Reading Week 6: Persian Tales Part A

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 centered on men, which is not surprising. The first tale in this unit is The Wolf and the Goat about a mother goat who outsmarts a wolf to save her children. The goat in this story was ruthless and set the tone for a female-empowered storytelling unit! Another tale in which a woman plays an important role is The Wolf-Aunt. A wife tries to warn her husband about the true form of his sister, a wolf, which he denies. The wife takes their seven daughters safely away while the husband is eaten.

As I mentioned, some of these tales are a bit disturbing, yet have a moral. One of these tales is The Boy Who Became a Bulbul. This is similar to a story that I have read before, maybe in a French course. A step-mother tells the father and son that they should make a wager and whoever loses should have their head cut off. The boy wins the wager, but the father tricks the son and cuts his head off. Then, the boy’s head is cooked into a soup for his sister to find. What was uncomfortable about this tale was that neither the step-mother nor the father were described as evil or tricky or, simply, messed up. I think that giving a little more information on the parents would have made this story less weird, because in the tale as it is, the dialogue is a bit breezy and made me wonder why parents would one day decide to cook their son as if it were normal. There ends up being a moral, but it was a creepy read.

Another story that was hard to extract the meaning of was The City of Nothing-in-the-World. I honestly think that it is very reasonable that whoever wrote this story might have not been in their right mind. A little girl falls and cuts her leg and asks her aunt for some ointment. The aunt doesn’t have any, so she gives the girl two eggs to trade for ointment. The girl goes off, loses the eggs, and tells her aunt of the adventure she went on afterwards. She does many weird activities, such as skin a flea, ride a chicken, and climb inside a watermelon to find a city of Nothing. This is the most completely incoherent story that I have ever read, so I assume that it is purely for entertainment purposes.

You can access these bizarre tales here: link.

LORIMER, David Lockhart Robertson, et al. Persian Tales. Written down ... in the Original KermāNī and BakhtiāRī and Translated by D.L.R. Lorimer and E.D. Lorimer. With Illustrations by Hilda Roberts. London, 1919