Reviews for Tales for Jung folk

The average rating for Tales for Jung folk based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-12-06 00:00:00 Jeanine Narouski Note, Aug. 28, 2020: When I read short story collections intermittently over a long period of time, my reactions are similarly written piecemeal, while they're fresh in my mind. That gives the reviews a choppy, and often repetitive, quality. Recently, I had to condense and rearrange one of these into a unified whole because of Goodreads' length limit; and I was so pleased with the result that I decided to give every one of these a similar edit! Accordingly, I've now edited this one. In all, editor Anderson has collected 21 stories here, mostly by British authors --though American fantasy is represented, and Ludwig Tieck was German. The arrangement of the stories here is chronological, and the editor contributes a brief introduction to the book and short historical/ contextual notes prefacing each story. An appendix gives mini-bio/ bibliographical notes for each contributor, and for a few other genre writers from that era. It could be argued that a few of these stories are out of place in a fantasy collection. Hodgson's surprisingly Christ-centered "The Baumoff Explosive" is science fiction --soft SF, but the agency of the protagonist's experience (which proves that it isn't wise for ordinary humans to try to relive Christ's spiritual-psychic experience on the Cross) is clearly natural science, not magic. And there is no clearly speculative element in Haggard's "Black Heart and White Heart: A Zulu Idyll," except for the minor one of a Zulu witch-doctoress who seems to wield some real powers; it's essentially a straightforward, excellent morality tale of adventure, rooted in a solid this-world historical context. (This was my first introduction to Haggard's work, though his major novels have been on my to-read list for a long time; I greatly appreciated his realistic evocation of his setting and his willingness to judge people by their character, not their skin color --the highly admirable hero and heroine here are black and the villain white.) "The Drawn Arrow" by Clemence Housman, though it's set in a historically and geographically unspecified ancient/medieval context, has no speculative element either; it's an emotionally harrowing tale of how absolute power and vanity can corrupt and warp a human being, but magic plays no part in the narrative. And some of the supernatural tales, like Richard Garnett's "The Demon Pope" and Lord Dunsany's "Chu-bu and Sheemish" are set entirely in this world. In fact, though, this isn't strictly a fantasy collection --it's a collection representing works/writers who influenced (or may have influenced) Tolkien, who happened to write fantasy but whose reading was broader, and who was influenced in some ways by writings outside his own preferred genre. Understood that way, the selections make more sense. (Also, while some of the stories, such as Stockton's, ostensibly take place in this world --or at least aren't explicitly set elsewhere-- they make their setting, in effect, a fantasy world, without a clear context in the real world, and with creatures like griffins, ogres and fairies treated as matter-of-fact parts of the fauna. Only two of the stories here are ones I've read before: Frank Stockton's "The Griffin and the Minor Canon," which I heartily like --he's best known for "The Lady or the Tiger?" (which I view as a gyp of the readers), but deserves to be better known for this one-- and Tieck's "The Elves," which in its tone and treatment of the theme reflects the fact that it was intended for children, but can hold the interest of adult readers, too. I didn't read the selection by E. A. Wyke-Smith, which proved to be an excerpt from his 1927 novel The Marvellous Land of Snergs (I prefer to read novels whole, not excerpted). Interestingly, Tolkien read MacDonald's "The Golden Key" at least twice in his life, with a very different reaction. In "On Fairy-stories," he praised the tale as one "of power and beauty" which "succeeded" in making the genre "a vehicle of Mystery." Rereading the work in 1964 as an elderly man, however, his critical judgment of it was the opposite; he now found it "ill-written, incoherent, and bad." (By 1965, he deemed MacDonald's whole corpus unreadable, and faulted the author for excessive preachiness.) Arguably, such a drastic 180-degree turnabout in Tolkien's reaction may say more about changes in his taste over time than about the story (and MacDonald, like E. H. Knatchbull-Huggessen in the following story, "Puss-cat Mew," was writing for children, not for adults in their 70s; both tales are British versions of the German idea of kunstmarchen). But my own judgment of this story would come closer to Tolkien's final opinion than his first. It certainly offers beautiful language and imagery, and originality; and the plot is clearly intended to embody a journey symbolism akin to that of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. But the metaphors are murky, we never get to know and feel the two main characters from inside as real people, and the telescoping of time in the fairy realm detracts from character development and ultimately (to this reader) makes the character's lives seem pointless. IMO, it is not the equal of the author's Phantastes (which I would exempt from Tolkien's harsh dismissal). "Puss-cat Mew," on the other hand, struck me as quite an engaging and entertaining story. The idea was suggested by a 19th-century nursery rhyme (quoted at the outset), but the novel treatment was the author's own. There is definitely some mayhem here (and the hero doesn't object to dispatching man-eating ogres and dwarves while they're unconscious or otherwise helpless --in one case, by bashing the victim's brains out). If you can tolerate that, however, the story offers flashes of dry wit (the tone is firmly tongue-in-cheek --especially since the unnamed narrator supposedly overheard the tale being told to a kitten by an older cat; he speaks animal languages, a couple of generations before Dr. Doolittle. :-)), the triumph of pluck, loyalty and virtue over mean-spirited malevolence, and a chaste romance between a couple you can willingly root for. (Here, as often in the actual folklore of fairies, the latter can be romantically interested in humans, and vice versa.) In fact, in their different ways, no less than three other stories all treat the theme of human man encountering female elf, with resultant romantic interest; but the authors' ways of handling this motif are very different. "The Thin Queen of Elfhame," by James Branch Cabell, is by far the least satisfactory of the trio; it's basically an expression of jaded total cynicism about the very possibility of fulfilling romantic or family relations, because it views the male nature as too inherently flawed to sustain them. But A. Merritt's "The Woman of the Wood" and the Appalachian-set "The Elf Trap" by Francis Stevens (whose real name was Gertrude Barrows Bennett, and whose work I encountered here for the very first time --hopefully not the last!) are powerful, beautiful, poignant and bittersweet masterpieces that fully realize the emotional possibilities of the motif. Andrew Lang's re-telling of "The Story of Sigurd" in modern English follows the outlines of the plot which I had read elsewhere; William Morris' "The Folk of the Mountain Door" (which is actually more of a vivid vignette than a plotted story with conflict and resolution) also evokes an early medieval, pre-Christian atmosphere, with the Old English-infuenced diction that characterizes his fantasy writings. "The Demon Pope" and "The Regent of the North" by Kenneth Morris also have a medieval setting. (The latter, set in Sweden on the cusp of the transition from paganism to Christianity, treats the former respectfully and sympathetically, while not denying the truth claims of the latter, and conveys an understanding of the psychology of some of the pagans who resisted the change, not necessarily for perverse reasons; his treatment of the Norse gods as real persons and Valhalla as a real place isn't incompatible with a Christian world-view, either --though his portrayal of healthy wolves attacking a human is incompatible with what we know about actual lupine behavior. :-)) On the other hand, Baum's "The Enchanted Buffalo," like all his fantasy, has a distinctly American --here, Native American-- flavor, bringing us into a realm of the supposed early world where anthropomorphic animals could talk, creating a tale reminiscent of the Indian mythology on which its clearly modeled; and Lord Dunsany's story takes place in an unspecified Third World milieu, probably Asian. (That story, too, presents pagan gods as "real" in a sense; the idols are sentient, and wield some power --but their power is so minute, and used in the service of such petty jealousy, that they come across as pathetic and ridiculous; and that's quite probably the perspective with which many ancient Hebrews, faithful to Yahweh, would have viewed them.) Buchan's "The Far Islands" (my first introduction to his work, too!) is set in the author's own time --but it suggests that beyond our everyday world, there are other dimensions that only some people are favored to see. "The Coming of the Terror" is actually a condensed version of Machen's novella The Terror (1916; original title, The Great Terror), the version Century Magazine created for the first American printing in 1917. Machen himself, however, allowed that their shortening of the original, which I haven't read, was done "with a skill that was really remarkable;" and I would say that for achieving the effect of concentrated terror (it's well-titled, believe me!), the length here is perfect. It's not really a work of fantasy (it's set in England, against the brooding, paranoid backdrop of World War I, mostly in the mountain-hemmed, lonely country valleys of a remote Welsh county), but since the lethal goings-on are never definitively explained --that's part of the horror, of course, as Machen well understood!-- it's hard to define the genre; the narrator's preferred psycho-spiritual explanation doesn't involve magic as such, but is so mystical that science-fiction purists wouldn't be apt to claim it either. (It's certainly not in the "hard" SF tradition.) What it is, though, is a very effective work (more effective, IMO, than the better-known "The Great God Pan," my only previous introduction to Machen's work) of mounting, claustrophobic horror, with a good philosophical point at the end. David Lindsay's "A Christmas Play" is indeed a play (though not really about Christmas --that day just happens to provide the setting), but it can be read like fiction; written apparently in the 1930s but never published or performed before, it's printed here for the first time. It's a sweet, delightful modern literary fairy tale of moral testing and virtue rewarded, perfectly crafted by the author. (I never got far into his novel A Voyage to Arcturus, being completely unable to get into it; but this shows a whole different side to his creativity. Altogether, this is an outstanding collection that I'd enthusiastically recommend! There's also a companion volume, Tales Before Narnia, which collects fantasy that may have influenced C. S. Lewis; I'm hoping eventually to read (and review) it as well.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-12-28 00:00:00 David Kelleher I really like this book. It is the sort where I don't feel I have to painstakingly read every story if one isn't the sort I like. A quick skimming is perfectly adequate to give me the gist. I've been surprised at how many of the stories I have enjoyed and how many have a fresh, modern feel considering how old they are (most from 1919 and earlier). I also enjoy the author's story introductions and the fact that he doesn't try to force the idea that Tolkien read each of these or that each influenced him. It is enough that this is the fantasy atmosphere which was floating around during his formative and reading years before he began writing.