This essay argues that the male-centered Marchen of Halpert and Widdowson's Folktales of Newfoundland offer models of behavior for young working-class men, particularly in their relationships with employers. Close reading of the tales shows them to be lessons in life as seen from the perspective of a subordinated social class: they tell young men "how to be" in order to get employment and protect themselves from exploitation. Advice is also given regarding whom to trust and how to conduct love relationships. A further conclusion of the study is that for a quintessentially maritime culture, Newfoundland's magic tales refer surprisingly often to an agricultural world as their implicit background. It is suggested that this reflects a continuity of culture between Newfoundland and the areas in southeast Ireland and southwest England from which its settlers came. The transference of working-class modes of self-presentation from the West of England to Newfoundland is argued on the basis of personal fieldwork and published literature.

If the crew are to be carried away to an unbeknown place, they all go below to a man, for Jack's as good as his master when it comes to his having to do something which he didn't agree for.(1)

THE PUBLICATION IN 1996 of Herbert Halpert and John Widdowson's Folktales of Newfoundland(2) has provided a huge new corpus of North American versions of international magic tales. This magisterial collection opens many opportunities for comparison and speculation, particularly in light of Bengt Holbek's arguments, in his 1987 work Interpretation of Fairytales, that Marchen were symbolic representations of common conflicts, drives, and aspirations in everyday peasant life. There are many ways these tales can be read now that, regrettably, they are rarely told: here I emphasize their presentation of consistent advice, mainly to young men, about ways to conduct themselves in seeking and keeping work. While realizing that this is only one facet of these marvelously complex narratives, I intend to focus on these Newfoundland tales as deliberate, albeit sometimes coded, representations of the "master and man" employment relationship. They are lessons in life as seen from the perspective of a subordinated social class.

Newfoundland is a hard luck place. Current unemployment levels are among the highest in North America. The great cod fisheries of the Grand Banks attracted European exploitation from the fifteenth century onward, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries particularly there was permanent settlement, especially from the west of England, south-east Ireland, western France, and the Channel Islands. In the last ten years, an industrialized fishery, Canadian and international, has fished the cod to the point of extinction. The small outport communities in which these tales were told as a regular entertainment into the 1950s and collected as a fading tradition in the 1960s and 1970s have in some cases been completely abandoned, and more will share this fate.

But work was never constant in Newfoundland. Unlike the nineteenth-century Danish peasants whose tales were recorded by Evald Tang Kristensen and interpreted by Bengt Holbek (1987), these Newfoundland young...