The talents of master storyteller Bob Barton dovetail beautifully with those of painter Jirina Marton in this delightful collection featuring folk tales from Denmark, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Lithuania, England, and North America, several of them not widely known. Just having these stories newly available makes The Bear Says North a valuable book.

Added to this worthy act of recovery are Barton’s lovely, clean prose and his keen sensitivity to the dynamics of a good story. As his introduction indicates, the degree of interpretation in each tale varies: some are gentled into his own voice, others significantly rebuilt. In “The Honest Penny” and “The Little Girl Who Wanted the Northern Lights,” he pays particular attention to the oral resonances of spoken language – a difficult thing in written language and beautifully achieved. Though finely written, not all of these stories show the unique oral patterning that marks the folk tale, but the ones that do are wonderfully successful.

Jirina Marton’s paintings beautifully extend central moments in the tales they accompany. The illustration for “The Reindeer Herder and the Moon” shows the Moon Man’s spindly arms and legs reaching for a frightened girl, moonlight glistening off her hair. But those arms and legs are blocked by the lines of the antlers of the magic reindeer who protects his young herder. This subtle detail encapsulates the movement of the entire story and shows how Marton, like Barton, knows how to burrow into the heart of a tale.