Category: Thursday’s Tales

Someone- I won't say who- thinks he saw a bear in the neighbor's backyard last night. It's not impossible, but bears in town usually get publicity and as far as I can tell, no one else has seen this one yet. And his friends at work had been talking about hunting and about the bear one of them has seen on his property, which is nowhere near us. Not that someone is suggestible, but. . . I did ask him if the bear asked for honey and he said no. Anyway it did make me look up a tale about a bear for today. "The Hunter and the Polar Bear" is an Inuit folk tale retold in The Eskimo of Alaska by Norman Chance, 1966. Once there was a poor hunter. He always went out but never got anything. Finally one day he saw a polar bear. As he crawled toward it over the ice, the bear said to him, "Don't shoot me. If you follow me and do...

  "The King's Thanksgiving" may not be necessarily a traditional folktale, but I liked it and it seems fitting for today. The author and date are unknown. Every child in the village was very much excited on account of the news that had come down from the castle on the hill. Because it had been such a rich harvest, the fields yellow with grain and the orchards crimson with fruit, the King was going to keep a thanksgiving day. He was going to ask some child from the village to come up the hill to the castle and eat dinner with the Prince and Princess. It was rumored, too, that this child would be given good gifts by the King. But it must be a very special kind of child indeed. That they all knew. Then the village children remembered everything that had been told them by their mothers, and their grandmothers, and their great-grandmothers about the castle kitchen. Scores of cooks and scullery...

I thought I'd share a couple of trailers for upcoming Disney fairy tale-ish movies, both of which are on my to-watch list. Into the Woods is coming out on Christmas, this year. And Cinderella is scheduled for March 2015. Thursday’s Tales is a weekly event here at Carol’s Notebook. Fairy tales, folktales, tall tales, even re-tellings, I love them all....

Today's story, "The Greek Princess and the Young Gardener," comes from Joseph Jacobs' More Celtic Fairy Tales, 1894. He, in turn, sites his source as Patrick Kennedy's Fireside Stories of Ireland. It's a confusing little story, mostly do to the quests, each person adds to the list of things that must be accomplished. In standard fairy tale fashion, the youngest son is the hero of the story, the one who actually completes the tasks. An animal helper is also common in fairy tales, in this case the fox, who is a pretty amazing creature.  And we have a happy ending all around, even for the foolish brothers. If you get a chance, read the whole story - it's available at Sur La Lune. I like the Irish tilt to it with the phrasing and words. I learned a new word, pishogue, which is an Irish term meaning sorcery or an evil spell. Thursday’s Tales is a weekly event here at Carol’s Notebook. Fairy tales, folktales, tall...