Favorite Folktales From Around the World

by Jane Yolen

  Father of Eighteen Elves: Jacqueline Simpson, Icelandic Folktales and Legends (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 28–30.

  This Icelandic variation of “The Brewery of Eggshells” has the porridge stirrer in common with some Norwegian versions. The elf-woman’s complaint that the human mother is not treating her charge as well as the fairies are caring for the human child can also be found in Danish variants of this tale. In one Danish story, the changeling says, “I am so old that I have been suckled by eighteen mothers.”

  The Fly: Mai Vo-Dinh, The Toad Is the Emperor’s Uncle: Animal Folktales from Viet-Nam (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970).

  Stories about wise children abound in folklore. In this Vietnamese tale, the child outwits the usurious landlord in a very sophisticated manner.

  The Two Pickpockets: Katharine Briggs, British Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 64.

  This jocular tale from England is still current. There are similar stories in India and Hawaii.

  The Seventh Father of the House: Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, Norwegian Folk Tales (1960; New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), pp. 13–14.

  Unlike most cumulative tales, this repetitious Norwegian story has an incantatory power that doesn’t change the essential narrative flow.

  The King’s Favorite: Moss Roberts, Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), p. 151.

  Wagging My Tail in the Mud: Roberts, Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies, p. 126.

  The great Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu published this Chinese gem.

  When One Man Has Two Wives: Inea Bushnaq, Arab Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 352.

  This jest story from Syria has found its way into American and English music-hall comedy routines.

  The Old Man and His Grandson: Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1944, 1972), pp. 363–64.

  Variants of this tale (type 980A) have been found in countries as far apart as Brazil, Japan, and Greece.

  Half a Blanket: Michael J. Murphy, Now You’re Talking … Folk Tales from the North of Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1975), p. 42.

  This Irish version of “The Old Man and His Grandson” is only one of the many variants. The Korean story, “The Aged Father,” has the old man taken to a mountaintop and put over the side in a basket. The child advises his father to save the basket so that he, in his turn, may put his own father in it.

  TRUE LOVES AND FALSE

  How Men and Women Got Together: Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 41–45.

  The Bloods and the Piegans, two of the allied Algonquian tribes that made up the Blackfoot people of Montana Territory, tell this story. It is similar to a rather more graphically sexual tale, “Bringing Men and Women Together,” from the Afro-American tradition in Surinam.

  The Little Old Woman with Five Cows: C. Fillingham Coxwell, Siberian and Other Folk-Tales (London: C. W. Daniel, 1925), pp. 262–69.

  This Siberian tale comes from the Yakut people of the middle Lena Basin, whose language is closely related to Turkish. The story has many common motifs: the miraculous birth, the maid of “indescribable beauty,” the wedding taboos, the false bride, the talking animal helper, and the happy ending.

  The Prayer That Was Answered: Frederick and Audrey Hyde-Chambers, Tibetan Folktales (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala Publications, 1981), pp. 152–55.

  This Tibetan tale of the “false bridegroom” (motif K1915) has a particular ironic twist, a variant of motif K1600, “The deceiver falls into own trap.”

  The Merchant’s Daughter and the Slanderer: Aleksandr Afanas’ev, Russian Fairy Tales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945, 1973), pp. 415–18.

  This Russian tale combines three major motifs: the king falling in love with a picture (see “Faithful John”), the deceptive wager (which Shakespeare uses in Cymbeline), and the ending in which the young woman accuses the liar with his own words. It is a much-traveled tale, having found its way even into a Tiwa American Indian story, “The Faithful Wife and the Woman Warrior.”

  What Happened to Hadji: Allan Ramsay and Francis McCullagh, Tales from Turkey (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1914).

  This tale from Turkey incorporates type 924, “Discussion between priest and Jew carried on by symbols” (see “A Dispute in Sign Language” in the “Telling Tales” section) into a story of a faithful wife. The stupid Hadji is a popular Turkish character.

  Mr. Fox: Katharine Briggs, British Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), pp. 87–89.

  This Bluebeard variant is connected to the cellar-of-blood and robber-bridegroom tales (type 956). The Grimm version is “Fitcher’s Bird.” The American Appalachian “Old Foster” is so similar to “Mr. Fox” as to be the same story with only regional accents making the difference. The “Be bold” formula can also be found in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, book 3, canto 2, stanza 54. In her book of essays Daguerreotypes, Isak Dinesen recalls a similar story and incantation she heard as a child in Denmark.

  The Waiting Maid’s Parrot: Moss Roberts, Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), pp. 9–14.

  From China, this story incorporates romantic elements which Oriental societies usually discouraged. Arranged marriages were the norm, but this story uses a magical animal helper (the reincarnation of the waiting maid’s sister) to aid the two lovers.

  The White Cat: Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith, The Fairy Ring (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 312–25.

  This is the classic French tale of an animal bride (type 402), made popular in 1710 through a retelling by Mme. D’ Aulnoy. The same story is found throughout Europe in over 300 versions, as well as in Armenia and North Africa. Different animals appear as the bride: in Finland, a mouse; in Czechoslovakia, a frog. The gifts differ, too: sometimes a ring, a kerchief, a loaf of bread, a bouquet, the finest dog or horse is demanded by the father. The status of the hero and his family also differs from story to story: sometimes he is royal, ofttimes a farmer (Czech) or a laborer (Finnish).

  Sedna: Ronald Melzack, The Day Tuk Became a Hunter (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1967).

  This demon-lover story told by the Eskimo people is one of their most popular and widespread tales. Sedna is the goddess of the sea, though she is also called by other names. Nuliajuk, a similar goddess of the sea and sea animals, loses her fingers when she tries to leap onto a raft with other boys and girls.

  Urashima the Fisherman: Royall Tyler, Japanese Tales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).

  This fragment taken from the Tango Fudoki is one of the best-known and most widespread of Japanese folktales. It dates from as early as the eighth century A.D. In the variant published by Edmund Dulac in the Allies Fairy Book in 1916, Urashima crumbles into dust at the end of the story. The supernatural lapse of time is a familiar motif (see “One Night in Paradise” in the “Ghosts and Revenants” section).

  The Spirit of the Van: Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology (1892; London: Wildwood House, 1981), pp. 409–11.

  A Welsh story that has made its way as a legend attaching itself to a particular place, this tale nevertheless is a familiar one. The warning against striking the fairy lover three times (“That’s once …”) is a usual taboo. As Katharine Briggs says in The Vanishing People (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978): “In the Fairy Wife tales and legends the fairy is wooed and consents to the marriage with a stipulation, which is generally not arbitrary, but arises out of the conditions of her being. This is almost always contravened and the wife departs” (p. 148). This particular story was written down in the late nineteenth century.

  The Toad-Bridegroom: Zong In-Sob, Folk Tales from Korea (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), pp. 175–78.

  This is a variant of the frog-prince tale (type 440), that classic Grimm favorite, collected throughout Europe, America, Scandinavia, and the Russias back to the thir
teenth century; it is also related to “Beauty and the Beast.” The provocative core of all the variants is that the loathsome-looking hero must be loved for himself alone. Note that in this version it is the toad’s rank rather than his extreme ugliness that causes him to be refused at first.

  Taken: Robin Flower, The Western Island: Or, The Great Blasket (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), pp. 135–37.

  This Irish tale is a very Christian version of the “captive in Faery” stories. Katharine Briggs wrote that “too hasty a re-marriage is often the cause of failure to rescue a captive in Fairyland,” but here it is the hard judgment of the priest that dooms the taken woman. The clash between Christendom and Faery is given full treatment in Maureen Duffy’s The Erotic World of Faery (New York: Avon Books, 1980).

  The Girl at the Shieling: Jacqueline Simpson, Icelandic Folktales and Legends (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 35–40.

  The love between a girl, especially a girl on a lonely mountain pasturage, and an elf or fairy man is common in Scandinavian lore. This lovely, tragic Icelandic tale is motif ML6005, “The interrupted fairy wedding.”

  Deer Hunter and White Corn Maiden: Erdoes and Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends, pp. 173–75.

  From the Tewa tribe of the Pueblos, this story of an all-consuming love that ignores tribal traditions and taboos even after death is similar to another Tewa tale, “The Husband’s Promise.”

  TRICKSTERS, ROGUES, AND CHEATS

  “The advocate of uncertainty …”: Alan Garner, The Guizer (New York: Green-willow Books, 1976), Introduction, p. 1.

  Tyll Ulenspiegel’s Merry Prank: M. A. Jagendorf, Tyll Ulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks (New York: Vanguard Press, 1938).

  The German trickster supreme (also spelled Till Eulenspiegel) is a historical personage who lived in the fourteenth century and is said to have died in 1350 at Mölln, Schlweswig-Holstein, where his grave has been a popular tourist site since the sixteenth century. By the fifteenth century, legends, jokes, and anecdotes were attributed to him; in fact, a collection of these were printed in one or more Low German books about that time.

  The Hodja and the Cauldron: Allan Ramsay and Francis McCullagh, Tales from Turkey (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1914).

  The Hodja, or Nasr-ed-Din Hodja, is a popular figure in Turkish tales, as well as in the folklore of other Near and Middle Eastern countries. There is no agreement as to whether the Hodja actually lived, though there is a government-sanctioned tombstone at Akeshehir, dated 1284. Like many national tricksters, the Hodja figures in a cycle of tales, most of them familiar stories found in other countries. This one has a Jewish parallel tale in which the rabbi trades spoons and says, “If a spoon can bear little spoons and if a goblet can bear little goblets, why should it surprise you that a watch can die?” An Indian variant puts it this way: “In a country where a large balance of iron was eaten by mice, a hawk might easily carry off an elephant.” In Syria the same cycle of stories clusters around the trickster Djuha; the story “Djuha Borrows a Pot” is a popular one.

  Being Greedy Chokes Anansi: Roger D. Abrahams, Afro-American Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 122.

  The stories about Kwaku Anansi the spider began in West Africa and made their way across the ocean to America on the slave ships. Anansi is the classic trickster, both having godlike qualities and occasionally playing the fool. This tale is motif C496, “Tabu using certain words.”

  Quevedo and the King: Américo Paredes, Folktales of Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 34.

  Don Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, a Spanish poet and satirist, lived in the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth (1580–1645). He became a legendary character, and trickster stories clustered around his name in both the folklore and the literature of the time (the borrowing in both from the trickster cycles of other countries was enormous). The principal motifs in this short tale from Mexico are H1050, “Paradoxical tasks”; J1485, “Mistaken identity: I did not know it was you”; and J1160, “Clever pleadings.”

  Why the Hare Runs Away: Roger D. Abrahams, African Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp. 74–75.

  This Ewe tale from Africa is a bareboned version of the famous tarbaby story (tale type 175) that first appeared in the Indian Jataka tales and then spread worldwide as an oral story. Here, birdlime instead of tar is used. Tarbabies come in all shapes, sizes, and materials: pitch, wax, gum, and clay are some of the things out of which the figure is made.

  Coyote Fights a Lump of Pitch: Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 359–61.

  This White Mountain Apache variant of the tarbaby story (type 175) stars the American Indian trickster Coyote. The tarbaby is linked to the original Jataka tale “The Demon with the Matted Hair,” in which the Buddha himself fights the demon and sticks to the figure in five places—hands, feet, and head.

  Crack and Crook: Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales (1980; New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), pp. 50–52.

  This Italian version of tale type 1525, “The master thief,” has retained only the final episode, the bedsheet. The red mark on the door is reminiscent of the trick played by the great dog in Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Tinderbox.”

  The Master Thief: Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1944, 1972), pp. 773–80.

  This story is tale type 1525, and there are versions of it throughout the world. The American is “Jack and the Rich Old Man”; the Irish, “Jack, the Cunning Thief”; the Mexican, “Ite’que”; and the French, “The Skillful Thief.” Herodotus told a similar story about King Rhampsinitus in 450 B.C. In most of the variants the horse and the bedsheet are consistent, though in the Mexican it is a poncho rather than a sheet that must be taken.

  Peik: Claire Booss, Scandinavian Folk and Fairy Tales (New York: Avenel Books/Crown Publishers, 1984), pp. 44–49.

  Known elsewhere in Europe as “The Clever Boy” (tale type 1542), this is the Norwegian version. Motif K341.8.1, “Trickster pretends to ride home for tools to perform tricks,” can also be found in parallel stories of the American Indians, most notably the Kiowa “Coyote Tricks the White Man,” and “Coyote and Wasichu” from the Brule Sioux. The life-restoring-object trick is a familiar motif. There are examples of it in the American Ozarks (“The Magic Horn”), in the West Highlands of Scotland, in the Afro-American tradition, and in several American Indian tales, as well as in India.

  The Monkey and the Crocodile: Ellen C. Babbitt, Jataka Tales: Animal Stories (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1912, 1940).

  From the Indian Jataka tales, this story of clever deception is popular throughout the world. It is quite old and has been found as “The Fox and the Foolish Fishes” in the seventh- or eighth-century Jewish Alphabet of Ben Sera. In Japan the story is known as “The Jelly Fish and the Monkey” and is a pourquoi tale about why the jellyfish is pulp.

  The Race Between Toad and Donkey: Abrahams, Afro-American Folktales, pp. 194–96.

  This is the Jamaican version of motif K11.1, tale type 1074, a story popular in East Asia, in Africa, among the American Indians, and in the Portuguese tradition of Brazil. According to Stith Thompson, it is a story that can star either animals or men.

  The King’s Son Goes Bear Hunting: C. Fillingham Coxwell, Siberian and Other Folk-Tales (London: C. W. Daniel, 1925), pp. 655–56.

  This Finnish tale is type 154, “Bear food,” without the second and third episodes in which the man’s dogs chase the fox into the hole and the fox then holds a conversation with the parts of his body. This first section may be found in the Roman de Renart, indicating that it was in common European usage from the tenth or eleventh century.

  John Brodison and the Policeman: Henry Glassie, Irish Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 103–4.

  This Irish short tale is possibly related to tale type 1529, “The peasant betra
ys the Jew through the substitution of a horse,” according to Henry Glassie, though that is stretching things a bit.

  The Rabbi and the Inquisitor: Nathan Ausubel, A Treasury of Jewish Folklore (New York: Crown Publishers, 1948), p. 36.

  Escape by deception is a common folkloric theme, though this Jewish tale is different from most.

  The Ugly Son: Royall Tyler, Japanese Tales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).

  This Japanese story of a deceptive marriage is unique.

  Dividing the Goose: Aleksandr Afanas’ev, Russian Fairy Tales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945, 1973), pp. 579–80.

  Part of the body of stories called “deceptive bargains,” this tale from Russia has made its way west. In America the clever peasant’s place is taken by an Irish tramp in a joke story called “Dividing the Chicken.”

  The Men Who Wouldn’t Stay Dead: Milton Rugoff, A Harvest of World Folk Tales (New York: Viking Press, 1949), pp. 331–33.

  This famous French story (motif K2321, tale type 1536A) began as a literary jest story of a decidedly gruesome nature, and has made its way out of the medieval fabliaux and into the oral tradition.

  The Story of Campriano: Calvino, Italian Folktales, pp. 298–301.

  A more elegant and artistic Italian version of the bloody Indian story “The Greatest Cheat of Seven,” it still has its dash of gore at the finale. It is also a variant of tale type 753, “Christ and the smith,” a saint’s legend told throughout Europe.

  THE FOOL: NUMBSKULLS AND NOODLEHEADS

  “The comic counterpart of solemnity …”: Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 279.

  “The element I think marks us most …”: Alan Garner, The Guizer (New York: Green-willow Books, 1976), Introduction, p. 1.

  The Three Sillies: Katharine Briggs, British Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), pp. 61–63.