Folktale Week Illustrations: Book - The Master and His Pupil

The Master and His Pupil, 8" x 10" hand-tinted linocut print by Ele Willoughby, 2025

 

I look forward to it every year! It's time for Folktale Week. Hosts post their 7 prompts for artists and/or writers to create illustrations or tell stories on these themes inspired by folktales, folklore, fables, myth and fairytales! There’s always a lot of magic submissions and it’s open to all. Most of the action is on Instagram (see @folktaleweek for more information) but you can find artists and writers sharing on other socials too. I am going to post my new illustrations here. And now Day 4: Book.

My hand-tinted linocut illustrates the English fairytale ‘The Master and His Pupil.’

A learned man of the north lands who knew all the languages of the world and mysteries of creation, had a big black book with iron lock chained to a table and forbidden to all others which contained the secrets of the spiritual world including details of angels and demons. 

His pupil and servant was a foolish lad, barely allowed into the same room as the book. One day when the master was out the curious pupil snuck into the room keen to investigate the magical and alchemical objects but he got nowhere without knowing the magical words hidden in the book. He noticed the master had forgotten to lock the book and he rushed over to read it! He could understand little but he sounded out the words and the room turned dark and there was a clap of thunder and the demon Beelzebub appears with glowing eyes, breathing fire. “Set me a task!” the demon roared, and threatened to harm him. Frantically the boy looked around and noticed the geranium. “Water yon flower!” he cried.

The demon left and returned with a barrel of water, he poured on the flower. And then he left and returned with more and more barrels, flooding the room. The boy pleaded with him to stop but he didn’t know the right words and the demon gleefully continued till the water rose so high that the boy climbed onto the table. The water continued to rise higher and higher and would have flooded all of Yorkshire had the master not recalled that he had left the book unlocked and he returned home as the water reached the boy’s chin. He spoke the right magic words and banished Beelzebub back to his fiery home!

This story has ancient roots, and can be linked to the Sorcerer's Apprentice, but I chose this version because it focuses on the book.

Reading is sexy XXXIX

(image by Andre Martins de Barros)
25.Curiosity by Joan Thomas. If you know anything about the history of earth science, you will know the name Lyme Regis, neither as English beach resort, nor as the set of Persuasion but as cliffs which were key to early 19th century understanding of the very nature of fossils, and the beginning of paleontology. Curiosity is a novel based on the life of Mary Anning, "fossilist", dealer and paleontologist. Anning was an outsider in every way - a working class woman, a religious dissenter, whose natural intelligence, insight, sense of injustice and largely self-taught knowledge set her apart. At a time when women were not even allowed to attend the meetings of the Geological Society of London, let alone belong to the Society, some upper class gentlemen-scientists seemed barely capable of acknowledging the daughter of a cabinet maker as a fellow human being (citing the gentlemen who purchased her fossil finds, rather than name her), most of her siblings did not even survive childhood and geologists were still trying to explain dinosaur fossils in terms of the Biblical flood story, Anning single-handedly found, identified and excavated dinosaur, fish and marine fossils (the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be correctly identified, the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found, the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany). Other real-life characters appear in the novel, including, Henry De la Beche, William Buckland, William Conybeare and Elizabath Philpot - all of whom owe certainly their fossil collections, and some of their fame and success in science to the discoveries of Anning. This is a novel, and a love story. Joan Thomas relied on primary sources which allude to a secret of Anning's, possibly thwarted love. She takes the liberty to interpret this as a love between Mary and Anning's great supporter and friend, who eulogized her to the Geological Society, Henry De la Beche. De la Beche was a bit of an iconoclast himself - expelled from military college for insubordination, willing to question received wisdom and be an actual scientist, rather than a theological apologist, and able to recognize genius in a woman, and a working-class woman at that. Nontheless, he also was a plantation -and slave-owner in Jamaica, for all his otherwise progressive beliefs. It makes for a rich story, of memorable, rounded characters, in a time of change and discovery.


26. The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia I bought this debut novel, seeing reviews which allude to García Márquez and Calvino, but I was captured by the reference to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. This, is one hell of a debut novel. It's a tale of great beauty, magic and pathos. Part creation myth, with origami organ replacement and one person made entirely of paper, it is filled with all the magic of Mexico (from loteria, to a sainted lucador Santos with his Japanese tag-team partner 'Tiger Mask' Sayama, to the Virgin of Trinidad whose halo burns so brightly she unwittingly burns the visionaries, to lime obsessions and curandero). This is a story of love lost, heart-break, family, quixotic battles and finding one's place in the world, or the solar system, as the case may (or may not) be. Further, there is Rita Hayworth and the lettuce pickers, mechanical tortoises with lead carapaces, Napoleon, Vatican troops, bees, and one Baby Nostradamus. When Frederico de la Fe's beloved wife Merced, finally leaves him and their daughter Little Merced, he and his daughter leave Mexico for California. They join the community of flower-pickers in El Monte, and soon the gang El Monte Flores (EMF) is enlisted in a war for autonomy and privacy against the omni-present oppressor Saturn. The book employs some of the things in the "post-modern" toolbox (many of which in fact were there with Cervantes, in Don Quixote), whether it be a dubious narrator, the author as character, telling and re-telling, levels of meaning and stories within stories or tricks of typography and occasional illustration - but these are used judiciously and seamlessly. You really should go read it, now, cause I'm not going to tell you more, and you do want to know.

{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXVIII}