Reading Diary A: Lang's European Fairy Tales I

This week I read from the Lang's European Fairy Tales unit. I was initially drawn to it because I saw it included Puss In Boots, which is a personal favorite of mine, but ultimately found How the Dragon was Tricked to be my favorite. This is partially because I've always found myself interested in dragons, but also because the story was fun to read. It's about a young man who is forced to steal from, and ultimately capture, a dragon. The ways he tricks the dragon are very entertaining though I did find myself feeling bad for the dragon who didn't really seem to have done anything wrong. Overall, a very good story!

The dragon

Reading Diary A: Brothers Grimm

This week I read a story from the Brothers Grimm. I've always been a big fan of these stories because they're so interesting to read when paired with the more popular fairy tales that we all read as kids. I didn't realize that there were many others stories from the Brothers Grimm that weren't adapted into children's stories. My favorite that I read today was Old Sultan. It's the story of a dog - Old Sultan - who is getting old, so the father of the family decides to put him down. The wife talks him out of it, and so the dog hatches a plan with a wolf to interrupt a kidnapping of the family's child. After doing this, the mother and father love the dog again. When the dog refuses to let the wolf steal sheep in repayment, the wolf challenges Old Sultan to a fight. I won't ruin what came next. I really enjoyed this story because it was from the point of view of a dog, and it offered an interesting take on the negative outcomes that can come from laying with a wolf.

Old Sultan about to battle the wolf

Brothers Grimm unit

Reading Diary A: Aesop's Fables (English)

This week I decided to read Aesop's Fables in the English version. I had previously read the Classical/Biblical versions, so it was interesting to see the contrast. The biggest thing I noticed was the form itself, with the earlier ones I read being structured as a story while the English versions were poems. I personally enjoyed the stories more just because I have trouble following poetry all that well. My favorite stories from the book came from Lions and focused on the experiences of Lions with man and other animals. It talked about the Lion and Man and their disagreements, as well as how the Lion cunningly separated the Bulls so that he could hunt them one by one, but my favorite individual poem was about the Lion and a Mouse. The Mouse wakes up the Lion while he's sleeping, but the Lion decides to let the Mouse live. Later, when the Lion is caught in a trap, the Mouse comes and rescues him to pay back the kindness. I enjoyed this because I'm a big fan of circular kindness like this.

The Mouse rescuing the Lion from a trap

Aesop's Fables (English)

Reading Diary A: Beowulf

This week I decided to read the stories of Beowulf for my reading diary. I was especially interested in the stories Beowulf Lands in Daneland and Beowulf Comes to Heorot because the focused on the land of the Danes, Denmark. I'm actually 50% Danish with both of my grandparents on my dad's side being there, so it was especially interesting to read a story that involved Denmark. The story is about how Beowulf and his warriors arrive in Denmark on a mission to assist the king there. The king and his followers are harassed constantly by a demon named Grendel, and Beowulf is there to help. Upon arriving, they are greeted at the beach by a warrior of the king, who conveys them to Heorot. There they are welcomed and begin to learn about the terrible danger of Grendel.

King Hrothgar of Heorot

Beowulf

Reading Diary A: Blackfoot Stories

This week I read the Blackfoot unit, which focused on stories from the Blackfoot people. All involved animals in some way, but my favorite was The Wolf Man. In the story, a man has two wives who do very little to serve him. They don't cook or clean because they're too busy having a good time, and so the man decides to move them out away from other people so then women won't be distracted. They move and he continues to provide, but the women grow bored quickly. They decide to build a trap for the man and trick him into falling in a hole. When he does, they run back to the village and pretend he disappeared while hunting. What they don't realize, though, is that the man is still alive. He's dug out of the hole by a pack of wolves, and they use magic to make his head and hands like a wolf's. The man shows the wolves how to steal food from the humans, until he's finally captured and it's revealed that his wives had tried to kill him. I enjoyed the story because of the mix of supernatural and folktale. I liked that in many of the other stories as well, but I thought this story was particularly interesting because of the betrayal by the wives, and then the semi-betrayal by the Wolf Man in stealing food from people that used to be his neighbors.

What Wolf Man looked like, probably

Blackfoot Stories

Extra Reading Diary: Eskimo Folk Tales

My favorite story from the second half of the Eskimo Folk Tales was The Eagle and the Whale. It's the story of an Eskimo family with two daughters and a bunch of sons. The daughters are married off to a whale and an eagle, and live with them for a long time. They sons begin to miss the daughters, so they work on a plan to break them out. The first daughter escapes from the eagle using a rope, and then the brother shoot it with an arrow and kill it. The second daughter escapes from the whale using a boat, and the brother row away fast enough to escape. Ultimately the whale dies after beaching itself. I enjoyed these stories because they involved animals as well as creativity for the daughters to escape. Humans marrying animals is still a tad odd to me but I think I'm slowly adapting.

An Eskimo whaling ship

Source:

Eskimo Folk Tales

Reading Diary A: Eskimo Folk Tales

My favorite story in this unit was The Woman Who had a Bear as a Foster Son. I've always enjoyed stories about animals that get integrated into human life, which is essentially what this story is. A woman adopts a small bear, who grows older and stronger until he is a hunter for the woman and her community. It eventually gets to the point where he is too strong, and ultimately ends up killing a human. It's then that the bear is sent off in to the world, but not before the woman marks him with black soot so that he can be recognized. It was a bit of a sad ending in that sense, but at the end they reference that a bear with a black mark can be periodically seen hunting in the area.

Polar Bear

Eskimo Folktales

Reading Diary B: South African Folktales

To start, I was slightly confused by The Dance for Water. I believed it was earlier in this unit that I read another story that was almost exactly identical. The Dance for Water is a story about how all the animals but the Hare dance to get water, and it actually works. Then the Hare drinks the water even though he didn't dance for it any everyone's upset. So they decide to have the Tortoise hide at the edge of the pond and make his shell sticky, so that when the Hare came he would be stuck to the Tortoise's shell. In the previous portion of the unit, The Story of a Dam tells a similar story concerning Jackal, one that ends with Lion determining the punishment will be spinning by the tail and dashing Jackal's head against the rocks. In the second story, the punishment is taking Rabbit's tail and dashing his head against the stones. I found this close parallelism in consecutive stories interesting and a little confusing. Outside of that, I again enjoyed the second half of this unit, though there were no stories that really stood out to me like Tink Tinkje did in the first half.

Citation:
South African Folktales

Rabbit tracks in the sand

Reading Diary A: South African Folktales

First, an overall comment. I enjoyed these stories quite a bit but was somewhat frustrated with them. The Lion loses to the Jackal in basically every single story. I know that this is a shout out to being cunning and clever and manipulative, but the Jackal was also pretty clearly a terrible creature. I'm boring and prefer a story with a moral message that I approve of, so that was somewhat discouraging. On an individual level though, I thought the stories were quite good. My favorite was Tink-Tinkje, which is a story about the competition between the birds of South Africa to be named King of the birds. There is a lot of disagreement on what the actual competition should be, but ultimately they decide that it will be whoever can fly the highest. This seems rigged from the start, because it's openly acknowledged that the Vulture can fly the highest. But they compete anyways, and just when the Vulture thinks it has flown the highest, the Tink-Tinkje appears from beneath its (the Vulture's) wing and declares that it has actually flown the highest. I did enjoy this show of cunning to outwit a physically superior animal, which is interesting because it is somewhat a parallel of the situation between the Jackal and the Lion. That further reinforces for me the idea that the message of a story has quite a bit to do with whether or not I enjoy it.

South African Folktales

Tink-Tinkje Bird

Reading Diary A: Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria

Topic: The stories I focused on in this unit were The Fish and the Leopard's Wife and The Elephant and the Tortoise. Each of these stories is intended to explain natural phenomena that occur with animals in Africa. The first tells the story of the Fish, who was banished to live only in the water after taking part in an affair with the Leopard's wife. The Leopard and the Fish are good friends, so the Leopard asks the King to handle the punishment. This punishment is to be allowed to live only in the water, and to be killed if the Fish comes on land. The second story, explains why the Elephant has such small eyes. The Elephant used to eat so much food at feasts that other animals couldn't get their fair share. So, the Tortoise tricks the Elephant into trading each of his eyes in exchange for more food. After realizing he has been tricked, the Elephant talks the Worm into giving him his eyes. For this reason, the Elephant has small eyes and the Worm is blind. This was the general theme of all the stories I read in the unit, creating an explanation for the characteristics of the various animals in Africa.

Table of Contents:
Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria

Elephant eye

Reading Diary A: Raja Rasalu

My reading for Week 5 was interesting because it was actually somewhat similar to the Sindbad stories I read in Week 4, but I enjoyed it a lot more. I've been trying to do some thinking to figure out why exactly that is. Raja Rasalu is a somewhat invincible, incredibly strong and smart hero. He beats a famous king in a game of skill and kills many giants. He's just as infallible as Sindbad, yet I found him to be a much more likeable character. I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that the stories of Raja Rasalu are set in 3rd person, whereas the stories about Sindbad are first person. Each achieves great successes, but in the case of Sindbad it feels as though he is bragging, while it feels like Raja Rasalu's story is just being accurately recounted. I think this has something to do with the fact that I'm especially reactive to what I consider bragging, and Sindbad was especially unlikeable to me. The other factor is that Raja Rasalu has undeniable abilities. His major successes are by virtue of his major capabilities, whereas with Sinbad it appeared that everything was a result of his general luck. I have always felt that capable people are more worthy of respect than those that just fell into a situation, so I enjoyed Raja Rasalu more. I also felt that there was more variety to the stories in Raja Rasalu and then they never seemed to follow just one set storyline.

Links:
Raja Rasalu

Raja Rasalu kills the giants

Reading Diary B: Voyages of Sindbad

Summary: I really feel like I'm just missing the point in these Sindbad stories. The more I read them the less I enjoyed them. I think that I just don't like the structure of a hero constantly being honored and achieving incredible things speaking about it in first person. In elementary school I was a bit of a braggart and ever since my grandpa sat me down and gave me a talking to I've been especially aware of what I perceive as bragging coming from myself and other people. Reading Sindbad just feels like listening to that guy at the high school reunion who wants people to know about all the incredible things he has done in life, even though most of them are definitely to good to be true. I did enjoy that his sixth and seventh voyages were at least tied together by the plot, I thought this plus the addition of complementary character that stayed around made it much more interesting.

Table of Contents:
The Voyages of Sindbad
The Arabian Nights' Entertainments by Andrew Lang and illustrated by H. J. Ford (1898).

Sindbad is taken to the elephant graveyard

Reading Diary A: Voyages of Sindbad

Topic: I had some sort of mixed feelings about Sindbad as a whole. I'm sure it's some sort of storytelling method, but I didn't particularly enjoy how each of his voyages mostly followed the same basic structure, even down to reuniting with the original captain and recovering his shipment of goods. I read Ovid's Metamorphoses previously and they seemed to more or less follow a constantly changing storyline, which I appreciated. I just found these stories too repetitive. I did enjoy the stories of Sindbad once he had become trapped in one place or another though, especially on the island with the one-eyed giants. It was definitely very interesting the parallels this story had to one of the tales of Odysseus. We aren't especially far into this class but I definitely feel as though repitition of themes and even plotlines is a very common thing across cultures. This could possibly be put down to plagiarism but I think a more benign explanation for it is that storytellers want to put tales in a context that their listeners will understand and appreciate. So if a storyteller from Baghdad heard the tale of Odysseus, it actually makes a lot of sense for him to translate it over to Sindbad so his listeners can relate better.

Table of Contents:
Voyages of Sindbad
The Arabian Nights' Entertainments by Andrew Lang and illustrated by H. J. Ford (1898).

The one-eyed giant that eats many of the sailors

Reading Diary B: Ovid's Metamorphoses (Books 5-7)

For this diary I read the second part of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The portion I was most impacted by and interested in was the tale of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus. In this story, Procne and Philomela are sisters, with Procne being married to Tereus. When Tereus meets Philomela, he decides that he must 'have' her. So he tricks Procne and Philomela's father into letting him take Philomela with him back to Procne, and instead rapes and mutilates her. He leaves her trapped inside a building while he goes back to Procne and pretends she has died. Philomela manages to weave a message using her hair, which she gets to Procne. Procne then saves Philomela and exacts revenge on Tereus in a pretty horrifying way. Tereus and Procne have a son together, and because he is very much like Tereus, Procne proceeds to murder him and then feed him to Tereus. It's pretty awful. Then Tereus tries to kill the sisters and they all turn into birds and fly away. I've got some pretty mixed feelings about this story. The beginning with the rape of Philomela was terrible, but it didn't seem like an entirely uncommon thing in the context of Greek mythology. The murder of Procne's own son took me off guard though, as I (perhaps naively) don't associate many Greek myths with filicide being committed. I have read similar stories that appeared more recently that follow a similar path, but typically the two feuding parties aren't in the same family and so it's different. I think that ending turned me off to the story as a whole, but I would say I enjoyed it up to that point.

Ovid's Metamorphoses (Books 5-7)
Tereus Marries Procne
Tereus Rapes Philomela
Procne's Revenge

Rubens: Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itys

Reading Diary A

The Greek gods have always interested me because they generally come off as entitled babies. It's a significant contrast to God in Christianity or Judaism because humans seem to be their playthings as opposed to creature that they care for to some extent. I think this makes sense because they were originally thought up as a means for explaining all the terrible things that happened back in those days, and eventually transitioned to also explaining the good. For example, when crops died or there was an extended drought, Ceres could be to blame. Now of course if she was to blame when things were bad, she also received some credit for an especially strong crop. An example of the whims of the Gods exists in this section in the story of Arachne and Minerva. In this story, Minerva is essentially angry because Arachne is an excellent wool spinner, but refuses to give any credit to Minerva, thought Minerva claims that she in some way taught the girl this ability. Ultimately Minerva is so upset that she challenges Arachne and turns her into a spider. This is just one in a long lineage of stories of Gods messing with the lives of mortals. Later, a woman named Niobe rejects the goddess Latona as being inferior to her and tells the people to worship her instead. Latona is furious at this, and kills first Niobe's sons and then her daughters. Again, this is an example of a mortal putting themself above the gods, making one of them angry, and ultimately paying the price. These stories both explain the many tragedies that took place back in those times, but also teach people to be careful not to display hubris.

Ovid's Metamorphoses Part 2

Death of Niobe's Children, Konig

Reading Diary A: Aesop's Fables (Jacobs)

The most interesting thing about my reading in this unit was the contrast between what I would consider somewhat similar creatures. It's very clear that the various animals have been given specific characteristics and personalities to describe them. For example, the Lion is proud and dangerous. The Fox is very cunning and sneaky, while the Wolf appears to be vicious and just downright bad. This was a especially interesting because these characteristics linked directly to the lesson that each fable was intended to teach. The vast majority of the Lion's stories involved him eating or killing something, and often referenced his place as 'King of the beasts', as with "only cowards insult dying majesty". This suggests to me that there is an extent to which the author was attempting to place personalities on these animals to serve a message, but they seem to make a lot of sense. I don't think many people would argue with the idea of a fox as devious and cunning, so the use of one for those lessons seems to make perfect sense.

References:
Aesop's Fables (Jacobs)
Lions Part 1
Lions Part 2
Foxes Part 1
Wolves

The Lion takes all of the hunt for himself