This is a big, big book. Big in volume. Big in price. But big in value, too.

For some reason, the study of British folk tales was slow to catch on. Charles Perrault in France and the Grimms in Germany came long before Joseph Jacobs compiled the first serious collection of English folktales. This lack meant that there was never a collection as substantial as that of the Grimms. Katherine Briggs changed that. She gathered up just about everything in this multi-volume work, organizing the tales into categories and then arranging them by title within the categories.

That by itself would have been important enough, but she also classified them by motifs (based on the Aarne-Thompson motif set) and indexed them on this basis. And she listed parallel versions, allowing the user of the dictionary to find the materials not included in the book.

The result is one of the greatest references on folklore in the English language. If the works of Stith Thompson are the first thing anyone should acquire (and they probably are), this book has a very strong claim to be second. You'll quickly learn to work around the few minor defects it has. ( )

Folklore, Folio Society, Multi-volume Set ( )