TALES FROM CORNWALL
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6. The Tailed Man Of Cornwall 45
The Editor's page
If you had been reading AMAZING STORIES monthly and quarterly, and WEIRD TALES in 1928, and added SCIENCE WONDER STORIES and AIR WONDER STORIES to your list when they appeared in the newsstands in 1929, then you would have thought you knew what to expect when you picked up the October 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES and saw the title, The Battle of the Toads, by David H. Keller on the contents page. And you would have been astonished; for here readers saw a different sort of story, written in a different manner from such powerful tales as The Revolt of the Pedestrians, The Menace, and The Human Termites (still running in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES at that moment). There la a touch of grue, to be sure; but the manner is light, almost whimsical. And the following two issues brought The Tiled Man of Cornwall and No Other Man, so that there was no doubt that we had a series here.
But only one more “Cornwall” story appeared in WEIRD TALES: The Bride Well in the October 1930 issue; eight years later, The Thirty And One, was published in the November 1938 issue of MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES; three years after that, The Key to Cornwall appeared in the February 1941 issue of STIRRING SCIENCE STORIES. And that apparently was all we would see.
For some time, readers have been urging me to see if I could obtain the rights to reprint this series; and Sam Moskowitz and others told me that there were a number of unpublished tales in the series. That turned out to be an understatement: what we have is a full book-length collection of stories, each complete in itself, but running chronologically. The title of the book is Tales From Cornwall, A History of the Hubelaires.
These are tales, rich in legend and folklore rather than tightly plotted stories, although some of them certainly have plots in the commercial fiction sense. There is, as I mentioned above, a touch of the grue-some in them, but after a few we find a light, whimsical touch-never the heavy-handed sort of slapstick which burlesques the medium itself. A child can listen to them or read them with the same sort of open-mouthed wonder that a child finds in the famous fairy tales, while an adult can enjoy them and see something more. And I suppose, if you really insist upon doing so, you can apply various elements of various psychopathic theories to them too; in some quarters, this constitutes the acme of literary sophistication. (Of course, where such procedures actually help you to understand yourself and your fellow human beings better, this is all to the good; I do not either decry or demean such exploration with that purpose — but I don't think the activity has anything to do with sort of enrichment one can receive from enjoying a story simply for what it is on its literary surface.)
Fairy tales have been under assault for some time, but I am reminded of some comments that the late C. S. Lewis made in relation to them and to their supposed morbid effect upon tiny tots, their alleged damage to the child’s capacity for relating to "reality”. He notes that he himself enjoyed such stories thoroughly as a child, but never found that they distorted his perceptions or understanding of the "real” world. What he did find damaging was the so-called "proper" stories about "real life and real people” told to children, for these gave positively false pictures of the world in which we actually live, among people as they actually are. In other words, enjoying fairy stories did not result in his encountering any nasty shocks later in life, but believing what adults told him in stories "proper for children" resulted in many nasty shocks when he learned the truth. And looking back on it from my own personal experience, I find that what was upsetting to me about Grimm, etc., was not the stories themselves, but the fearful attitude of adults who were sure that I would be greatly harmed by such stories, and their anxiety-ridden attempts to assure themselves that I had not been totally led astray; while finding out, as I grew older, that I had been systematically lied to by teachers, both so-called religious and secular, about the world as I actually would encounter it, was traumatic. So much then for the case against fairy tales.
The first story in Dr. Keller’s series, The Oak Tree, is dated 200 B. C., when Folkes-King Eric rules in Wearfold, Norway, and Olaf is Lord of the House of the Wolves at Jutland. The family name will not be changed to "Hubelaire” until 57 B. C. With each story, we will present a section of the “argument with dates” relating to preceding tales. And we shall find, in this presentation that Dr. Keller prepared before he died, that the six previously published tales did not appear in chronological order. However, I shan’t say any more here, for if you have read any of them before, that would infringe upon your pleasure of finding them in the proper place.
RAWL
ARGUMENT FROM DATES
200 B. C. Folkes-King Eric rules in Wearfold, Norway. Olaf is Lord of the House of the Wolves in Jutland.
190 B. C. Balder, son of Olaf, is born.
189 B. C. Thyra, daughter of Eric, is born.
171 B. C. Balder, adventures to Wearfold, kills a giant and married Thyra.
170 B. C. Holga, oldest son of Balder, is born.
140 B. C. Odin, only son of Holga, is born.
100 B. C. The Wolves are driven from Jutland by the Norsemen. Balder is transmuted into at oak tree. Under the command of Lord Holga the Wolves sail southwest and find a new home in Armorica.
99 B. C. Harold, son of Odin, is born.
77 B. C. Edward, son of Harold, is born.
58 B. C. Edward adventures to the east and marries an eagle. She lays an egg, hatches a boy, changes to a woman and calls her son Cecil.
57 B. C. Caesar invades Gaul. The Wolves flee to Cornwall. Lord Harold dies and his son Edward becomes Lord. The family name is changed to Hubelaire.
43 A. D. Claudius conquers most of England and builds the Hadrian Wall.
350 A. D. The Romans are driven from England.