Jack the Giant Killer is a story of witty and ingenuous Jack, the only son of a Cornish farmer. He decides to destroy a giant terrorizing Cornwall. Armed with horn, shovel and pick-axe, at night he digs a pit outside the giant’s cave. Then he wakes the giant with a blast on the horn and after the giant falls into the trap he kills him with his pick-axe. As a reward he gets the giant’s treasure and the title ‘the Giant Killer’. He continues in the same style and kills two more giants; he also helps king Arthur’s son to marry a lady of his heart and becomes a knight of the Round Table. In the second part he sets out to rid country of all giants and monsters and finally to release a duke’s daughter whom he then marries and lives happily with on an estate given to him by the king

However, most fairy tales circulated in England only in oral form. Puritan writers, who were the first to write for children, considered tales about magical wonders inappropriate for children; John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, regretted a childhood spent reading chapbook stories about marvellous happenings and in New England in America another writer, Cotton Mather, complained of ‘foolish Songs and Ballads’ on such fanciful subjects and recommended writing ‘poetical compositions full of Piety’.

In the 18th century English translations of French fairy tales mainly by Perrault were published in England and from the beginning of the 19th century also English folk fairy tales started to appear in print, e.g. Jack and the Beanstalk.

Jack and the Beanstalk is a story of lazy Jack, the only child of a poor widow. When she sends him to the market to sell her cow, he returns with a handful of beans instead of money. She throws the beans away and in the morning there is a huge beanstalk in the garden. Jack climbs to its top and finds there a barren land. He meets a fairy who tells him that nearby lives a giant who deceived and killed Jack’s father years ago. Jack goes to the giant’s house where he is given food and drink by his wife who then hides him in the oven. When the giant returns home and falls asleep Jack steals his hen which can lay golden eggs, climbs down the beanstalk and gives the hen to his mother. Later he makes two more journeys up the beanstalk and gets back with the giant’s money-bags and a magic harp. When stealing the harp it starts speaking so the giant wakes up and chases Jack; when he starts climbing down the stalk, Jack cuts it so that the giant falls down and is killed by the fall.

Fairy tales-collecting

Around the middle of the 19th century J. O. Halliwell and Robert Chambers collected fairy tales, the latter in Scotland. In 1890 were published English Fairy Tales collected by Joseph Jacobs, followed by more collections of this editor.

Tales are stories that tell of miraculous and fantastic happenings. The main character in fairy tales are often supernatural and can do all sorts of extraordinary things. These beings could be creatures such as fairies, goblins, brownies, pixies, elves, giants, trolls, leprechauns, witches and wizards. Fairies appear in both fairy tales (in an imaginary world) and in legends (in the real world).

In folklore, a diminutive supernatural creature, generally in human form, dwelling in an imaginary region called fairyland; and the stories of its interventions through magic in mortal affairs.

The term fairy is also loosely applied to such beings as brownies, gnomes, elves, nixies, goblins, trolls, dwarfs, pixies, kobolds, banshees, sylphs, sprites, and undines. The folk imagination not only conceives of fairyland as a distinct domain, but also imagines fairies as living in everyday surroundings such as hills, trees, and streams and sees fairy rings, fairy tables, and fairy steeds in natural objects.

The belief in fairies was an almost universal attribute of early folk culture. In ancient Greek literature the sirens in Homer's Odyssey are fairies, and a number of the heroes in his Iliad have fairy lovers in the form of nymphs. The Gandharvas (celestial singers and musicians), who figure in Sanskrit poetry, were fairies, as were the Hathors, or female genii, of ancient Egypt (see also my Egypt Chapter), who appeared at the birth of a child and predicted the child's future.

The traditional characteristics of fairies are depicted in European literature in such works as Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet (in Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech); The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser; L'Allegro and Comus by John Milton; Contes de ma mиre l'oye, known in English as Tales of Mother Goose, by Charles Perrault; Kinder-und Hausmдrchen, known in English as Grimm's Fairy Tales, by the brothers Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm and Wilhelm Karl Grimm; a fairy-tale series by Andrew Lang, for example, The Blue Fairy Tale Book and The Red Fairy Tale Book; and representative collections of Irish stories such as Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland by Thomas Crofton Croker and Irish Fairy Tales by William Butler Yeats. Croker has described fairies as being "a few inches high, airy and almost transparent in body; so delicate in their form that a dewdrop, when they chance to dance on it, trembles, indeed, but never breaks."

In folklore fairies are generally considered beneficent toward humans. They are sensitive and capricious, however, and often inclined to play pranks; so if their resentment is not to be aroused, they must be spoken well of and always treated with deference.

Bad fairies are thought to be responsible for such misfortunes as the bewitching of children, the substitution of ugly fairy babies, known as changelings, for human infants, and the sudden death of cattle

A fairy tale is a particular type of folktale, part of the oral narrative tradition that, in England, flourished until about the 17th century. However, the English fairy tale nearly disappeared as French and German fairy tales gained popularity, and then as the genre itself fell into disrepute because of changing social conditions in England. However, in the 19th century, often described as the golden age of the fairy tale, folklorists such as Andrew Lang and Joseph Jacobs began collecting folk and fairy tales throughout Britain, thus reclaiming, at least to some extent, the uniquely English oral narrative characterized by its humour and homespun quality. At the same time, many British authors began writing literary fairy tales, among them George Cruikshank, who sermonized the tales; a number of women such as Mary Louisa Molesworth, who modernized traditional tales; women like Jean Ingelow who wrote book length tales, and finally, George MacDonald, foremost of the fairy tale writers, who infused his tales with a spiritual quality unique among his peers. Thus began a rich, new fairy tale tradition in England.

English fairy tales plays an important role in forming of the national English character. They reflect traditions, customs and system of values of English people.

National traditions are preserved in English folklore and English nation is considered to be very conservative one. You cannot really imagine Britain without all its traditions, this integral feature of social and private life of the people living on the British Isles that has always been an important part of their life and work.

To conclude it`s important to point out that British folklore include traditions, customs, beliefs and system of values of a particular nation. In fact, nations, as we conceive them, are founded upon a consciousness of common interests and ideas, which are the result of long and complicated historical, social and economic experience.

Folklore has many cultural aspects. Firstly, folklore can also serve to validate a culture (romantic nationalism), as well as transmit a culture's morals and values. Folklore can also be used to assert social pressures, or relive them, in the case of humor and carnival.

In addition, folklorists study folklore with the system of traditions, values as an essential part of British culture.

1. Answer to the following questions:

1. In what century scholars began to collect and study the national folklore?

2. The influences of which cultures the British folklore is known to have?

3. When the term ballad was used in it`s present sense?

4. What are the main classes of ballad?

5. What is one of the oldest printed fairy tales in England?

6. What important information does the British folklore contain?

7. What English fairy tales and legends do you know?

1. Render the following sentences into Russian

1. A great deal of folklore and local legends has been lost because they are not passed by word of mouth as much as they used to be.

2. Many of them still feel strongly about the monarchy because it adds a great deal of colour to their life.

3. One remarkable feature of the old ballad consists in its half curious, half familiar treatment of the supernatural.

4. It is quite remarkable that ballads taken down or recorded from singers separated by centuries in time and by hundreds of kilometers in distance, should be both different and yet recognizably the same.

5. The time that produced the ballad was wholly before the diffusion of books: with the printing press the office of the minstrel disappeared.

2. Render the following sentences into English:

1.Главная причина уникальности культуры Великобритании, очевидно, лежит на поверхности.

2. Однако, большинство английских сказок существовали только в устной форме.

3. Сказки с одинаковыми сюжетами героями можно обнаружить практически во всех культурах.

4.Баллады можно считать богатым источником информации об истории, общественной жизни, чувствах и ценностях англичан.

5. Фольклор является неотъемлемой частью британской культуры.

SECTION 2

INTRODUCING THE USA

It is common to say that the USA is the country with a short history but vast, abundant geography and diverse population. Only five hundred years ago the USA was a wilderness, inhabited by Indian tribes. After the discovery of America by Europeans the immigrants from Europe and then almost all over the world streamed to the new continent seeking happier life and so-called “American Dream.” As a result of the mass immigration, the struggle of the young nation for independence from former motherland Britain, formation of the new country with democratic rights and great opportunities, the acquisition of the new territories, fast development of industry and agriculture, the USA turned into a superpower with the strong economy, the most advanced and innovative technologies, diverse national culture and arts , influencing the other countries of the globe. The life of the USA is so complex, controversial and dynamic that it would be impossible to present all its aspects in every detail. However, we hope that the materials collected from many different sources and included into this textbook may help the students see the American historical formation and political structure, education and science, cultural and lifestyle peculiarities with better understanding.

CHAPTER I Some First Significant Stages of the USA History

Part I. The First Explorers and Settlers of America.

Read and translate the following words and word combinations:

to establish settlements to be bound to …

to set up colonies a cargo of …

to colonize(v.)-colonization(n) to be far-flung-from

hostility to share the pie

to be on the decline to buy for trinkets

to squat unobvious

to be doomed to… outright mass extermination

to cede a territory barren land

indentured servitude forced relocation of people

to enact a law to be recaptured

to be ill prepared rugged existence

to be engulfed to be distressed

a joint-stock company to be beset

to be economic” white elephant” to perish

a nightmare to thrive

to become drifters a mutiny

How did American history begin? For thousands of years America lay unknown to Europeans beyond the Atlantic Ocean. The very first discovery of the continent is supposed to have been made by Norsemen from Greenland who reached the New World and encamped there. The actual material on the voyages is very small and covered with mystery. But the voyage of Thor Heyerdahl’s papyrus craft, Ra 11, did demonstrate that ancient sailors could have crossed the Atlantic ocean even before the Christian era. Both archeological evidence and ancient sagas do reveal the activities of courageous Norsemen who reached North America around year 1100. An old Scandinavian saga tells that the Norsemen found there a lot of grapes and grape vines. They filled their ships with grapes and a cargo of timber and sailed away, naming the country Vinland. Another saga tells about a group of the Vikings who spent a winter in Vinland but failed to establish peace with the natives and returned to Greenland with their son , the first European born in what is now America.

It is well known that the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) rediscovered the “New World” in 1492 by accident while looking for a shorter route to the spice places in Asia. An all-water route to the Indies might reduce the cost of Oriental products, inflated by various middlemen along the traditional land-sea way. Finally the queen of Spain Isabella of Castile sponsored Columbus to sail westward with the fleet of three small ships. A navigational genius, Columbus made four successful voyages from Spain to the islands now called West Indies and claimed the land in the New World for Spain. The continent America however was named for another Italian explorer – Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) who completed many voyages to South America and was the first to understand that he had reached India but a new continent – the New World. After Vespucci’s accounts, published in Europe, geographer Martin Waldseemuller produced a world map (kept in the Library of Congress) on which he depicted the new continent and named it America after Vespucci’s first name.

After Columbus’ voyages, Italian, Spanish, French and English explorers continued European expansion of the continent looking for riches and land to claim for their countries. Italian explorer John Cabot commanded the first European ship to reach the shores of North America. Like Columbus, Cabot hoped to reach Asia by sailing west. Like Columbus, Cabot had unsuccessfully offered his service to several countries before finding financial support from England’s port Bristol and formal authorization of King Henry Y11. In May 1497 Cabot sailed from Bristol with two small ships and made a remarkably quick journey to the coast of Newfoundland. He spent a month there exploring American waters.