marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Chinese Menu: The History, Myths, and Legends Behind Your Favorite Foods by Grace Lin

A series of stories -- myth, legends, and occasional history -- about various Chinese dishes. Starting with those about the origin of chopsticks and giving three mutually exclusive ones, and with tea, one of which involves recognizably the same plot as the Brother Grimms' The Three Little Birds, through all the categories of Western food that Chinese food has been put in.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Turkish Fairy Tales & Folk Tales by Ignác Kúnos

A collection of fairy tales. I recognized all the types, but they are not the commonest, and they were all distinct variants.

Read more... )
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Spanish Fairy Tales by Fernan Caballero

A collection of tales selected from her works. Some tales of fools and tricksters, beast tales, cumulative tales, but mostly fairy tales. I recognize a number of the types, but none of the most popular. A couple show literary influence -- in "The Bird of Truth" the children hear their backstory from birds instead of its being presented in temporal sequence.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Chinese Fairy Tales by Herbert Allen Giles

Mostly tales of tricksters and magic, with a few ghost stories mixed in and one tale of a witch.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Tales of Lusitania from The Folklore of Portugal by Francisco Adolfo Coelho, translated by Henriqueta Monteiro

A collection of folktales. A number of cumulative tales and animal ones, too. A good number of fairy tales, a wide variety of types, but very few of the most popular ones. (A Snow White, though she's an inn-keeper's daughter who lives with bandits.)
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Beauty and the Beast by Nancy Willard

This is border-line picture book, because it has a lot of text. The pictures aren't particularly striking, either.

But -- Beauty and Beast transposed to late 19th century New York. A lot of details, the text is used to expand nicely. Curse never gets any sort of veneer of explanation, though.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
The Way Meat Loves Salt: A Cinderella Tale from the Jewish Tradition by Nina Jaffe

One of the other openings for the Cinderella tale. A rabbi cruelly drives his daughter away because she tell him she loves him as meat loves salt. . . .

Bits of local color for the tradition, but the same skeleton under it. Nice illustrations.

Ashpet

Jul. 27th, 2022 10:08 pm
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Ashpet: An Appalachian Tale by Joanne Compton

An American Cinderella variant, starting with her being the hired girl, and getting aid after being tested by a magical being. Shorter than some variants of this I have read. Illustrations are perfunctory.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Three Perfect Peaches: A French Folktale by Cynthia C. DeFelice and Mary De Marsh

A retelling of a fairy tale where the princess can only be cured by the peaches of the title, and the king balks at the promised reward when a poor youngest son succeeds.

Some nice illustrations
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Folktales of England by Katharine M. Briggs and Ruth L. Tongue

A collection of tales. Many are done in phonetic renditions of dialect, which can be a bit hard to read.

Very few fairy tales. One is a cross between a fairy tale -- kind and unkind girls -- with more anecdotal fairy lore, such as not eating fairy food and being blinded for seeing something they don't want you to see.

A lot of legends. The jocular tales were less to my taste, some were full blown urban legends.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Folktales of Mexico by Américo Paredes

A mixed group. Lots of legends, which did not appeal to me as a genre, jokes, cumulative tales, and fairy tales.

I was mostly interested in the last. A number of variations, not of common times. I particularly like how, in "The Greenish Bird", the prince declares that he will marry the woman whose cup of cocoa he drinks -- except that usually, this is a test of skill, and in this one, the narrative explicitly says that he noted who brought each cup and drank the heroine's without any care for how it tasted.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Folktales of Chile by Yolando Pino-Saavedra

A collection of various types.

Read more... )
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales by Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana

An interesting collection of tales. Many are recognizable types, but only in their deep structure. "Sackcloth", a type like "Catskin" or "All Kinds of Fur" not only dresses up in sackcloth but passes herself off as a man to escape.

Some discussion of local customs affecting tales, such as polygyny and cousin marriage, but take it with a grain of salt. When the same tale is told from India to Ireland, the plot devices that remain the same are driven by the story not the culture. (The brother in "Brother and Sister" including the variant here, drinks from the wrong spring and turns into an animal because that's how "Brother and Sister" goes.)
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Apples of Immortality: Folktales of Armenia by Leon Z. Surmelian

A collection, starting with fairy tales and going on to other folktales of fools and clever characters, and such like mundane tales.

You have to know your fairy tales to recognize many of the types. Even the Cinderella variant -- The Red Cow features not only a quite different helper, but a brother and sister pair, and many are less familiar types. In particular, the hero is uncommonly likely to end up with two brides, not typical of European tales at all (except sometimes in Irish).
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Green Hills of Magic: West Virginia Folktales from Europe by Ruth Ann Musick

An unusual collection. From West Virginia coal miners -- mostly immigrants or living in immigrant communities. The notes in the back list the original European country, from Ireland to Turkey.

Many broadly spread tale types, in tales of the Devil, religious tales, tales of fools and crafty fellows, fairy tales, and legends. I particularly like when set before the states were united and you needed permission to go from one to the other, where we have the character King Jimmy of West Virginia.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
The Talking Eggs: A Folktale from the American South by Robert D. San Souci

A version of the kind and unkind girls from Louisanna, with the sweet and kind Blanche and the spoiled Rose. It starts out with Blanche giving an old woman a drink at a well, but then her mother and sister throw her out for being slow, and she stays at the old woman's very strange place, and it's that that Rose tries to emulate.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
The Golden Maiden and Other Folk Tales and Fairy Stories Told in Armenia by A.G. Seklemian

Or possibly A.K Seklemian, I have seen dueling bylines -- perhaps it's transcriptions.

Distinctive variations of tales. And generally of ones where you need to know quite a bit to recognize. Even the Cinderella variant is unusual. Third sons and quests. Giants and dragons. Maidens so beautiful that they seem to say to say to the sun that it does not need to shine, they are shining. Wicked stepmothers and many other fairy tale tropes in new combinations. Occasionally, polygamous heroes for cultural influence.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Tuscan Folk-Lore and Sketches, Together with Some Other Papers by Isabella M. Anderton

I read it mainly for the folk tales, which are listed up front and have some interesting variants on familiar tales. "Monte Rochettino" managed to thoroughly twist the ending of "East of the Sun, West of the Moon."
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
The Arabian Nights translated by Husain Haddawy

Based on one of the older and more unified Syrian manuscripts.

Read more... )
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Latin American Folktales by John Bierhorst

A large variety. On top of tales, also riddles and prayers, and the tales come in all sorts of forms. Legends right after the conquest. Anecdotes. Christian legends with varying degrees of Christianity to them. Tales of fools and clever tricksters. A woman who climbs her daughter's hair from Purgatory to Heaven. Many fairy tales in distinctive variants, with the Parrot Prince who is injured by the heroine's stepsister; a boy whose godfather was the Devil but whose guardian angel intervened; the tale of rescuing three princesses from the underworld, only it's not three men, but two men and a widow -- she has the youngest princess marry her son, instead; a kind and unkind girl tale; and more.

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