Abbey Lubbers, Banshees, & Boggarts by Katharine M. Briggs

Although highly educated, she avoided becoming caught up in academic theories and textual analyses, but chose rather to explore folklore and literature for what she loved best – the stories – and savor them, for herself and others. On the contrary, she always worked hard at whatever she was involved in, and distinguished herself in several fields – folklore, literary scholarship, dramatic work. Briggs was independently wealthy all her life, but she never had any desire to lead a life of leisure. Her father’s family was from Yorkshire and had accumulated a great fortune in the coal mining industry. Katharine Briggs was born in Hampstead, London, in 1898. Throughout her life – in creative childhood games, in amateur dramatics, in scholarly studies of folk and fairy lore, in many books and articles for academic as well as general readers and for children, and in her four-volume collection of tales – her passion shone through. From an early age, Katharine Briggs had a passion for telling stories, and a special affinity for the world of the imagination. As an established authority on folk-tales, and on the relations of beliefs in fairies and other supernatural beings with English literature, she was more than up to the task. Briggs is well known today for an ambitious project that she began in the 1960s, to collect and publish all the native British folk-tales in English she could find. This memory of Katharine Briggs, by a friend from her student days at Oxford University, goes to the heart of her life’s work.

I can hear in my inner ear that purring tone with a tiny lisp, that went on so softly that you daren’t stir.” “She had a way with a story that put me in mind of the powers of story-tellers in earlier ages and simpler conditions.

Abbey Lubbers, Banshees, & Boggarts by Katharine M. Briggs