Peter and the Piskies


Peter and the Piskies: Cornish Folk and Fairy Tales is a 1958 anthology of 34 fairy tales from Cornwall that have been collected and retold by Ruth Manning-Sanders and illustrated by Raymond Briggs. It was the first in a long series of such anthologies by Manning-Sanders.
In an author's note, Manning-Sanders says of the passing down of the tales: "A widow woman lived in a cottage by the sea.... It was the piskies who told the old widow woman the stories in this book, and she told them to me, and now I am telling them to you."
Of the tales themselves, the book's dust jacket says: "The folk-tales of Cornwall are peopled with giants and saints and wicked demons; with the thieving, spiteful spriggans, the mischievous piskies who are always laughing, and the little bearded knockers who work industriously in the mines, and who, they say, are growing smaller with every year they live so that there will come a day when they are no size at all."
This book was first published in the United Kingdom in 1958, by Oxford University Press. It was not published in the United States until eight years later, by Roy Publishers. The information for this entry is taken from the U.S. version.

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