Fairy Tale Friday

This week's collection is Folk Tales from Tibet, with Illustrations by a Tibetan Artist and Some Verses from Tibetan Love-Songs, collected and translated by Capt. W.F. O'Connor.
I recommend The Story of Room Bacha and Baki.  It has themes from the story The Giant Who Had No Heart in his Body.

Illustration from the book.

Fairy Tale Friday--The Heavenly Messengers

From Old-World Japan: Legends Of the Land of the Gods retold by Frank Rinde, with illustrations by T.H. Robinson, enjoy The Heavenly Messengers, in which the gods try and try again to bring order to the Earth.

Fairy Tale Friday

Enjoy Ancient Tide Lore and Tales of the Sea, From the Two Ends of the World, also, Some Highly Curious Ancient and Legendary Little-Known East Coast Maori Stories collected and translated by William Colenso.

Fairy Tale Friday--The Ghost that was Foiled

From The Chinese Fairy Book, edited by Richard Wilhelm, enjoy The Ghost that was Foiled.

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.