Week 12 Extra Reading Diary: Folktales of Bengal

Story source:Folk-Tales of Bengal by the Rev. Lal Behari Day, with illustrations by Warwick Goble (1912).

For the extra reading this week I read half of the Folktales of Bengal and focused this reading diary post on one story I found particularly interesting - The Boy Whom Seven Mothers Suckled. This story started out with a king who had seven lovely wives who were childless. He found a way to give them children by feeding them a certain kind of fruit and they all became pregnant. He then met a new wife who was actually a demon. The new wife said that if he really loved her he would have his other wives blinded and killed, so he ordered it done. The executioner blinded them but then took pity on them and hid them away. They started to give birth one by one, but decided to eat the children in order to survive, except for the youngest wife who kept her portion aside. They ate all of the babies except the youngest wife's baby. She tried to save it by giving the other wives her portions of the other babies but they knew she was lying about it because the meat wasn't fresh. She convinced them to save her baby however and they all suckled him until he grew big and strong. Meanwhile, back at the palace, the demon wife was secretly eating all of the staff at the palace and then moved on to eating citizens, so the king had nobody to take care of him. The child came to the palace and volunteered to be his caretaker. The boy became like the child of the two rulers, but he was protecting the king from being eaten by the queen. She decided to send him on an errand for her to her mother to get a special melon to cure her "sickness". When he got there, the woman gave him the melon and let him stay the night. He noticed a peculiar bird in her house and asked her about it. She told him that the bird contained her daughter's soul and if it died, she died. When he left, he took both the melon and the bird and hid it in the palace. The people complained to the king that their fellow citizens were being eaten by a bird and the boy volunteered that he knew where the bird was and could take care of the problem. When he brought out the bird, the queen recognized it and fainted. The boy told everyone that if they tore off the bird's limbs they would find out who had really been eating the people, so he tore off its leg and the queen's leg was also torn off! Then he strangled the bird and both it and the queen died. The boy then told the king that his wives were still alive and that he was their son. The king was very happy to hear this and summoned the wives, whose vision were restored miraculously when they returned. The boy was the heir to the throne then and they all lived happily ever after.

Week 12 Reading Diary B: Indian Fairy Tales

 Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1912).

Today I'm going to write about the strangest story I read this week in the Indian Fairy Tales, which I liked because it reminded me of Rumplestisken in our own fairy tales. This story was called The Prince and the Fakir.

This story starts out with a king who has no children and is very sad about it, so he goes to lay down in an intersection (was he trying to die?). A Fakir comes along and asks what he is doing so the king explains that he is very depressed because he has no children. The Fakir asks what the king would give to have children and the king says anything. The Fakir says he will let the king have two sons, but that he must later give one of his sons back to the Fakir. The king agrees, but when it comes time to give his son back he is heartbroken by the idea because he loves both of his sons. So instead he tries to trick the Fakir by giving him a slave's son, but the Fakir knows the difference because he hears ants talking about how the king's sons are eating in the cellar and then he is very angry. He demands that the sons show themselves. Then the sons go with the Fakir and I think one of them dies in a vat of oil because it says he's turned into roasted meat. The other one escapes and sets all of the Fakir's prisoners free and takes the Fakir's clothes. While pretending to be the Fakir in another kingdom, he ends up marrying the princess there and eventually reveals his true identity to her father, who is happy that she married a prince and not a Fakir.

Week 12 Reading Diary A: Indian Fairy Tales

 Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1912)

Today I'm going to write about one of the Indian Fairy Tales that I might use for my storytelling assignment because I liked it so well. The specific fairy tale I'll write about is The Magic Fiddle, which I liked because it was a nice story and had a surprising twist in that the lady in the fiddle fell in love with the fiddle player and married him. I didn't expect her to be able to come out of the fiddle like this, but I get ahead of myself - here is how the story goes:

Seven brothers, their wives, and their sister all lived together. The wives resented the sister because she did all of the cooking (which I don't understand, I would be extremely pleased if someone else did all of the cooking, but maybe it made the brothers like the sister better than the wives, which really they should anyways because she's their sister and they're supposed to love and protect her). The wives tormented the young girl and made it so that whenever she went to get water she couldn't because it would miss her pitcher or just dry up, so the sister was very distressed. She decided to turn herself into a bamboo to escape them, but one day a yogi decided to cut down the bamboo and make a fiddle out of it. She begged him not to, but he thought someone was playing a trick on him and did it anyways. The fiddle that resulted from this made beautiful music and the brothers heard the music and wanted to buy the fiddle, but the yogi refused. Eventually though, the yogi got drunk and sold the fiddle to the village chief. The chief's son took very good care of the fiddle, so in repayment, the girl would come out of the fiddle while he was away and prepare his meals for him. The chief was really confused by this so he decided to hide one day and see who was making his meals. Alas it was the sister, he caught her, and they fell in love and were married. The sister was very happy and later saw her brothers, who had become poor. She said that that was the repayment they got for knowing about the abuse she suffered for all that time and never doing anything about it.