Hiding from troubles

I think this story was in American Negro Folk Tales; I paraphrase somewhat.

There was a man who had a bad time with his wife, and got angry with all women. He had a little boy, so he took the boy way back in the hills with him and raised him there, where the boy never saw a woman or girl at all. When the boy was about 13, his father reckoned he couldn't keep him in the hills forever--he'd have to go to town sometime--so he brought the boy with him to town this time.

He explained the things the boy had never seen before--a cart, a store, and so on. Some girls came by.

"What are those, Daddy?"

"Those are ducks, son."

"I want one, Daddy."

His father sighed. "Which one, son?"

"I don't care, any one."

The tale ended with a "moral" that the father had planned poorly, so his son didn't know how to be appropriately picky when the time came.

I'm not a student of folklore like my Mother's aunt, but that didn't sound like any of the other tales I'd read before, or since. (I didn't see the motif in Thompson's list.)

For irrelevant reasons I was reading Barlaam and Ioasaph supposedly by St. John of Damascus (died 749AD): a fantasy based somewhat on the mythic(*) history of Gautama. Honestly, I skimmed a lot of it. It included this story, told by Theudas as part of his advice to Ioasaph's father.

"A certain king was grieved and exceeding sad at heart, because that he had no male issue, deeming this no small misfortune. While he was in this condition, there was born to him a son, and the king's soul was filled with joy thereat. Then they that were learned amongst his physicians told him that, if for the first twelve years the boy saw the sun or fire, he should entirely lose his sight, for this was proved by the condition of his eyes. Hearing this, the king, they say, caused a little house, full of dark chambers, to be hewn out of the rock, and therein enclosed his child together with the men that nursed him, and, until the twelve years were past, never suffered him to see the least ray of light. After the fulfilment of the twelve years, the king brought forth from his little house his son that had never seen a single object, and ordered his waiting men to show the boy everything after his kind; men in one place, women in another; elsewhere gold and silver; in another place, pearls and precious stones, fine and ornamental vestments, splendid chariots with horses from the royal stables, with golden bridles and purple caparisons, mounted by armed soldiers; also droves of oxen and flocks of sheep. In brief, row after row, they showed the boy everything. Now, as he asked what each ox these was called, the king's esquires and guards made known unto him each by name: but, when he desired to learn what women were called, the king's spearman, they say, wittily replied that they were called, "Devils that deceive men." But the boy's heart was smitten with the love of these above all the rest. So, when they had gone round everywhere and brought him again unto the king, the king asked, which of all these sights had pleased him most. "What," answered the boy, "but the Devils that deceive men? Nothing that I have seen to-day hath fired my heart with such love as these." The king was astonished at the saying of the boy, to think how masterful a thing the love of women is. Therefore think not to subdue thy son in any other way than this."

I wonder if there's a connection.

The story of Ioasaph is freighted with emphasis on the monastic and austere life--explained that baptistm only works once, and you're liable for all the later sins, unless expiated with extreme penitence and austerity. Logical, but not attractive, and I think misses an aspect of incarnation.

(*) I mean "mythic" in a good way. The parable that however hard you try, you can't escape the limits of life is always useful--especially to those who think they can hide limits from themselves. "Tomorrow will be like today, but more so."

Little people

In the mostly English and Irish legends I knew of, the Little People were not generally friendly. I read a suggestion about 40+ years ago that these were displaced indigenous peoples still hiding in the woods and wastelands. Insofar as such displacement happens pretty much everywhere, and the folks hiding will probably not be as well nourished and certainly not dressed in the usual fashions, it wouldn't be crazy to find smaller folk who look different, hiding in the woods. The tale would then "shrink" in the telling. Nice theory.

However, these tales show up in Alaska, where one expects the displace-ee's to live, and Hawaii, and Flores Island, and the rest of North America, and places in Africa. OK, Africa is different--they actually _have_ little people, but Hawaii had no indigenous people before the Polynesians showed up.

So from whence the stories?

Maybe the stories are retellings of retellings of truly ancient stories of the humans who met Neanderthals et al before they spread around the world. That would be interesting, but wouldn't tell us much about the encounters.

Maybe they are a kind of hard-wired reaction to tell a story that explains uncanny things that happen in the woods; attributing them to humanoids since we understand humans, and the humanoids have to be small because there's no sign of them afterward.

Or maybe they're real, and just have gotten good at hiding. Really good at it, because lots of former residences of the little people are now suburbia and farms. Maybe that explains why I can't find the garage door opener...

A century in a day

I started looking up references to "fairy-land time". We hear that a day in fairy-land can be a year of ours--and there are rarer stories that tell the reverse. Maybe Lewis borrowed from a legend about Mohammed. Legends about such time differences, and the problems associated with them, seem to appear from Japan to Spain, in Russia, Vietnam, India--and Germany, of course. (There are other pages in that sequence.) I don't know if this is a Eurasian genre or if the author simply didn't sample stories from Africa or the Americas. Most of the stories I'd never heard of before, like this one:

a man at Dornoch, in Sutherlandshire. He was present at a funeral in the churchyard on New Year's Day, and was so piqued at not being invited, as all the others were, to some of the New Year's festivities, that in his vexation, happening to see a skull lying at his feet, he struck it with his staff and said: "Thou seemest to be forsaken and uncared-for, like myself. I have been bidden by none; neither have I invited any: I now invite thee!" That night as he and his wife were sitting down alone to supper, a venerable old man entered the room in silence and took his share of the delicacies provided. In those days the New Year's feast was kept up for eleven days together; and the stranger's visit was repeated in the same absolute silence for six nights.

At last the host, alarmed and uneasy, sought the priest's advice as to how he was to get rid of his unwelcome guest. The reverend father bade him, in laying the bannocks in the basket for the seventh day's supper, reverse the last-baked one. This, he declared, would induce the old man to speak. It did; and the speech was an invitation--nay, rather a command--to spend the remainder of the festival with him in the churchyard.

The priest, again consulted, advised compliance; and the man went trembling to the tryst. He found in the churchyard a great house, brilliantly illuminated, where he enjoyed himself, eating, drinking, piping and dancing. After what seemed the lapse of a few hours, the grey master of the house came to him, and bade him hasten home, or his wife would be married to another; and in parting he advised him always to respect the remains of the dead. Scarcely had he done speaking when the grey old man himself, the guests, the house, and all that it contained, vanished, leaving the man to crawl home alone in the moonlight as best he might after so long a debauch.

For he had been absent a year and a day; and when he got home he found his wife in a bride's dress, and the whole house gay with a bridal party. His entrance broke in upon the mirth: his wife swooned, and the new bridegroom scrambled up the chimney. But when she got over her fright, and her husband had recovered from the fatigue of his year-long dance, they made it up, and lived happily ever after.

F377 if you want to look these sorts of stories up elsewhere. Well, D1950.1 and D2011 too, I suppose.

Hubris

"Now it is a well-known belief among the Winnebago that if you fast too long, one of two things will happen, either you will die while fasting, or you will obtain blessings of such power that they will eventually destroy you."

The subject of Radin's article is distinguishing between "myths" ("what is old") and "tales" ("that which is told"). One useful distinction is that frequently the myth tells of actions that horribly violate Winnebago cultural standards--and there is no repudiation of the actions. That should sound quite familiar to anyone who remembers Greek myths about Zeus.

Horned serpent

A U of Cincinnati group claims to have evidence of an extra-terrestrial airburst at Hopewell sites across the Ohio River Valley. They suspect a comet was involved. Their range is from 252AD through 383AD: Chinese astronomers recorded 69 comets during this period, and the "The Miami tell of a horned serpent that flew across the sky and dropped rocks onto the land before plummeting into the river" "The Ottawa talk of a day when the sun fell from the sky" They claim evidence of fires over about 10K square miles.

"A horned serpent" is an evocative description. A comet with two tails?

Clearly the comet didn't hit, but a chunk might have broken off after warming up by the Sun. Chelyabinsk--or maybe more the size of Tunguska...

Interesting. I'd be surprised if there was just one chunk, though of course the odds of hitting the Earth are pretty small. Unless a small chunk blew up near someplace literate, we'd not know likely learn about it, and certainly have no idea about the date.

According to the Ohio History Central, the Ohio Hopewell built mounds up until 500AD, so they may have been set back by crop loss (as the article suggests), but they weren't done for. Assuming the platinum and iridium are the smoking guns here that they usually are...

Most serpent stories seem not to be astronomical, some do.

For the curious, W Bruce Masse proposes that the flood myths from around the world suggest that "only a globally catastrophic deep-water oceanic comet impact could account for all environmental information encoded in the corpus of worldwide flood myths" Hmm. Global tsunamis? Some places would be far less effected than others.

Ship pets

My wife was listening to one of Drachinifel's "dry dock" (Q&A) episodes, when the subject of ship's pets came up. Apparently in the early 70's the Royal Navy decided that (presumably for reasons of hygiene), no ship's pets were permitted. That did not prevent sailors from trying.

How about an elephant?

HMS COURAGEOUS 1974-1979 adopted an African Elephant that someone found tethered to a bollard next to the taxi rank on Helensburghs mainstreet. They called him *Mongo* and he lived in an old Chacon that they put in their Lay-apart store just up from 6-Berth.

I can imagine sailors yarning a hoax like this--they're famous for them. I can also easily imagine them trying to do it just to prove they could. And if anyplace would be challenging to fit an elephant it would be on a nuclear submarine.

Unfortunately for the story, I can't see any easy openings in the deck big enough to sling one below, and I can't imagine a captain agreeing to keep such an attention-getting passenger on top. Maybe on a cruiser... But then it wouldn't just be the elephant acquisition method that was untrue, but the ship's name as well. Pity. It would be such a wonderful way to tell the brass where to put their rules about pets.

By the way, the text in the link about the elephant was lifted from a thread on "Rum Ration" about Ships Pets and Mascots. Somewhat more plausible mascots, including "unsinkable Sam," are shown here.

Tall tales

I like to distinguish a tall tale from a legend. Both may have exaggeration, but the tall tale isn't really meant to be taken seriously, and the exaggeration is the point. We all know stories of Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and other American characters, but how common is the genre elsewhere?

Wikipedia says, not surprisingly, that Canada has a number of tall tales, and Australia, and it mentions others from Europe (e.g. Finn MacCool creating the Giant's Causeway), but doesn't mention anything outside the Euro-Anglophone west.

It seems unlikely that other cultures wouldn't have them too. But...

I remember reading a book on Chinese humor (though I don't remember a lot from it), and finding some examples quite opaque. If I can't always recognize humor, I'm probably not enough in tune with the nuances of the literature to spot when something is exaggerated for humor. Or possibly some cultures don't use "tall tales," finding something else funnier instead. Or maybe I should broaden my definition to include "just-so" type stories like the Anansi stories.