Lays and Legends of the English Lake Country

White, John Pagen, -1868Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.9
Word count
553K words
Chapters
56

Tags

English Originals Folk Literature Lakeside ScenesNature ObservationPoetic NarrativeTraditional Aesthetics19th CenturyLocal LegendsFolk CustomsFolk LegendEnglish CountrysideMusical Rhythm

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Lays and Legends of the English Lake Country by John Pagen WhiteAuthor: White, John Pagen, -1868,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Feb 8, 2015

Editor's review

This book is a collection of ballads and legends from the English Lake Country, gathered and edited by John Pagen White, and belongs to the literature of English letters. The Lake Country is renowned for its natural scenery and local legends; this volume sets verse narratives alongside folk tales, preserving the nineteenth-century literary interest in collecting local traditions: here are traces of lake and mountain scenery and historical figures, as well as supernatural tales and local memory. For Chinese readers, its value lies in offering a sample of "regional literature," to be read against the works of the Lake Poets and to observe how folk narrative was transcribed by men of letters. The language is verse, its rhythm and diction bearing the marks of its age; it suits slow reading and selected reading, and need not be read straight through. As a public-domain ebook, it is also convenient for searching place names and titles, and serves as supplementary material for comparative literature or folklore studies.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the table of contents and choose pieces tied to Lake District place names and figures; there is no need to read straight through.
  2. Read the verse aloud to feel its rhythm and rhyme, then return to the notes and background explanations.
  3. Compare the same legend with related works by the Lake Poets, noting differences between literary reworkings and folk versions.
  4. Look up unfamiliar place names on a map first; reading the stories after building a sense of space will go more smoothly.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56

FAQ

Does this book contain poems or stories? Both. It consists mainly of verse ballads but also includes local legends and narrative pieces; it is a compilation of regional literature assembled by a man of letters, not a collection of a single genre, so each piece may be approached according to its nature.
Do I need to know about the Lake Poets first? Systematic study is not necessary, but a basic background in Wordsworth and the other Lake Poets helps. This book focuses on folk ballads and legends and forms a contrast with the Lake Poets' literary work; readers may read the pieces first and supplement the background afterward.
What if the English verse is difficult to read? Read titles and summaries first to judge the content, then choose short pieces and read them slowly line by line, using a dictionary for archaic words. Reading aloud helps grasp the rhythm; difficult allusions may be skipped for the moment and notes and background materials consulted afterward.
Is it suitable as material for folklore research? It can be used as a sample of nineteenth-century literary collection of local traditions, but note that it was reworked by a man of letters and is not fully equivalent to field records. Researchers should state the source of the edition and use it alongside more systematic ethnographic materials.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

White, John Pagen, -1868 Author

John Pagen White (White, John Pagen, -1868) was a nineteenth-century English writer whose life is poorly documented in publicly available sources; his year of death survives in author records, while the rest of his career can no longer be reliably established. Only one work by him is extant, Lays and Legends of the English Lake Country, which takes the landscapes and local traditions of the English Lake District as its subject and casts them in the form of lays and legends, blending natural scenery with folk narrative. Such writing reflects the Victorian appetite for regional places and local lore, and it preserves a valuable text for later readers interested in the Lake District's legends and literary imagination. Because sources are scarce, details of his life, the full scope of his work, and his contemporary influence cannot be described in any detail; researchers can only make tentative inferences from this single work and the limited author records.