Mythology and Folklore MLLL 3046

Gustave Moreau, Une péri on  Wikimedia In a town in the mountains there was a man named Fayiz. He was a goat herder who had a small cottage, a wife, and two children. Fayiz was not the happiest man on the planet, but he counted his blessings. He always told himself, “I am a poor man, but I have a good family. Many around here have nothing to eat and no home to go to, but I am able to provide these for my family. I am truly blessed and will pray to the gods for their graciousness.” His wife was a good woman who never asked much of her husband, and the children were grateful to their father for what he could provide. One day while watching over his flock, Fayiz took a rest on a boulder. He was staring off absent-mindedly until he realized that his eyes were gazing upon a beautiful woman. Fayiz had never seen a human being so beautiful in his many years. The woman came up to him and said, “I can tell that you are a good laborer. I have seen you out here with y...

Peri on  Wikimedia This is a continuation of my Persian tales unit notes. In my last post, I mentioned that all of the stories there began with “Once upon a time there was a time when there was only God,” and end with “And now my story has come to an end, but the sparrow never got home.” I tried researching these two phrases, and had no luck with the first. The only information that I found on the ending about the sparrow was from a book of Susan Fletcher’s who claims that her mother would end her tales this way. She suggests that storytellers may simply have their own way to end their tales. For the second part of this reading unit, however, the tales did not actually begin and end in this manner. As in Reading A, some of these tales had ambiguous morals to try and figure out while others were quite clear and more similar to Aesop’s fables. One tale that had a clear moral yet was still a little backwards, in my opinion, was Fayiz and the Peri Wife . In th...

Red-whiskered Bulbul on  Max Pixel For this week, I decided to read Persian Tales. I have never read any Persian tales, as far as I know. One of my boyfriend’s best friends is Persian, though, and I thought that it would be nice to know more about his culture. I was surprised by a lot of these tales. I expected them to be like Aesop’s fables and for all of them to have morals. Some do have morals, but their story lines are bizarre and disturbing, or I could not pinpoint a moral. It may be that some of these stories are just for entertainment. All of the stories begin with “Once upon a time there was a time when there was only God,” and end with “And now my story has come to an end, but the sparrow never got home.” I am planning on researching this bit for my Reading Notes B post. These tales seem to place importance on the knowledge that women are capable of, and I found that to be a really interesting aspect of this unit. It seems like tales are usually cent...

There once were two friends, Ganem and Salem, who were on a long journey through fruitless mountains. They were perpetually hungry, and their supply of drinking water was almost gone. While crossing one of these large mountains, the two stumbled across an inscription written in a large boulder. The words were: Dear traveler, we have prepared a great feast in your honor. Come to us, and you shall never want for anything more. You must first complete a daring task to earn your reward. If you are brave enough, crawl through the barren valley amidst the beasts and witches, never halting. You will find on the other side a statue of a great lion. Carry our beloved statue on your shoulders to the top of the next mountain. You must never take a break or falter in your step. Once you deliver our lion to us, you will receive great rewards. Salem, the wiser of the two friends, kept walking in the direction they were already headed. Realizing that Ganem was not following, he turned to ...

Tortoise and Birds on  Wikipedia Continuing on with this week’s reading of Bidpai fables, I really enjoyed seeing the similarities and differences between these fables and Aesop’s. The Hare, the Fox, and the Wolf originally reminded me of The Wolf and the Lamb by Aesop. In the Bidpai version, a little Hare is minding his business when a Wolf comes up. In both of these tales, the prey try to convince the Wolf, their Highness, to not eat them. The morals of these stories end up being very different, though. In Aesop’s, the Lamb is a pure creature who is devoured by the Wolf, and the moral is that those in power do not need reason for their actions. In Bidpai’s, the Hare is a vengeful creature who tries to have her enemy, the Fox, eaten instead of her. This backfires, and the Wolf still eats her. I also noticed that in Bidpai’s tales, the morals of the fables are sometimes ambiguous. As Aesop’s fables are great for young readers because it is easy to p...

King Dabshalim visits Bidpai to learn the fables of Kalila on  Wikimedia For this week’s reading, I read The Fables of Bidpai . These are like the Indian version of Aesop’s fables. I was thinking this as I read, and some of the explanatory notes suggest that Aesop really did draw inspiration from these stories. Overall, these stories are longer than Aesop’s fables, and where Aesop usually explicitly states the moral at the end of his tales or has one of the characters speak it, Bidpai usually does not state his moral. Something that I like about these fables as compared to Aesop is that Bidpai uses a wider range of characters and situations. Many of his fables are about people, where we usually do not read about humans in Aesop’s. For me, this makes reading these tales more of an experience that I can relate to. A lot of these stories are about either reward or punishment. The Rustic and the Nightingale is a tale of a bird who has destroyed some of a man’s roses. The man...

In the Seven Woods

La Cigale et la Fourmi on  Flickr Fourmi was a hard worker, and never took a break from preparing for the future. His friends would often ask him to go out for a drink or to go to the movies, but he replied that he had to save money. He had a lot of expenses for being so young, and he took his job very seriously. Some of his friends thought of him as the “party pooper”, but they knew that he was the most sensible one out of their group. He was more studious than any of them combined. When his friends went to parties on the weekends, Fourmi was preparing for the next exam. This way, he always made excellent grades while his friends were just managing C averages. The only one of the friend group who was either not in school or working a full-time job was Cigale. He was a guitar player, and even though he had a part-time job, his goal was to become a professional musician. No matter the amount of skill he had, Cigale could never manage to secure more than two ...

The Ant and the Grasshopper on  Wikimedia The second part of Aesop’s Fables compiled by Jacobs deals with lesser-known fables and/or characters who are used less frequently. These include Insects, People, and Birds. Because I have not read about these characters as much as I have Lions, Wolves, and Foxes, I was excited to read these fables. Just like the tales for Reading A, some of Jacobs’ tales are followed by Crane’s renditions. Crane turned these popular fables into short poems of about five verses each. It is generally easier to understand the context and dialogue of Jacobs’ fables, but I found that occasionally it was clearer to read the morals explicitly expressed at the end of Crane’s. Also, Crane sometimes changes the characters used in the fables, or alters the plot of the fable, but keeps the moral about the same. It is also interesting to read how two similar stories can be interpreted by two different readers/authors, because there are some instances in ...

The Fox and the Crane on  Wikimedia For this week, I decided to read more of Aesop’s fables. There are so many of them, and each one comes with a valuable lesson or a critique of society. There are fables compiled by both Jacobs and Crane, and they are interesting to read back to back. They keep the same plot overall, but where Jacobs’ fables are usually a few paragraphs long and have a good amount of context and dialogue, Crane’s version of the tales are short poems. In Crane’s edition, he often places two of these short poems side by side on the same page of his book if they have similar morals, and there are illustrations to go along. It was informative to see how two authors could take the same basic plot and moral of a story, yet write on them completely differently. Also, occasionally I found that Crane’s morals, which he always states explicitly at the end of his poems, are sometimes clearer. We all read some of the Lion fables earlier in this course. The Lion and...

Image on  Pixnio The first article that I read was Criticizing (common criticisms of) Praise by Alfie Kohn. Kohn asserts that any kind of judgement, whether negative or positive, essentially hurts a child when giving them feedback. In fact, “good job” isn’t really feedback at all. It is actually positive judgement, and it can hurt a child’s performance just like negative feedback. Kohn’s article is very similar to the work of Carol Dweck, who believes that praising a child actually makes them self-conscious and not willing to try. Consequently, they underperform. Dweck believes that praising the process that a child is going through in order to complete something, such as a math assignment, makes the child want to better, and so they try harder. This is because a shift in their mindset has made them believe that they are capable. Unlike Dweck however, Kohn believes that praising process can actually have negative outcomes, as well. He states that “at least three ca...

Ireland on  Pixabay Yeats on  Wikimedia The Storybook project that I would like to do is on W. B. Yeats’ In the Seven Woods, which are poems and a play on Irish mythological themes. Here, I have read some of the poems and have chosen three that I could potentially make complete Storybooks out of. Baile and Aillinn is a lengthy poem of several stanzas. It is about two lovers who have been tricked by the Master of Love, Aengus. He wants them to be lovers forever in his own world, the land of death. He tricks Baile and Aillinn separately, telling each that the other has died, whereupon they individually die of heartbreak. It would be interesting to do a Storybook on these lovers, including their relationship, Aengus’ tricks on each, and their deaths. I could even change the plot to where the lovers outsmart Aengus and do not each die of heartbreak. Adam’s Curse is about the narrator and a young woman whom he loves. They sit and talk about poetry. This shorter ...