Reviews

Welsh Folk Tales by Peter Stevenson

vertellerpaul's review against another edition

3.0

A fairly good collection of folktale material from Wales. Several stories are not actually stories, but history lessons or collections of sightings of particular creatures or very short descriptions of idiosyncratic Welshmen. Some stories are difficult to understand, because they're told in a strangely convoluted way.
And there are some gems of stories. Not a great book, but a nice enough read.

rupertowen's review against another edition

2.0

At first this seemed like a good idea. However, by the end I found myself in a blur of anecdotal, sometimes mythological, other times authorial passages which, although having chaptered themes, began to lose its pep. The author dips in and out of elucidation and sometimes I felt a bit disconcerted as how much the author had contributed to the telling of each piece and how much was "verbatim" from the sources from whence they came. In that I didn't want to read Welsh Folk Tales as told by Peter Stevenson, I wanted some background on who told the story and where it came from.

To be honest, the book for me was less a folk compendium and more a periodical assortment of loose tales. Having said that, it is still worth a read if you have an interest on the subject as it may introduce many myths and folktales that may otherwise remain unknown.