Customer Reviews

Legends of Paul Bunyan (Fesler-Lampert Minnesota Heritage Book)

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I'm a big fan when publishers decide to reprint out-of-print titles. The University of Minnesota Press, in conjunction with Fesler-Lampert Minnesota Heritage Book Series, has been doing just this the last few years by reprinting a few of the fairy tale collections illustrated by Wanda Gag and most recently a collection of Paul Bunyan legends.

The new title, Legends of Paul Bunyan edited by Harold W. Felton, was first published in by Alfred A. Knopf in 1947 and has been unavailable in a new edition for several years. If you are at all interested in American folklore, especially concerning Paul Bunyan, this is an exemplary entry in the canon. The collection offers over 100 different Paul Bunyan tales divided up into several broad categories, listed below:

The Spirit of Paul Bunyan Is in America
Paul, the Baby and the Boy
Paul, the Man
Food and the Kitchen
Paul's Fellow Workers, Pals and Friends
Paul's Adventures with Contemporary Heroes
Paul and the Animal Kingdom
Paul's Great Inventions
Paul's Vegetables
Paul Made Geography
Paul Had a Way with Water
Paul Made and Met the Weather
The Spirit of Paul Bunyan Will Stay in America

The tales are told by several storytellers and folklorists as well as authors, including Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost. I especially enjoyed the section about Paul's inventions, from the doughnut to a special grindstone, Paul was a creative man, inventing by both accident and design to solve a problem.

While this book is thick (over 400 pages) and somewhat scholarly in appearance, it is suitable for younger readers and includes several pen and ink illustrations by Richard Bennett to add visual interest.

The SurLaLune website has always focused more on fairy tales, especially the European based tales, with occasional offerings of American versions. I'll admit for years that I've considered adding American Folklore to the site and perhaps someday I will. Books like this tempt me even more.

This was everything I was hoping it would be -- from poetry to oral history this is by far the most diverse and complete collection I have come across to date. As a homeschooling mother with a Classical and Charlotte Mason influence I was looking to cover something of the local color when we moved back to the Wisconsin/Minnesota area. I was looking for more than a childrens book because I wanted the concept of the American Tall Tale and the personality of Paul to be absorbed over many days of bedtime stories. My 9-year-old begs me to read more and kept choosing this as the book of choice for "an extra story while we wait" moments.

This jacket blurb for this book characterizes Paul Bunyan as a "true, American folk character" who was "created in logging camp bunkhouses" by lumbermen. That might be one of the bigger tall tales in this collection of stories about Paul Bunyan. It's questionable whether or not he is a true American folk character. There are forerunners to Paul Bunyan in international folklore, and it's likely that the character is modeled after, or even derived from, European folk heroes. More importantly, as even the introduction affirms, lumberjacks rarely told Paul Bunyan stories; furthermore, the types of stories in this book are pretty far removed from the actual folk culture and storytelling traditions of lumbermen. Paul Bunyan is much more the creation of a successful advertising campaign for the Red River Lumber Company and for the nascent children's literature publishing empire. Once I placed this demythologization aside, I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed reading these stories. Many are very clever and engaging. I really liked the freeplay of imagination, and I found a number of them very funny. They also do present a lot of themes and motifs common to folklore. Some also reflect an earlier ethos and will be of great value to social historians. I especially enjoyed the literary appeal of many of the texts. Along with fine writing about Paul Bunyan by Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost, this book also features the wonderful writing of James Stevens as well as some excellent poems and literary ballads based on the conventions of folk poetry. Once I got past the jacket blurb and the miscategorization of the title -- there really aren't many legends in this book -- I found that I really enjoyed reading the tales. Some of them would really be fun to read to kids, and some probably should be placed into history's dustbin.