A foolish lad tells his mother he would like to buy a pottle of brains because he is tired of being stupid, and she gives him permission to see the wisewoman of the village. The wisewoman asks him to bring the heart of what he loves best, and he decides he loves bacon more than anything, so he goes home, kills a pig, and brings back its heart. She then asks him to solve a riddle that he can’t answer, so she tells him he has not brought the right thing, and of course he leaves confused. His mother dies, and he decides that maybe he loves her best of all, so he pops her body in a sack and returns to the wisewoman. She poses another riddle, and again he leaves confused. He then meets a milkmaid, and pours out his heart to her. She suggests they marry so she can look after him, and soon they are happily wed. He then realises that perhaps he loves her most of all, so he goes back to the wisewoman’s cottage and takes his new wife with him. She poses him another riddle, and his wife whispers the answer in his ear. The wisewoman declares that he has found his brains, he asks where they are, and she tells him they are in his wife’s head.

Recounted by Marie Clothilde Balfour for her three-part ‘Legends of the Cars’, published in Folklore (1891). Balfour lived in Redbourne while collecting the tales, though it is not clear precisely where she was when she heard this.

The protracted search for brains (and hearts), the ‘good witch’, and the ultimate absence of a magical cure but provision of a real-world alternative one, makes much of ‘The Pottle of Brains’ superficially reminiscent of L. Frank Baum’s children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its 1939 film adaptation, though it is unlikely that Baum encountered the tale before he wrote his most famous work. Maureen James provides a full version of the tale in Lincolnshire Folk Tales (2013), and a précis here. Joseph Jacobs adapted the tale for inclusion in More English Fairy Tales (1894), and Katharine Briggs included it in British Folk Tales (1970).

The story obviously has great potential – for wit, connotation, the ability to move audiences and readers – and since then, it has been retold in several printed sources. Kevin Crossley-Holland’s version, ‘A Pitcher of Brains’, is in The Old Stories (1997), and Adrian Gray’s, ‘The Fool and His New Brains’, is in Tales of Old Lincolnshire (1990). The Chagford Filmmaking Group, whose primary goal is the championing of British folklore, made a short film based on the tale in 2005.

Watch the American storyteller Brother Donald tell a version of the tale below:

Words by RORY WATERMAN