Every retelling is a translation. A tale that reaches the page was, not so long ago, spoken in a particular kitchen in a particular valley, in a particular accent, shaped by the weather, the work and the water nearest to hand. Carry it into print and something always goes missing in transit. The skill lies in choosing what to lose on purpose.
The mistakes below are the ones that turn up again and again in submitted stories: tales tidied until nothing bites. None of them are fatal. Most can be fixed in an afternoon with a pencil and a bit of nerve.
1. Flattening the regions into one "British" tale
Britain is not a single folklore. It is a patchwork of very local fears, and the names are half the flavour. Black Annis belongs to the Dane Hills outside Leicester, an iron-clawed hag who was said to snatch children. Jenny Greenteeth lurks in the pondweed of Lancashire and Cheshire; Peg Powler haunts the River Tees. Orkney has the skinless Nuckelavee, Shetland has trows, Cornwall has piskies and the knockers down the mines, and the north-west has boggarts who move into a farmhouse and make everyone's life difficult.
Blend them into a generic "British spirit" and you lose the thing that made the story worth telling: the sense that it happened here, to people who knew that stretch of water. Place names carry belief inside them. A tale set at Carterhaugh means something different from a tale set "in an old forest".
What to do instead
- Keep the local word. Write "the boggart sat on the dresser", not "the mischievous spirit sat on the dresser".
- Keep the dialect that survives in the telling: "bide", "yonder", "thou" where the source uses it.
- If you move a tale to a new county, say so plainly. Invented geography is fine; pretending it is inherited is not.
2. Over-explaining the strangeness
There is a strong pull, when writing for a modern readership, to smooth every odd corner. To add a line explaining that people once believed in fairy ointment, or that a seventh son was thought to have healing hands. Resist it. The unexplained rule is the engine of a folk tale: don't look back, don't eat the food, don't say thank you, always leave by the same door you came in.
Explain the rule and the engine stalls. The reader no longer wonders whether the prohibition can be broken; they simply know, and the tension leaks away. Trust the strangeness. If a woman leaves a bowl of cream out for the brownie every Thursday and never once says why, the reader will accept it, because folk tales run on accepted oddness rather than explanation.
Cut the phrases we reach for when nervous: "as legend has it", "some say", "it is believed that". Usually the plain statement is stronger. He never came home. Not: It is said that he was never seen again.
3. Sanitising the dark
British folk tales are often brutal, and the brutality is rarely decoration. Changeling lore grew out of infant illness and infant death, and out of what desperate families did about it. Drowning hags gave shape to the real danger of a weed-choked pond on the edge of the village. The Lambton Worm comes with a curse on nine generations. Mr Fox ends with a severed hand on the stairs.
Soften these elements to make the story palatable and you have removed the reason it survived. The old tellers were not being gratuitous; they were putting a face on what people already feared, and doing it with one clean image rather than a paragraph of gore. That is the standard to aim for.
Say less, and make it worse.
If you are telling to young children, of course you adapt. That is editing for an audience, which is a craft. Telling an audience that the originals were gentler than they are is something else entirely.
4. Forgetting that these tales were spoken, not written
Printed prose likes order: tidy paragraphs, fresh vocabulary, a clear ending. Oral storytelling likes repetition, rhythm, formulas and rhyme, because they help a teller remember and a listener follow. Three brothers, the third attempt, the same question asked in the same words, the verse that gets sung rather than spoken.
Strip all of that out and you get a competent short story that has lost its heartbeat. Keep the run of three. Keep the opener — "There was once…", "Not long ago, and not far away…" — and keep the sign-off that closes the door on the tale.
Keep the variants, too. Cinderella has hundreds of shapes across Britain and beyond, and no single correct version exists to be restored. Name the one you are working from, whether that is a collector's text or a version you heard as a child, and let the rest go. An honest retelling admits it is one branch of a bigger tree.
5. Inventing an ancient pedigree
Not every tale is Celtic. Not every tale is pre-Christian. Not every custom stretches back before the Romans. A great many of the stories we now call traditional reached print through nineteenth-century collectors, Walter Scott among them, and some are later inventions dressed in old clothes. Orkney and Shetland carry Norse weight; the English tradition has Scandinavian and Germanic layers of its own.
This matters because a false claim of antiquity flattens the story, making it timeless in the worst sense — vague and unplaceable. Instead of "the Celts believed", say who wrote it down, where you found it, and what the version quietly changed. A tale's history is often more interesting than the invented pedigree.
6. Ending with a moral
Folk tales rarely conclude with a lesson, and the moment you add one — a final line explaining what it all means — you stop trusting both the story and the reader. Some of the best tales are deeply unfair. The girl who obeys the rules still disappears. The bargain is kept and the price is still paid. Let the ending stand on its own, and let the reader carry it home.
A practical checklist before you publish or perform
- Read your draft aloud. Anywhere your voice stumbles is a sentence that needs cutting or breaking.
- Highlight every place name and dialect word. Have you kept enough of them?
- Search for "it is believed", "legend has it", "as you know". Delete what you find.
- Ask what you have softened, and whether the tale can survive it.
- Name your source, your variant and your region in one line at the start or end.
- Check that you are retelling someone's story rather than merely borrowing its mood.
The best retellings do not sand a tale smooth; they sand it in one direction, so the grain shows. Keep the place, keep the cruelty, keep the silence where an explanation would be easier, and the story will do the work it has always done.
Photo: Dimhou / Pixabay
