1The tales that appear in this volume were collected during the winter of 1983 from Mrs Angela Kerfont in Cape St George, Newfoundland.

2Mrs Angela Kerfont is now eighty years old. For a long time she has been a famous storyteller in the community of Cape St George, although she never considered she was. As a matter of fact her main occupation was that of many a woman living in this rather desolate area. She spent most of her life taking care of children and grandchildren while husband and men were at sea fishing cod or working in the woods, two activities which have for a long time been the most important ones in Newfoundland.

3As a storyteller, Mrs Kerfont belongs to what is called the private tradition of storytelling as opposed to the public tradition. The main characteristic of this private or family tradition is that the storyteller, Mrs Kerfont in the present case, tells her tales before small groups, essentially composed of members of her family. Consequently, the trichotomic structure proper to any fairy tale is not always respected. Thus the atmosphere is less formal than in public storytelling sessions in that she may eventually pause or be subjected to various interruptions. However this does not deteriorate the value of the folktales in any way, and in fact it allows a specific scientific approach with regard to the performance aspect of such storytelling sessions. This type of approach has been the subject of a Master’s thesis.1

4The transcription of the tales as they appear in this collection is the result of lengthy editing. These tales were recorded on tapes during several encounters with Angela Kerfont, and then were transcribed so that the atmosphere could be recreated as closely as possible. The method thus adopted rendered the tales practically undecipherable, unless scientific interest was involved. Therefore an actual rewriting was required so that the tales could be read and appreciated separately from the strict rendering of their performance.

5However, the purpose of this collection has been to present the tales not only for their content; there has also been an attempt to preserve the specific style of Mrs Kerfont’s delivery in so far as language is concerned. Her French origins are not to be denied and the reader will be able to notice them through several patterns and sentence forms that seemed to derive from literal translation from French into English. Besides, Mrs Kerfont herself mentioned on several occasions that she had learned all these stories in French and although she could not actually tell them in this language, she admitted its strong influence on her English, at both phonetic and syntactic levels. Hence the « imperfections » or mistakes, that are scattered all over the text must not be considered as such but rather as elements contributing to the specificity of Mrs Kerfonfs language, and therefore to the atmosphere of the telling session. Moreover, the language itself is one of the most important elements in the study of a folktale tradition as far as communication is concerned and in the actual performance of the narrator.2

6Our major purpose is not to describe the method employed but rather to « warn » the reader that only a few alterations have been made to the original in order to maintain the coherence of the tales. Thus we hope that the reader will enjoy the tales presented here.