Fairy Tale Friday--Huldu-Folk

After seeing the movie Thale, I wanted to find tales featuring Hulder, seductive forest-dwelling women with tails. This book, Scandinavian Folk-Lore, edited by William Alexander Craigie, has several starting on page 162.  Unfortunately, it has no illustrations, but I've collected some from other sources. Note the tails sticking out from under the Hulders's skirts.

Fairy Tale Friday--The Voice of the Bell

This tale of a bell, a baby, and a male curfew is from The Unmannerly Tiger and other Korean Tales by William Elliot Griffis.  I can't remember reading any other tale featuring a male curfew. I'd like to find others.

Folkwear Pattern

Baby Bell Pepper

Fairy Tale Friday--The Unnatural Mother: a Swazi Tale

From Fairy Tales From South Africa by Mrs.E.J. Bourhill and Mrs. J.B. Drake enjoy The Unnatural Mother.

In this tale a child sends a parent on a quest; I've never come across that situation before.  A mother sins against nature, so has to redeem herself by finding and bringing home some special water.

Queen mother of Swaziland, mother of the present chief, Sobhuza II, paramount chief, Swazi, Swaziland, South Africa. Duggan-Cronin, Alfred Martin, between 1919 and 1936

Fairy Tale Friday--Jack o' the Lantern

This origin tale for the Jack-o'-lantern is on page 5 of Irish Fairy Tales: Folklore and Legends, illustrated by Geoffrey Strahan. A grumpy man, an angel, some demons.

Fairy Tale Friday--The Plague-Omen

This short Polish tale deals with the plague as a merry-making train of specters. or the Homen.  Look for it on page 19 of Slavonic Fairy Tales, Collected and Translated from the Russian, Polish, Servian, and Bohemian,  edited by John Theophilus Naaké.

Fairy Tale Friday--The Carnation Youth

This week check out another free online book by Elsie Spicer Eells, Tales of Enchantment from Spain.  I recommend the second tale in the collection: The Carnation Youth.

This tale features:

• A young man turned into a flower
• A young woman who leaves home to find him
• Helpful birds

Fairy Tale Friday--Folk-Lore of the Holy Land

This week's full-text Google Book is Folk-Lore of the Holy Land: Moslem, Christian, and Jewish, collected by J.E. Hanauer and edited by Marmaduke Pickthall.
My favorite sections of this book are:

Judgements of Karakash, page 120
Azrael, page 176
The Underground Folk, page 188
About Coffee, page 290

Courtesy of Wikimedia

Fairy Tale Friday--How Night Came

This week's free Google Book is Fairy Tales From Brazil: How and Why Tales From Brazilian Folk-Lore by Elsie Spicer Eels with Illustrations by Helen M. Barton. How Night Came is the first story.

Fairy Tale Friday--Tales of Giants from Brazil

Elsie Spicer Eells's Tales of Giants from Brazil has several beautiful illustrations by Helen M. Barton.

How the Giantess Guimara Became Small.

The Beast Slayer

The Quest of Cleverness

Domingo's Cat

The Princess of the Springs

The Fountain of Giant Land

The Most Beautiful Princess

The Forest Lad and the Wicked Giant

Fairy Tale Friday--Seven Brothers and their Sister

This week check out Santal Folk Tales translated by A. Campbell of the Santal Mission.  The Santal People are a tribe in India. In the preface the translator admits to some bowdlerizing: "It was to be expected that in the popular tales of a simple, unpolished people like the Santals, expressions and allusions unfitted for ears polite would be found."
The story Seven Brothers and their Sister features the sacrifice of an unwilling victim.  A jugi gosae (a caste of Hindus who make and sell doras) is consulted.

Fairy Tale Friday--A Wise Weaver

From The Golden Maiden and Other Folk Tales and Fairy Stories Told in Armenia by A.G. Seklemian enjoy A Wise Weaver.

Armenian Rug courtesy of Wikimedia.

Fairy Tale Friday--Master and Pupil (or The Devil Outwitted)

From Georgian Folk Tales translated by Marjory Wardrop enjoy Master and Pupil.  Who doesn't love a deceiving-the-devil story?

Fairy Tale Friday--The Maiden the Sun Made love to, and Her Boys

From Zuñi Folk Tales, edited by Frank Hamilton Cushing, enjoy The Maiden the Sun Made Love to, and Her Boys.  The Zuñi are a Native American tribe living in New Mexico.

Dancers at Zuni Pueblo courtesy Wikimedia

This long, complicated tale includes:

• Solar impregnation
• Twins
• Dismemberment
• Resurrection
• An explanation for the origin of anger 

(Dear fairy tale fans, I originally planned to find motif numbers for every tale, but it's getting to be too much work.)

Fairy Tale Friday--God's Godson

From Gypsy Folk-Tales by Francis Hindes Groome, enjoy God's Godson. It's a short hero tale.

This book has a very long introduction, in case you decide to browse.

Amazon

Fairy Tale Friday--The Three Oranges

Enjoy this Magyar version of the Love for Three Oranges.  It's on page 133 of The Folk-Tales of the Magyars, volume 13, by W. Henry Jones, János Kriza, János Erdélyi, Gyula Pap.

Here are other versions of this tale I have found.

The Love of Three Oranges, The Borzoi Book of French Folk Tales, Paul Delarue, editor, pp. 126-134.

The Three Citrons of Love, Portuguese Folk-Tales. collected by Consiglieri Pedroso, translated by Miss Henriqueta Monteiro, London: Elliot Stock, 1882, pp. 9-13.

The Princess of the Third Pumpkin,Yiddish Folktales, edited by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich, translated by Leonard Wolf, NY: Pantheon Bks, 1988 pp.122-125 (http://rachelhopecrossman.blogspot.com/2011/04/cinderella-99-princess-of-third-pumpkin.html)

The Love of the Three Pomegranates, Italian Folktales, Italo Calvino,compiler, NY: Pantheon, 1980. pp. 389-393

The Reed Maiden, Myths and Folk-Tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars by Jeremiah Curtin, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington,1891, p 457-  (There is also a 1971 edition.)

The Three Love-Oranges, Roman Legends: A Collection of the Fables and Folk-Lore of Rome by R.H. Busk, Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1877. pp. 15-21.

The Love of the Three Oranges, Italian Popular Tales, by Thomas Frederick Crane, Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1885, pp. 338-343.

The Three Orange-Peris, Turkish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, edited by Ignácz Kúnos, London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896, pp. 12-29

The Young Lord and the Cucumber Girl, Tales Alive in Turkey by Warren S. Walker & Ahmet E. Uysal, Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1966, pp. 64-71. (http://enargea.org/tales/Turkish/Cucumber_Girl.html)

How the Pigeon became a Tame Bird, Fairy Tales From Brazil by Elsie Spicer Eells, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1917, pp.165-174.

The basic pattern of these stories goes like this:

• Young man gets three fruits or plants containing young women.
• Young man releases women by cutting fruit, but fails to provide water for first two.
• Young man leaves young woman in tree while he prepares for wedding.
• False bride turns true bride into animal or plant.
• Young man returns and marries false bride.
• True bride tries to get attention of young man in whatever nonhuman form she's in.
• True bride (in many versions) moves in with a woman.
• True bride manages to get attention of young man
• False bride is removed; true bride moves in.

There is considerable variation among versions.  For instance, the young lord in The Young Lord and the Cucumber Girl has to go on a long quest, get milk for a lion, meat for a tiger, chewing gum for a witch, drink from a blood-and-pus fountain, and slip past giants to get 3 cucumbers from a giantess.  In contrast, the prince in The Princess of the Third Pumpkin had only to get up at dawn, put on his coat, and take a bottle of water to his parents' garden, where three pumpkins are growing on one vine.

Fairy Tale Friday--The Enchanted Flower

This week's collection is Fairy Tales from the Harz Mountains.  The Harz Mountains are in Germany and are full of medieval  castles. (Note: I fixed the links. Sorry about that!)

 The Enchanted Flower, page 81, is like the continuation of the Apollo and Daphne story. It begins with a flower that used to be a woman who didn't want to marry the Count of  Lauenburg.  She avoids him by turning into a white flower.  The tale deals with how the flower becomes a woman again: the right person has to pluck her.  In this case, the right person is a young woman about to be married.

Fairy Tale Friday

This week's Google book is Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo containing the story The Blind Man who Recovered His Sight.  A cruel mother blinds her son--the son recovers his sight--the son and daughter kill the mother--there are consequences for matricide.

 Courtesy of VIA

Fairy Tale Friday--The Gold Giving Serpent

The fairy tale for this week is from India: Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs.

Now here's a portion of the entry "sacred Animals" from Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism regarding the Cobra:

Nāga: The Snake

Of all the animals worshipped in India, the cobra snake has probably been the most important and has the longest history. A very complex symbolism and history are attached to the sacred snake in Hinduism, and snake worship has multiple origins and represents a plurality of traditions. Snake worship includes the direct worship of the fearsome and dangerous living snakes, worship of the nāga deities associated with water, and the conception of the vedic Vṛtra connected to the cosmic struggle of the god Indra. Vṛtra, the enemy of Indra in the Ṛgveda, is also called Ahi (“Snake”) and might refer to a primordial snake in control of the cosmic water. The word for the divine snake is nāga, which is also the name of tribes of humans, and elephants are called nāga as well. Nāga as a name for snakes is used mostly only for cobras as divinities. “The Nāga of Indian mythology and folklore,” wrote J.P. Vogel, “is not really the snake in general, but the cobra raised to the rank of divine being” (Vogel, 1926, 27). In the early Ṛgveda and in the Atharvaveda, the word ahi is used for snakes as well as mythological serpents. In the later part of the Veda, sarpa is used. The word nāga appears in the Brahmaṇas the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas (and the Buddhist Jātakas), and here nāga is used only for the mythological serpents, while snakes living in nature are called sarpas. In Amarakośa, a Sanskrit lexicon, nāga is not listed as a synonym for snake. Cobras, in contrast, are called nāgas, and in religious art, nāgas typically have cobra hoods in both their zoomorphic and anthropomorphic shapes (Semeka-Pankratov, 1979; Vogel, 1926).
The nāgas are connected to water – to rain as well as the dark, creative, cosmic waters of the underworld. They are thought to hide in the interior of the earth and to appear on the surface, particularly during rainy season. They inhabit lakes and rivers, and the ocean is said to be their abode. The cobra was often thought to reside under trees and in the anthills, which were thought to be entrances to the underworld. The snake world (Nāgaloka) is described in the Mahābhārata as a delightful abode full of wealthy palaces, and the cobra was therefore thought of as guardian of treasures. The nāgas are associated with weather phenomena such as rainstorms and lightening and are believed to control the rain. The poisonous snake represents danger and power over life and death. The snake leaving its skin behind symbolized longevity or immortality, and it is a simile of mokṣa (liberation) and of the way one who is liberated leaves evil behind (Vogel, 1926).
Hinduism contains a rich nāga mythology. The nāgas are important figures, especially in the first book of the Mahābhārata, the Ādiparvan, which contains numerous nāga stories (in the Pauṣya, Puloman, and Āstīka chapters), but narratives about sacred snakes are found throughout the Mahābhārata (Minkowski, 1991). King Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice (sarpasattra) in the Khāṇḍava Forest is the frame story of the Mahābhārata (Minkowski, 1991).The story of the origin of the nāgas is told in connection with the snake sacrifice. The nāgas are presented as sons of Kadrū, whose sister Vinatā is the mother of Garuḍa. The nāgas and Garuḍa are enemies, and enmity of Garuḍa and his cousins the nāgas is a favorite theme in Indian literature and art (Vogel, 1924). Kadrū fraudulently won a bet against Vinatā, and those of Kadrū’s sons who had refused to be partners in the fraud were to perish in King Janamejaya’s sacrifice. The sacrifice was to be performed because of the violent death of his father Parikṣit, who, while hunting, met a sage who had taken a vow of silence, so Parikṣit insulted him by throwing a dead snake round his shoulders when he did not answer. The son of the sage cursed the king: on the seventh day, the lord of snakes Takṣaka was to take the king to the god of death, Yama. The king took all possible precautions, but at the end of the seventh day, the king ate a piece of fruit with a small worm inside. The worm, it turned out, was Takṣaka, who, after he had been eaten, assumed his real form and bit the king. The bite killed the king, and the heat of the poison even caused the palace to burn down (Vogel, 1924). One of Kadrū’s sons, the snake Śeṣa (“Remainder”), who is also called Ananta (“Without End”), secluded himself from his brothers and became an ascetic with matted hair and bark garments. When Brahmā asked him what was the aim of his asceticism, Śeṣa answered that he refused to stay with his brothers who hated Garuḍa and one another. Śeṣa chose the boon from Brahmā that his mind would rejoice in righteousness, tranquility, and asceticism ( tapas ). Brahmā asked him to bear the earth, and since then Śeṣa has carried the earth on his head, enveloping her in his coils (Vogel, 1924). A dominant theme of the Mahābhārata is the pralaya (destruction) and the end of a yuga (era; see cosmic cycles). Only two survive this pralaya, and one of them is Śeṣa, whose name signifies this fact (Minkowski, 1991). Another nāga of importance is Vāsuki, who had been anointed as king of nāgas, according to the Mahābhārata (Ādiparvan), and who was the snake used as rope around Mount Meru by the devas and asuras for churning the ocean.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Fairy Tale Friday--Old French Fairy Tales

This week I'd like to tout this whole book, because all the illustrations are gorgeous!  I'm including some of the color plates here, but don't miss the black-and-white ones in the book.

Old French Fairy Tales

by Sophie Segur

Illustrations by Virginia Frances Sterrett

Fairy Tale Friday--The Month of March

For the last Friday in March, I would like to feature the story The Month of March on page 42 of Italian Fairy Tales by Georgene Faulkner.  This is the first fairy tale I've read that features personified months; seasons, sure, but not months.

It also includes the very common theme of two people (in this case a rich brother and a poor brother) getting a completely different results from an encounter with the same supernatural being(s).

Fairy Tale Friday--Aino Folk-tales

The Ainu are an indigenous Japanese people.  This collection of tales aimed at academics hasn't got any illustrations, so I've added one from a Dover clip art collection.


Aino Folk-tales by Basil Hall Chamberlain

The story I would like to feature is The Man who was changed into a Fox on page 25.  Foxes appear frequently in Japanese folklore. They generally disguise themselves as women, or possess the souls of women,  so that makes this story an interesting exception.

Fairy Tale Friday--Urashima

Japanese Fairy Tales  By Teresa Peirce Williston has lots of color illustrations.  I'd like to tout the story Urashima.  It's a Japanese version of Rip Van Winkle.

Not from the book

Fairy Tale Friday--Prince Hat Underground

This title caught my eye because I love hats.  The tale, as told starting on page 187 of the collection Swedish fairy tales. Translated by Tyra Engdahl and Jessie Rew., never explains why he is Prince Hat.  Does he favor hats over crowns?  Is his head particularly important?

Another interesting element is the "singing leaves," which the good daughter (pictured above) asks her father to bring her.  Of course, her request for this weird gift gets her away from her father into the realm of Prince Hat Underground.  She has to live with him without seeing him, but (as in the story of Cupid and Psyche) she sneaks a look at him while he's sleeping, which makes him leave.  Then she has to go through a lot of rigamarole to get him back.

It's a very long, complicated story with many motifs.

Fairy Tale Friday--a New Series

I love fairy tales, and thanks to an army of 19th C tale-collectors Google Books has lots of copyright-free ones.   In honor of Open Access Week, I'm going to search out ones that interest me and feature them here on Fridays.

 

The first one is from Old Norse Fairy Tales: Gathered from the Swedish Folk. 

The Princess Sigorra

This tale includes several common folklore motifs:  A father is fooled into giving his child to a supernatural being (pictured above) (Thompson S241)*;  the child (in this case a son) is trapped in the SB's realm and is set, by said SB, several impossible tasks (Thompson H900), which the son accomplishes with directions from a woman (Princess Sigorra) (Thompson K1848); The son is finally able to flee with the aid of PS;  The son returns home, and, because he does not follow her instructions, he forgets PS.(Thompson D2003); The son's family arranges for him to get marries, and SB has to resort to complicated tricks to get to him and refresh his memory.


* Thompson, Stith, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature