Favorite Folktales From Around the World

by Jane Yolen

  God continued arguing with him, but the man would not even give Him a mouthful of broth, so He went His way.

  When the peasant was about to eat his chicken, another stranger came along; this one was very thin and pale.

  “Good morning, friend!” he said. “Haven’t you anything there you can give me to eat?”

  “No, señor, nothing.”

  “Come, don’t be a bad fellow! Give me a little piece of that chicken you’re hiding.”

  “No, senor, I shall not give you any.”

  “Oh yes, you will. You refuse me now because you don’t know who I am.”

  “Who can you be? God, Our Lord Himself, just left and not even to Him would I give anything, less to you.”

  “But you will, when you know who I am.”

  “All right; tell me then who you are.”

  “I am Death!”

  “You were right. To you I shall give some chicken, because you are just. You, yes, you take away the fat and thin ones, old and young, poor and rich. You make no distinctions nor show any favoritism. To you, yes, I shall give some of my chicken!”

  THE WORD THE DEVIL MADE UP

  Afro-American (Florida)

  The old Devil looked around Hell one day and saw that his place was short of help, so he thought he’d run up to Heaven and kidnap some angels to keep things running till he got reinforcements from Miami.

  Well, he slipped up behind a great crowd of angels on the out-skirts of Heaven and stuffed a couple of thousand in his mouth, a few hundred under each arm, and wrapped his tail around another thousand. And he darted off toward Hell.

  When he was flying low over the earth looking for a place to land, a man looked up and saw the Devil and asked him, “Old Devil, I see you have a load of angels. Are you going back for more!”

  Devil opened his mouth and told him, “Yeah,” and all the little angels flew out of his mouth and went on back to Heaven. While he was trying to catch them, he lost all the others. So he had to go back after another load.

  He was flying low again and the same man saw him and said, “Old Devil, I see you got another load of angels.”

  Devil nodded his head and mumbled, “Unh hunh,” and that’s why we say it that way today.

  A PADDOCK IN HEAVEN

  England

  There was a man who had just died, and arrived in Heaven, and Saint Peter was showing him around. Presently they came to a high wall. “Hush,” said Saint Peter. He fetched a ladder very quietly, and climbed up, beckoning the newcomer to follow him. They went stealthily up and peered over the wall. It was one of the Heavenly Meadows, and there were a lot of rather ordinary-looking people walking about in twos and threes.

  “Who are they?” said the newcomer.

  “Sh! said Saint Peter. “Don’t let them hear you. They’re the Primitive Methodists, and if they knew anyone else was in the place, they’d leave Heaven at once.”

  HOW A MAN FOUND HIS WIFE IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD

  Papua

  When our dead leave us none knoweth whither they go, nor by much searching hath any man found the way to Ioloa, the Land of the Dead, save one, and of him will I tell thee.

  This man lived in the hills where ariseth the Uruam, the river which flows into the sea between Wamira and Divari. It came to pass that the man’s wife died, and he mourned for her many days. But when it was time for the death feast to be made for her, he went forth with his dog to hunt for a cuscus that it might be eaten at the feast. (This tale doth my father tell, and I who have heard it tell it now to thee.)

  Now a cuscus sleeps all day, but in the softness of the evening it comes forth to seek its food. Therefore, it was at this time that the man set out to hunt. In a little he had found one, which he killed, and having no one with him who might carry it, he hung it upon a tree and went on. Once more he found one, which also he killed and hung on a tree. Then he saw a third, and the dog ran after it to catch it. But the cuscus ran also, and went down a hole in the earth. Now it went to its home in Ioloa, for it belonged to the Dead.

  When the man reached the hole, he found that his dog had also gone down, and he feared lest it might lose its way and come not back to him. Therefore he rolled away the great stone which lay over the hole and looked down. There far below he saw coconuts growing, so he said within himself, “This is a village.”

  Then he too went down the hole far into the earth. His dog was before him, and he caught him in his arms. Now so it is in Ioloa that all the day the bones of the Dead lie on the ground, but at evening each takes his own bones, and lives thus till the dawn. And as the man drew near, it was the time that the bones should live. It so befell that his wife was already walking, and was coming toward him. When she saw him, she said in her heart, “My husband hath died on the earth, and hath come to me.” Then she went to him, and with her fingers pinched his arm until the blood showed on his skin. Then said she, “Thou are not dead. Wherefore hast thou come hither?” And when he had told her how it had befallen him to find the hole in the earth, and that he had followed his dog, she said, “Hold thy dog closely lest he go after the bones of men, which lie upon the ground, and come thou with me while I hide thee, for it may be that the Dead will slay thee if they find thee here.”

  Then she took him to her house and bade him lie still nor let the voice of the dog be heard, for it was now time for the Dead to arise. The man did as she bade him, and he watched as the Dead laid hold of each his own bones. “This is my thigh,” and “Here is my arm,” he heard them say. Now it was night, and the Dead began to dance, while some of them beat also upon drums. And the man was much afraid as he watched from the house. But his wife remained with him, and he cared not for fear nor any other thing while he had her with him once more. “Ah, my wife,” he cried, “how hot was my heart with grief till I found thee!”

  But his wife feared for him that the Dead would find him in their land and would work him some evil; therefore she said, “Thou must not tarry here, for the Dead if they find thee will certainly fall upon thee.”

  Then said the man, “How can I leave thee when I have but now found thee?”

  “Ah, my lord,” answered the wife, “of a truth thou must not linger here. Yet if thou wouldst see me once more go now, and after three nights are past come again to me, and I will be here.”

  Then the man, after she had thus spoken, rose up to go. But on the way he stayed to pick coconuts, and scented herbs, and wild limes, that he might show them to the people of Uruam. And as he thus did, the Dead saw him and made haste after him in great numbers, and seized from his hands the coconuts, the scented herbs, and the wild limes, and he being beset by them could but escape with his life. And when he had come up to the face of the earth, the Dead closed the hole with a great stone that no man might lift.

  Therefore when the man returned after the three nights were past, he found no place where he might enter, and he saw his wife no more. Nor since that day have any found the way to Ioloa. But if the stone had not been placed over the hole we might even now have seen and talked with our dead after they had left us for their own land.

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  American Indian (White River Sioux)

  Somewhere at a place where the prairie and the Maka Sicha, the Badlands, meet, there is a hidden cave. Not for a long, long time has anyone been able to find it. Even now, with so many highways, cars, and tourists, no one has discovered this cave.

  In it lives a woman so old that her face looks a shriveled-up walnut. She is dressed in rawhide, the way people used to be before the white man came. She has been sitting there for a thousand years or more, working on a blanket strip for her buffalo robe. She is making the strip out of dyed porcupine quills, the way our ancestors did before white traders brought glass beads to this turtle continent. Resting beside her, licking his paws, watching her all the time is Shunka Sapa, a huge black dog. His eyes never wander from the old woman, whose teeth are worn flat, worn down to little stumps, she has used them to
flatten so many porcupine quills.

  A few steps from where the old woman sits working on her blanket strip, a huge fire is kept going. She lit this fire a thousand or more years ago and has kept it alive ever since. Over the fire hangs a big earthen pot, the kind some Indian peoples used to make before the white man came with his kettles of iron. Inside the big pot, wojapi is boiling and bubbling. Wojapi is berry soup, good and sweet and red. That soup has been boiling in the pot for a long time, ever since the fire was lit.

  Every now and then the old woman gets up to stir the wojapi in the huge earthen pot. She is so old and feeble that it takes her a while to get up and hobble over to the fire. The moment her back is turned, the huge black dog starts pulling the porcupine quills out of her blanket strip. This way she never makes any progress, and her quill-work remains forever unfinished. The Sioux people used to say that if the old woman ever finishes her blanket strip, then at the very moment that she threads the last porcupine quill to complete the design, the world will come to an end.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  “Tell all the Truth …”: Emily Dickinson, poem no. 1129, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), p. 506. The poem ends, “The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind—”

  “Whining like forest dogs …”: Vachel Lindsay, “Eden in Winter,” Collected Poems, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1925).

  “He woke up frightened …”: Katharine Briggs, British Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 170.

  “Tales are, in the ears …”: Roger D. Abrahams, African Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 2.

  The Old Lady in the Cave: My own reconstruction of a story told me—punchline only—by storyteller Carol Birch, who does not know where it comes from. All attempts to trace it have failed so far.

  “There is a kind of death …”: Ruth Sawyer, The Way of the Storyteller (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 59.

  “Tends to absorb something …”: Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales (1980; New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. xxi.

  “Man has to resort …”: Graham Greene, as quoted in Reidar Christiansen, Folktales of Norway (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. xxi.

  The Talking Skull: Leo Frobenius and Douglas C. Fox, African Genesis (Berkeley, Calif.: Turtle Island Foundation, 1983), p. 236.

  For more about this particular story, see either Abrahams, African Folktales, Introduction, pp. 1–27, or William Bascom, “The Talking Skull Refuses to Talk,” Researches in African Literatures 8 (1977): 226–91.

  “Compassion and humanness …”: Kornei Chukovsky, From Two to Five, trans. and ed. Miriam Morton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 138.

  “Bright is the ring of words …”: Robert Louis Stevenson, Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, selected by Helen Plotz (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), p. 57.

  “The fairy tale takes these existential anxieties …”: Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 10.

  “The breath of life …”: quoted by Laura Simms to the author.

  “Whenever misfortune threatened the Jews …”: a Hasidic tale that has been retold many ways, this version by John Shea, “Theology and Autobiography: Relating Theology to Lived Experience,” Commonweal, June 16, 1978, pp. 358–62.

  “There is a romantic idea …”: Joseph Campbell, “Exploring Myth with Joseph Campbell,” The Inward Light (Proceedings of the Friends General Conference on Religion and Psychology) 39, nos. 8–9 (Winter 1976–77): 50.

  “The younger generations …”: Don Futterman, “Allah Yassadi: Among the Moroccan Storytellers of Yeroham,” in The Calendar of Storytelling Arts, produced by the New England Storytelling Center, Lesley College Graduate School, Cambridge, Mass., 1985.

  “Sociology, Anthropology …”: Briggs, British Folktales, p. 2.

  “The ancient beldame …”: my own retelling of a popular literary anecdote about the philosopher William James.

  “It was a dark and stormy night …”: Katharine Briggs and Ruth L. Tongue, Folktales of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 149.

  This story—tale type 2320, “Rounds,” motif Z17—is very popular; over 100 versions have been collected in Lithuania. Edward Bulwer-Lytton began one of his novels this way, as did Madeleine L’Engle in A Wrinkle in Time; and Charles Schultz has had his writing dog, Snoopy, use the same classic opener in Peanuts.

  Why We Tell Stories: Lisel Mueller, The Need to Hold Still (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), pp. 62–63.

  TELLING TALES

  The Man Who Had No Story: Séamas Ó Catháin, The Bedside Book of Irish Folklore (Cork: Mercier Press, 1980), pp. 81–86.

  Collected in 1965 in Donegal, this is tale type 2412B in Sean O’Sullivan and Reidar Th. Christiansen, The Types of the Irish Folktale, Folklore Fellows’ Communications no. 188 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1967).

  How Spider Obtained the Sky God’s Stories: R. S. Rattray, Akan-Ashanti Folk Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930).

  Kwaku Anansi the spider is the incomparable African trickster who stars in hundreds of stories. Roger Abrahams talks about “the vitality and the protean abilities” of such characters. A children’s picture book of this tale, A Story, a Story, illustrated by Gail Haley, won the Caldecott Medal in 1971.

  Helping to Lie: Kurt Ranke, Folktales of Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 193.

  This little German tale is only one version of a widespread story of lying, the oldest of which is by the Persian poet Firdausi (A.D. 935–1020). It entered the European tradition in the twelfth century in the Exempla of the Bishop of Akkon.

  The Ash Lad Who Made the Princess Say “You’re a Liar!” Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, Norwegian Folk Tales (1960; New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), pp. 17–18.

  This is tale type 852. Versions of this popular story are scattered throughout Europe as well as Indonesia, Virginia, and Missouri, and a single version has been collected in Africa.

  The Parson and the Sexton: Asbjørnsen and Moe, Norwegian Folk Tales, pp. 15–16.

  This is the Norwegian version of an extremely popular story, “The Emperor and the Abbot” (tale type 922). In the English tradition it is a folk ballad, “King John and the Bishop.” While the emperor or king always propounds three riddles, some eighteen different riddles have been used. Walter Anderson, in his classic study of the tale, suggests that it originated in some Jewish community in the Near East, possibly Egypt, about the seventh century, The earliest literary versions date back to the ninth century.

  The Tall Tales: I. K. Junne, Floating Clouds, Floating Dreams: Favorite Asian Folktales (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), pp. 3–5.

  This Burmese version of the trickster tricked is related to tale type 1920, “Contests in lying,” where cleverness and absurd logic win the day.

  Catherine, Sly Country Lass: Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales (1980; New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), pp. 261–66.

  This extraordinarily popular tale (type 875), is known in the Grimm collection as “The Peasant’s Wise Daughter,” in Czechoslovakia as “Clever Manka,” and in hundreds of other tellings. It can be traced back to India, though its finest development has been in Europe. This is the Italian version. The set of tasks in which Catherine must appear “neither naked nor clothed” was also imposed upon the daughter of Brunhild and Sigurd in the great German cycle, as well as in the Icelandic Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok and in the Welsh hero cycle The Mabinogion, in the account of the death of Llew Llaw Gyffes.

  The Wise Little Girl: Aleksandr Afanas’ev, Russian Fairy Tales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945, 1973), pp. 252–55.

  A Russian tale with many of the same motifs as “Catherine, Sly Country Lass”: the three questions by the king, the task-countertask. The line about a cart giving birth to a foal is found in stories around the world.

  Clever A
nswers: Afanas’ev, Russian Fairy Tales, pp. 578–79.

  In this Russian variant of tale type 922B, the king and the soldier are in collusion and there is a further riddle to be solved: that of the plucked geese. In the Yiddish version, the “plucked pigeon” is the king’s vizier.

  A Dispute in Sign Language: Dov Noy, Folktales of Israel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 95–97.

  This ebullient Israeli story is a favorite among modern tellers because of the ease with which gesture can be incorporated in the telling. Tale type 924A, “Discussion between priest and Jew carried on by symbols,” it was first written down in the thirteenth century in the Gloss of Accursius. Versions have been found in England (“The Professor of Signs”), in the Turkish tales of Nasr-ed-Din Hodja, and even set down in literary form by Rabelais.

  Leopard, Goat, and Yam: Roger D. Abrahams, African Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 110.

  This is an African version of the famous classical logic puzzle with the answer built in.

  An Endless Story: Keigo Seki, Folktales of Japan, trans. Robert J. Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).

  This version of the endless tale, type 2300, has a distinctly Oriental flavor.

  THE VERY YOUNG AND THE VERY OLD

  Glooscap and the Baby: Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 25–26.

  The Algonquian tribes told many stories about Glooscap, or First Man, who was a combination of trickster and god.

  The Brewery of Eggshells: William Butler Yeats, Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (New York: Modern Library, 1925, 1950,), pp. 51–54.

  This method of detecting a changeling is widespread in European folk stories. Versions have been found in Germany (where the changeling is made to laugh), in Denmark (where it remarks on a pudding that is made with pig’s hide and hair), and Brittany. Stories about changelings fall under motif F321.1.