Monday, March 19, 2018

The Great and Powerful A to Z Challenge Theme Reveal!


You all know the drill by now. I have been doing this since 2012. That means, this is Year Seven for me in the Challenge! Seven is a magical number, especially in Hungarian folktales. Seven-headed dragons are the default dragon model for us. So, without further ado, and playing on last year's wildly popular WTF - Weird Things in Folktales theme, I give you my theme for 2018:

WTF HUNGARY?! - Weird Things in Hungarian Folktales

I would like to extend a special thanks to the #FolkloreThursday crowd on Twitter for helping me decide the theme by popular vote. I blame all of you for what follows. ;)

As for what you can expect out of this theme: I will be presenting some of the strangest, weirdest, most unique motifs, characters, places, and events from Hungarian folktales. There is no Motif Index specific to Hungary (sadly), so this theme will be less organized than last year; I will basically be cherry-picking things that are surprising, even to me as a Hungarian storyteller.

Among many other things, you can expect to hear about:

- A diamond prince in a rubber suit
- Princess Rosalia Lemonfarts
- Bacon. Lots of bacon.

See you all on April 1st!

(To see all the other themes being revealed today, visit the A to Z Challenge Main Blog!)

The Greeks tell great stories (Following folktales around the world 63. - Greece)

Today I continue the blog series titled Following folktales around the world! If you would like to know what the series is all about, you can find the introduction post here. You can find all posts under the Following Folktales label, or you can follow the series on Facebook!

The series is going on a short break after this week, and it will resume in May, after the end of the A to Z Challenge! In the meantime, tune in for some Hungarian folktale weirdness from April 1st!

Modern Greek Folktales
Richard McGillivray Dawkins
Greenwood Press, 1974.

This book is a classic. And a very thorough one, too. Dawkins selected 84 stories with the aim to represent the entire scope of Greek folktales. While one can definitely argue with that, it is impressive that most popular folktale types are indeed represented in the volume (and a few unique gems as well). Where applicable, Dawkins notes the ATU numbers for the tale types, and also cites all other Greek variants of the same type (which is awesome for research). All chapters are structured the same: Introduction of the tale type, discussion of the Greek variants and their differences, comparison to tales from other cultures, list of Greek variant sources, and analysis of certain symbols and elements - followed by the text (or texts, if they provide nice contrast), translated by Dawkins. In some cases, there is no text, because the Greek version did not diverge from the well-known stories (e.g. Snow White).
I did not only read the stories for fun, but also learned a whole lot about Greek folktales in general. I especially enjoyed the discussion of various motifs and symbols; among other things, I learned theories about why "open, sesame" has sesame in it, and why "three apples" fall from heaven at the end of a story.
"Complete" list of tale types or not, every country should have a collection like this.

Highlights


Showing how much I liked this book
One of the best tales in the book is The Mountain of Jewels and the Dove Maiden. It combines one of my favorite tale types, Gemstone Mountain (I wrote about it here), with a friendly ogre, and the search for a lost wife that takes the hero back to the mountain a second time (and he completely disregards the gemstones). In the end, even the ogre got his eyes back. I was also happy to encounter a variant of another favorite tale of mine, called The Magic Bird. I knew it as the Gold-spitting Prince (included in my book for the unique superpower). In this case, the powers given to the three heroes were not gold-related, but nonetheless intriguing; one of them even gained the ability to see into the hearts of people. One of the other stories in the same book came from this very collection: The Son of the Hunter, a version of the "extraordinary helpers" tale which I especially like because one helper has the ability to cause earthquakes. The three men and the umpire was a close version of "Three fastidious men" (also in my collection), all displaying keen superhuman senses and Sherlock Holmes-like deductive powers.
I really enjoyed Is it a Girl? Is it a Boy?, where a king sent a daughter, and another king sent a son, to fetch the Water of Life, in order to see whether boys or girls were more useful. The girl, disguised as a boy, won the bet, and managed to confuse the hell out of her helper, Sir Northwind in the process (but they did fall in love in the end).
One of the most fun stories in the book is the one about The young man and his three friends. It is a turducken of stories: The hero sets out to find a beautiful woman, and meets three companions on the way - Son of the Sun, Son of the Moon, and Son of the Sea. He gets wives for each of them through completing side-quests in the form of other tale types: The first, the Princess on Glass Mountain; the second, a Dancing Princess; and the third, a Silent Princess, whom they make talk through telling yet another embedded story, that of the Magician's Apprentice. The Silent Princess, yet another favorite of mine, is also represented in a separate text in the book, and contains a version of the Louse Skin tale. I like my favorite stories wrapped in other favorite stories of mine.
I also enjoyed the tale of The Quest for the Fair One of the World. Here, the hero had to find a hidden princess, who ended up helping him do so by giving secret directions. I also liked The Princess' Kerchief, in which a girl that everyone thought was "crazy" helped the princess find her lost love.
The tale of the Underworld Marriage felt distinctly mythical; a girl wandered into the Underworld, and returned with an armful of flowers, only to go back later, and marry the king of the Underworld (hello, Persephone!). A very similar thing happened in the tale about Eating Human Flesh - the King of the Underworld demanded what a girl who wanted to be his wife should eat some human flesh. In addition, his true wife found a key in his navel, and opened a door to the entire world - a great motif that Dawkins examines in detail (and we will encounter later on in Albania). And talking about the underworld: The tale of The woman who could see the Angel of Death was unique and a little sad. She asked for this as a gift from the angels, and from that point on, she could see what happened to people in the moment of their death. Less somber, and more horrifying was the tale of the Strigla, in which the hero had to fight his own sister who turned into a vampire-like creature.
Morningstar and Pleiades
Many of the tale types were familiar, but some had interesting twists on them. Little Brother and Little Sister, for example, had the stepbrother save his stepsister from their evil mother, and they eventually fled into the sky, turning into the Morning Star and the Pleiades. The Son of the Sea was very similar to Grimm's Nixie in the Millpond, except combined with the type where the hero could turn into a lion, an eagle, and an ant, and used all three of his abilities to get away from the curse.
I found the tale of The girl who had two husbands fascinating - I knew it in a Turkish version, but in this one, a girl actually killed her own mother following the manipulations of her (would-be) stepmother, and she had to do penitence for her sin by taming the Dragon Prince. The story did not have a happy end. Killing a mother also appeared in the Greek Cinderella, except it was the two older sisters who did it. Cruelty had less dire consequences in the Greek version of Love Like Salt, in which the king did not exile his youngest daughter, but instead married her off to the first poor man to pass the palace (who turned out to be a great husband).
In many tales it was the reversal of genders that was interesting. The girl who married an animal (actually, an ogre named Musk and Amber) was essentially the gender-swapped version of the Master Maid; the Boy who had a dream, according to some notes, also has a Greek variant where the dreamer destined for greatness is a girl. This boy, by the way, did not only marry the princess that saved him, but also the other one that kept sending riddles to be solved - and ended up with two wives. In an Animal Husband tale, it was the crab-prince who came out when nobody was home, and cleaned the house (yay for equality of chores). In Searching for Luck, the hero who set out to find luck was an old woman, looking for the Undying Sun. She helped others along the way, and returned home, content, but not any wealthier than she started. In the contrasting tale, however, a man tried to loosen the fountain of his fortune (literally), and broke a stick into the pipe; after that, his life was an endless series of misfortune. A note also mentioned a male "prince and the pea," but didn't include the text.

Connection


After the Ukraine, Moldove, and Bulgaria, I once again found a tale about the girl and her brothers who were kidnapped by a dragon, for their late-born little brother to save. In this case, the boy was born from his widow mother drinking her own tears. I last encountered the tale type of The Goldsmith's Wife in the USA; in this version, two princes helped a woman escape from her abusive husband.
The Magic Brothers-in-Law was a close variant of Grimm's Crystal Ball, except the villain here did not hide himself in one, but three eggs: One had his sight, one had his strength, and one had his life (hello, Voldemort). The Boy and his Guardian was a straight up "grateful dead" tale, but I liked the moment where the king threatened to have his son executed if he did not make at least one friend. The tale of The girl whose father wanted to marry her was a version of Catskins, but in this case, it was the girl who took the prince's ring at the ball, so that she could come back for him later. Three Measures of Salt was a classic case of the clever wife taunting her husband, like in the American Basil Maiden, or the Pentamerone's Violetta. The Girl who went to war was a sex-change folktale (and notes also said there are variants where the prince turns into a princess, instead of the other way around). The clever peasant girl in this case focused on speaking in riddles - called "crow language" - which a prince used to make sure his bride would be clever.

Where to next?
Malta!

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Where in the world is Juanita Harrison?

She had me at the title, really.
I love reading travel journals; the older, the better, and extra great if it was written by a woman. I came across Juanita Harrison's book by accident, but even before I clicked on the free ebook, the title already sold it:


There is so much love and joy in that title, there was no question whether I was going to like this book.
And then it got better.

Here is what we know about Juanita Harrison: She was born around 1891 in Mississippi, she was a woman of color, she worked various jobs in the US and Cuba, until in 1927, at the age of 36, she decided to travel around the world, so she packed up a suitcase, got on a ship, and set out on a 7 year adventure.

And then it gets even better.

Here are some things I absolutely adore about Juanita:
(Yes, this book is the grammar pedant's worst nightmare, which makes it even more awesome)

1. She is not a rich lady waltzing around the world. She calls herself a "rover"; she freelances wherever she goes, taking odd jobs to earn money. Whenever she has enough for the next leg of the journey, she quits immediately, and "loafs around", enjoying her vacation, until the money runs out.

2. She values fun over objects. She regularly gets rid of her entire suitcase (once she gifts it to a maid at a house she works at), and she only ever mentions buying two frivolous things: Postcards, and books. See why I like her yet?

3. Talking about books: Wherever she goes, Juanita visits the local library to read about the places she is visiting. She also spends time in various libraries for fun.

4. In general, she spends on adventures rather than things:

"I left New York with a ten dollar hat on my head but it rained so often in London and Scotland that it have taken all the life out of it I thought of buying another but for that money I can go into so many grand old castles and manisons that I can still see beauty in it."

She runs to save the taxi money for the opera, and when she finds some coins on the ground, she goes back to the world fair a second time to look around. She takes dance lessons in Spain, goes to public baths in Japan (and shows off her pink bra), visits cabarets and festivals, and especially enjoys crashing local weddings and funerals to see what they are like...

5. She claims her space and she does not apologize for it.

"I got a passage on the Orient Line on a lovely boat and they say the 3rd Class are as good as the second on the other lines. I gave my likes and dislikes a Cabin without children and uper berth, and will be ready to fight to get what I want once on boad so no one need piety me."

6. She sets her boundaries and sticks to them.

"I dont want anyone fooling with my room rent, my room is my personal self they can give me my food or little presents but I dont want any one to be able to come to my room."

7. She decorates her spaces, even when she only lives in them for a few days; she hangs curtains, buys flowers, and scrubs the floors. The short time while she works at a mental institute for children in Spain, she makes sure they get new, nicer pots.

8. She has a great deal of common sense. She sews pockets to her "bloomers", never lets her passport out of her hand, scrubs washing basins before she uses them, shops at local markets, and always pretends to stay at a hotel when someone walks her "home."

9. She punches men who try to hit on her too aggressively. Apparently, she has a mean upper cut.

10. She does not hate men, however, and is also not afraid of them. In fact, she enjoys flirting, and makes comments about the men of various countries, especially the really hot ones.

"I like best to tease with the handsome blue caped policeman, because when I have heard enough I can step away from his beat which he can not leave."

11. She takes deep, absolute, and pure enjoyment in everything she does. She walks barefoot in the grass around the Taj Mahal, and takes a nap in the shade. She drinks fresh milk in the Netherlands while watching the sunrise. She takes everything as an adventure; she climbs a lamppost to get a look at the Spanish Queen, laughs herself silly on a ship tossed around by a typhoon in Japan, and seriously considers getting arrested in Germany just to see what that's like. Even seasickness is registered as "fun" in her journal.

12. She is perfectly happy and content with traveling alone. She turns down several traveling companions (men and women alike), and does everything on her own time, in her own way, and exactly as long as she wants to.

13. She never has a bad word about any nation or culture. She calls most of them "gentle and kind," and goes out of her way to spend time with people, even when they try to put her with the "European" passengers. She prays, but she always prays in whatever church, temple, synagogue, or mosque is the nearest; she is open to learning about other people's ideas.

"another Gentlean a Very smart Professor and a strong Buddish He talked for 2 hours to me on that faith and I was so thankful it was just what I wanted to hear I sat very quiet and took it all in he spoke about it said I was a good listner as most Christians argue."

14. In 1935, she settles down in Hawaii. Her way of settling down involves buying a tent (grandly named Villa Petit Peep) that she can carry in a bundle on her head, and moving around whenever she feels like it. This is what she says about settling down:

Well never in all my life have I slept so wonderful as in my Tent the 4 holes in each of the windows where the ropes drow up the Shade make 12 holes and when the light is out and the door and Windows closed the lights of the street shine through the holes and on to the Top of my Tent and it look just like the Stars. I'll get a serfe boad and Take a few Hula lessons just to add gayness to that list of things the check bought. 
 I want alway to be where wealth health youth beauty and gayness are altho I need very little for myself I just want to be in the midst of it. 1 have reversed the saying of Troubles are like Babies the more you nurse them the bigger They grow so I have nursed the joys.

***

Just as she appeared on the stage of world literature, Juanita gracefully stepped off of it. We don't know what happened to her after the book was published. We don't even have a picture of her. She wandered the world for 7 years between the two world wars, seeing it as the most beautiful place to be, living every day as the most beautiful day to be alive.

We should be teaching this, for so many reasons. Juanita Harrison should be on reading lists everywhere. We should be talking about a world traveler who did not discover, research, or exploit; we should be talking about a woman (of color) who traveled alone by choice and was not ashamed or afraid for one minute of it. We should be talking about how she had no grammar or punctuation, and yet she lived for libraries and the opera. We should celebrate her empathy and her friendliness, her confidence, her sheer joy and her insatiable curiosity.
Or, at the very least, some Literature major should look into what happened to her after she landed in Hawaii. I would love to know.

Let's remember Juanita Harrison.

Monday, March 12, 2018

Troubles with creation (Following folktales around the world 62. - Bulgaria)

Today I continue the blog series titled Following folktales around the world! If you would like to know what the series is all about, you can find the introduction post here. You can find all posts under the Following Folktales label, or you can follow the series on Facebook!


Bulgarian Folktales
Assen Nicoloff
Cleveland, 1979.

The volume contains (as stated by the introduction) exactly 82 stories - 12 animal tales, 19 wonder tales, 23 legends, and 28 anecdotes. They were all selected from various 19th century collections, and translated by the editor - the language occasionally feels a little surprising to a reader of folktales, being peppered with terms like "buddy," "oldster," and "okay." I wasn't sure if that was a thing of translation, or based on the original casual language of the stories.
The introduction paints a detailed picture of the Bulgarian oral tradition, and the history of folklore collections in the country. At the end of the book we find copious end notes for each tale (including sources and tale types), a glossary, a bibliography, and an index. It is a well edited, well-selected collection.

Highlights

Dobri the Kind Woodcutter was an endearing tale on account of its kind, gentle protagonist. The woddcutter was nice to all animals, and gained magic powers as a result; he was able to make a suffering kingdom thrive again. He never used his powers for evil, but did use them to punish an evil queen - by turning her into a screech owl.
The Flying Horse is a colorful, exciting variant of the famous Ebony Horse of the 1001 Nights (I included that story in my own book as well). In this story, a young boy creates the magic wooden horse to prove that he is better than his master - then immediately attempts to destroy it so that it can't get into evil hands. The second half of the story reminded me of another favorite of mine, the Jewish tale of the Rebel Princess, where a girl becomes a king, and uses her power to teach a lesson to people who treated her badly during her journeys.
Dragons in love in Varna
The tale of Uncle Trak and the Last Dragon made me kind of sad. It told about the age of great dragon warriors who were brave in battle and gallant with mortal women (and even moved their scaly tails so that the girls could sit next to them). The appearance of gunpowder ended their time, and the last of their kind was unceremoniously cooked in a pot by the sly Uncle Trak. I have never seen such a depressing variant of the "poor man and the ogre" before...
I found several delightful stories among the legends. In How the world was created, God competed against a devil named Anastasius; the latter poked holes in people while they were still freshly made of clay, and thus the soul kept leaking out of them. There was also a legend about Why the sky is high, which resembled many tales from Oceania (You're Welcome!). I was especially amused by When and how people were created. In it, God created the first few humans from clay by his own hand, with great attention to detail; but then he discovered that he could create them faster with the use of molds, and switched to mass production - except the molded people were not quite perfect anymore. I also learned Why the Sun does not get married - apparently, people convinced him that marriage sucks, in order to avoid having a bunch of baby suns in the sky, burning up the earth. In another tale, Hedgehog crashed the celestial wedding party, and the Sun gave him spines for self-defense, since all other animals were angry about missing the event.
Among the historical legends, the most interesting was that of Rumena Voivoda, a 19th century woman who left her son and husband at home to go and lead a band of robbers in rsistance against the Turks. The enemy feared her, the Bulgarians loved her, and she was called the Queen of the Mountains. (They made a movie about her last year!)


Connectons

One of the local tricksters, like in the Ukraine, is a female fox called Kuma Lisa; she spends most of her time tricking Wolf. There were other familiar animal tales as well - that of the Brementown musicians (Animals' flight to the forest), where old Ox built a house and all the others begged to be let in, or that of the Mouse and the Mole, where Mouse wanted to marry her daughter to the strongest being in the world (which turned out to be the Mole). Next to Kuma Lisa, there was also a human trickster in the book, named Sly Peter.
Three Brothers and the Golden Apple was the familiar tale of apples being stolen every night. This time, the culprit was a dragon, stealing apples for his daughters; the youngest prince followed it into the underworld. Since only two apples had been stolen, the third girl was playing with a golden rat instead... Unlike other tales of this time, in this one the hero descended one level even deeper, and defeated another dragon, before returning to our world. Dragons also featured into The Dragon and the Tsar's Daughter, a unique variant of the shoes that were danced to pieces. In it, the princess went out every night to... play ball with a dragon.
The Shepherd and the Fox was a variant of Puss in Boots; interestingly, the (female) fox was actually a friend of the Lamia-monster that they evicted from the castle in the end. There were also other familiar fairy tale types, such as Godfather Death, and the story of Why old people are not killed anymore. There were actually several related stories about respect for elders, and also quite a few tales about clever girls and women.

Upcoming Bulgarian cartoon series based on folklore!
Where to next?
Greece!

Monday, March 5, 2018

Flowers and gemstones (Following folktales around the world 61. - Romania)

Today I continue the blog series titled Following folktales around the world! If you would like to know what the series is all about, you can find the introduction post here. You can find all posts under the Following Folktales label, or you can follow the series on Facebook!


Szegény ember okos leánya
Román népmesék
Kovács Ágnes (szerk.)
Európa Könyvkiadó, 1974.

Yet another volume of our wonderful Tales of Nations series, and once again a very valuable collection. It contains fourteen beautiful, elaborate Romanian fairy tales selected from 19th century sources. In the afterword, folklorist Ortutay Gyula explains that while Hungarian storytellers for example tend to focus on action and dialogue, Romanian tellers took pleasure in detailed, exquisite descriptions. This definitely shows in the tales, and I loved every minute of it. Of course the book contains notes for each story, complete with sources, tale types, and comparable Hungarian variants.

Highlights


Since most of the tales belonged to well-known types, the highlights mostly came from small details and elaborations within the stories. For example, in the story of Calin the Fool, the hero fell in love with the middle (!) sister - out of princesses of copper, silver, and gold, he chose silver. In The Man Turned to Stone, the magical helper of the heroes was the Spring Breeze. His mother hid the heroes (under the wings of an emerald-eyed and diamond-beaked magic bird) when he came home. Spring Breeze was a youth with golden hair and silver wings, carrying a staff covered in flowers and vines, smelling like roses and rosemary. He drank doe milk and violet water for dinner. In the same story, the heroes rode a fairy carriage to the princess' palace, a palace of sapphire with a door made of cypress wood.
As a whole, I think my favorite tale was that of Tugulea, Son of Old Man and Old Woman. It began with a dragon queen stealing the boy's sinews at birth, because she was afraid he'd kill her when he grew up. The crippled hero could not walk, but he learned how to shapeshift, turned into a bird, and eventually got his sinews back (and killed the dragon queen). The story from here turned into that of the Extraordinary Helpers - Tugulea had companions who could eat and drink a lot, withstand freezing cold, and do magic. The latter came in handy when one of the tasks posed to the hero was that he had to make fifty barren women have babies in one night (hello, Hercules). The magician did the trick "with the power of his magic wand."
At the end of the volume there was also a more "modern" fairy tale, in which The Fairy of the Waters did not only help the hero succeed, but they also ended feudalism in the process...

Connections


Georges Rochegrosse:
Le Chevalier aux Fleurs
The title story, The Poor Man's Clever Daughter, was that of the common tale type - a long and elaborate version. Youth without old age and life without death was a lovely and complex variant of the prince seeking immortality - in this case, he had to fight several witches on the way, including one named Scorpion. Fairy Ilona was a similarly long and beautifully detailed variant of the princess who turns into a prince.
After the Ukraine and Moldova, I once again encountered the story of the sister who is kidnapped by a dragon while bringing food to her brothers to the fields where they work. She is rescued by her late-born little brother and his friend (in this case, Peter Peppercorn and Florea of the Flowers). I especially liked the figure of the Knight of Flowers who became a close friend to the hero.

Where to next?
Bulgaria!