Elizabeth Brewer (adapted by Philip Dinn & Andy Jones), illustrated by Elly Cohen.
Peg Bearskin: A Traditional Newfoundland Tale
Gaspereau Press, 2003.

Rating: E*

Peg Bearskin was a story told by Elizabeth Brewer and recorded by a folklorist in 1976. This adaptation of that version strives to maintain the oral rhythms of an oral telling through use of punctuation to indicate pauses and emphasis within the sentence, while dialect is used sparingly, preventing the story from becoming lost in an excess of unfamiliar words.
The overall effect of the book is extremely pleasing. The print was set by hand on an old-style printing press and the linocut illustrations resemble woodcut prints, giving the overall appearance of a work from a much earlier era of printing. The layout of the text itself creates patterns on the page and is sometimes used to illustrate moments in the story (as when Peg throws pepper at the witch's "old man" and his sneezes and coughs are scattered over the center of the page).
The story itself is a fairy-tale, which begins when a childless woman is told by a stranger how she can have a child: she is to eat two of the three berries she'll find on a tree. the woman, however, eats all three, and has three daughters, two beautiful and one, product of the bitter berry she was warned against, large, hairy, and ugly. Peg is hated by her beautiful sisters, who leave home to get away from her, but she follows and saves them from being killed by a witch in a manner analogous to "Hop o' my Thumb's" saving of his siblings from the ogre. The witch is tricked into killing her own daughters by Peg, who puts her sisters' nightcaps on the witch's daughters. Peg next gets her sisters married to the king's two older sons in exchange for tricking the witch out of various magical possessions. She wins the hand of the third prince for herself and destroys the witch, but her new husband is unhappy because of her ugliness.Peg reveals to the prince that the bells in the mane of the horse she stole from the witch can grant wishes; the prince wishes for her to be beautiful, and instead becomes as large, hairy, and ugly as her.
To him, she is then beautiful, and they live happily ever after. Although it takes a different approach, this does recall the ending of "Riquet with the Tuft", another Perrault fairy-tale from late seventeenth-century France like "Hop o' my Thumb", in which the princess whose fairy gift is to make the man she loves as beautiful as she is, falls in love with a clever, ugly prince, who becomes beautiful – at least, Perrault says – to the eyes of love.
Peg Bearskin: A Traditional Newfoundland Tale would be a great story to read aloud to any age. It has a place in discussions of fairy-tales and oral storytelling traditions as well. the book itself, with its lovely integration of linocut art and text design, might also be an inspiration to high-school art classes.

Thematic Links: Folktales; Fairy-tales; Newfoundland; Oral storytelling.

K.V. Johansen
Vol. 10, number 5
June 2005

*Rating System:
E - Excellent, enduring, everyone should see it!
G - Good, even great at times, generally useful!
A - Average, all right, has its applications.
P - Problematic, puzzling, poorly presented.

Posted August 2005