs with them in the school playground and read them on tiny slips of paper that spilled from crackers at the Christmas dinner table. My own father gently teased me by asking me how many beans make five? The answer, of course, is ‘a bean and a half and half a bean, a bean and a quarter and a quarter bean, a half a bean and a whole bean’. Smiling, he would tell me to add that up; you may choose to do likewise. Annoyingly he was right!

      You see, for a riddle to work you need three people: a person who knows it, a person who can answer it, and, for maximum comic effect, a person who gets it wrong. Don’t worry, riddles aren’t important; but, as Mahatma Gandhi once wrote: ‘Everything we do is unimportant, but it’s really important we keep doing it.’ Eight hundred years before Gandhi wrote that, Leofric, the first bishop of Exeter, deemed them important enough to leave the manuscript for the Exeter Riddles Book on his death in 1072.

      As a storyteller performing live I regularly tell my audiences I need their brains as well as their ears. Often a riddle can hook an audience and secure instant inclusion and participation. For some of my more archaic riddles, i.e. catkin or harebell, younger readers or listeners may have to work intergenerationally. As a proud grandparent I welcome this communication between young and old, and hope you do too.

      What of my sources? As a jobbing storyteller I mainly gather my stories from a living oral tradition, although occasionally I collect from ‘guru google’, old books or wherever stories are shared. As a fellow patron of the Society for Storytelling once wrote, ‘all storytellers are honest thieves’.

      I often say ‘stories have legs’ – so do riddles! As far as my ageing brain allows I include the sources of each tale in their introductions. However, some of this material, gleaned over fifty years, has rolled off my tongue so many times and in so many places that its route to me has been lost in the mists of time. My hope is that this collection is fun for my readers.

      But what of the answers? In the tales most answers are revealed as part of the narrative. For the answers to the riddle sections, their answers are there visually in illustrator Steven Gregg’s beautiful title pages. If you come across a really tough riddle, the chances are that the one that follows will be much simpler. Read the tales, but share the riddle pages with others. If you are still stuck, the last section in the book is an answers page. But as long as you know how many beans make five, you’ll be all right.

      Taffy Thomas

      The Storyteller’s House, Ambleside 2017

      Whenever I can, I start

      my performance set of

      riddle stories with a

      version of this song, often

      sung by my daughter.

      Wherever we include it,

      it never fails to

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