Category Archives: Tales /märchen

Stories which are not regarded as possibly true.

The Princess and the Pea

Text:

BR: A young price is becoming of marrying age and his mother is eagerly trying to find a suitable princess for him to wed. She doesn’t think that anyone in the kingdom is a “true” princess, and tells him that he must wait for the right person to come along. One night, there is a terrible storm and a traveling girl seeks shelter in the castle. The prince immediately takes interest in her, but his mother judges her wet, ragged clothes and tells him that she is certainly not worthy. To prove it, the mother makes a bed of 10 mattresses and puts a single pea under the bottom mattress. She claims that only a real princess would be able to feel the pea through all of the mattresses. Much to her surprise, the princess tells her that the bed was too uncomfortable and she could hardly sleep. The girl was a true princess after all, and she and the prince lived happily ever after. The moral of the story is to never judge a book by its cover.

Context: 

BR: I first heard this story from my parents as a bedtime story. My sisters and I all listened together and learned that it is important to not judge people on their appearance. I think this message is important for people to know and this story is a good way to teach it to children.

Analysis:

When asked about myths and tales they know, shockingly few people think of bedtime stories they were told as children. This story in particular is a fairy tale from Hans Christian Anderson written in the 1800s. Anderson was a Danish storyteller, yet BR has no Danish roots, indicating the story has become more commonplace. Similarly to Aesop’s Fables, Anderson’s works often feature a concise moral. They differ however, in that all of the characters are human and behave as humans would.

Hanuman and the Mountain

Text:

NS: In the Ramayana, Lakshmana is poisoned in battle so his brother Rama tasks Hanuman with finding an herb that will save his brother’s life because Hanuman is the fastest of all the soldiers. The herb can only be found on a specific mountain that’s very far away, and Hanuman is scared he won’t be able to find the herb and bring it back in time because he isn’t sure what it looks like. As a solution, he carries back the entire mountain to Rama on the tip of his pinky finger. 

Context: 

NS: Growing up, my parents told me tales from Hindu mythology; the tale of Hanuman and the mountain in particular was supposed to emphasize how devoted Hanuman was to Rama, an incarnation of the god Vishnu. This was in part to inspire that same devotion to Hinduism in me and my brother, but was also their way of telling us to stop being lazy (“if Hanuman could carry the whole mountain on the tip of his finger, you can do xyz!”).

Analysis:

I admittedly am not terribly familiar with Hindu mythology, but from this conversation it seems to be full of stories similar to this. Religious myths are often used as a way to understand the world and inspire faith in people. The Bible and in particular the Old Testament is famously a collection of such stories, designed to teach morals and the value in following the teachings of God. As a polytheistic religion, Hinduism splits those teachings into the acts and stories of service to varying gods in the pantheon, but they serve the same purpose.

The Tortoise and the Hare

Text:

BR: What comes to mind is the Tortoise and the Hare. A tortoise and a hare were competing in a race to see which animal was faster. The hare was so confident that he would win that he bragged for weeks to the entire village that he could win with almost no effort. On the day of the race, the hare easily breezed by the tortoise and seemed like the obvious winner. After gaining a few miles on the tortoise, he even decided to take a nap in the final leg of the race to gloat. The tortoise, however, never gave up and steadily walked toward the finish line. While the hare was napping, the tortoise was able to catch up to the hare and was mere steps away from victory by the time the hare finally woke up. The hare was too late. He lunged at the finish line just in time to watch the tortoise cross it, and ultimately lost the race solely due to his arrogance. The moral of the story is that slow and steady wins the race, and that arrogance can be your downfall.

Context:

BR: The first time I remember hearing this story was in first grade. My teacher read this story to our class as we sat and listened on the alphabet carpet. I have since heard many renditions, and think that the story’s central message is a valuable one. 

Analysis: 

The Tortoise and the Hare is one of the oldest fairy tales, going as far back as 400 B.C. and is reportedly part of Aesop’s fables. Most of these stories feature animal characters that undergo some kind of trial or adventure and the story provides a moral lesson. In this case, the lesson is that being slow and steady is the way to victory. I’ve heard people say that it isn’t true that going slow and steady is better, that the hare would have run the race if it didn’t fall asleep. So perhaps the moral of the story is more that being arrogant and overconfident can cost you.

The Nain Rogue Demon

Text

AB: From what I know – which isn’t the most accurate account – is that the Nain Rouge is a disgusting hairy and horned demon. The story goes that the first time it showed up was before some battle where the demon danced on the corpses of the dead soldiers and turned the river bloody. Since then, it shows up prior to devastating events in the city as like a bad omen. The 1967 Race Riots were the most common example I heard since my grandparents moved out of the city due to them.

Context:

AB: The Nain Rouge is one of those myths not really in circulation in my family. I know growing up it was used as a boogeyman for a child’s bad behavior, which deviates pretty heavily from the original myth of it being a foreboding omen. I mostly just thought it was my parents needing a local legend derived from their parent’s catholic backgrounds. I lived in the suburbs surrounding Detroit but I did live close enough to the Rouge River for cultural osmosis to propagate. Myth went from chastising bad behavior to a reason to be back home before sundown (I used to bike up and down the Rouge River at Hines Park). Eventually my parents kinda just grew out of it, I didn’t really believe in it so they stopped using it.

Analysis:

There are a lot of similar boogeyman type stories in American folklore. Other common examples include stories like the Jersey Devil. The most likely origin for these stories is from somebody who witnessed a tragedy and wants some way to rationalize what occurred. Seeing a battlefield is damaging to the psyche, it isn’t too unbelievable that people would tell stories about the aftermath. As the stories grow popular, there are more “sightings” of the monster because more people know about it. Though, these stories are rarely believed, and like AB mentioned, are mostly used to scare children into behaving.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Text

“I think it was basically like, a boy would be outside playing, and he would always, you know, yell that a wolf was coming, or a wolf had done something bad, or he would do something bad and blame it on the wolf that was there. So he kept crying that there was a wolf, or yelling out that there was a wolf, and then people started- they’d always come running and there was no wolf, and he [the boy] thought that was really funny. And then eventually the wolf DID come, and when he cried that there was a wolf, nobody came to pay attention to him because he had lied so many times, and then the wolf ate him.”

Context 

J, my mother, currently lives in Seattle, Washington in the United States, but grew up in various towns in Ontario, Canada. She is the oldest of three siblings, and first heard this tale from her father when she was very young. When asked about the context in which she first heard the story, J provided the following: 

“I’m having a little bit of difficulty remembering the exact context, but Grandpa always was a big, like, moralistic storyteller, so he would use examples. So often when [her brother’s name] and I would fight, um, we would try to accuse each other of all kinds of outlandish crazy things. And, you know, sometimes I, as the older sibling, would try to work things to my advantage. And Grandpa would get frustrated with us because he knew that we were exaggerating or blaming each other for things. So he would basically talk to us about the story of the boy who cried wolf, because he was trying to enforce in us the idea that if we exaggerated or said things that weren’t true, that, you know, when something actually did happen we wouldn’t be believed.”

Analysis

As J stated in her own interpretation of this story, The Boy Who Cried Wolf fits closely within the common notion of a tale: a story with a moral value or lesson that is told primarily to children. In this instance, the tale’s moral is cautionary, showing a young boy who transgresses numerous social boundaries and is punished (eaten by the wolf) as a result. In a slightly simplified application of Levi-Strauss’s paradigmatic theory of structuralism, this tale features a binary opposites pair of honesty and dishonesty that correlate to safety/community and danger/isolation respectively. When considering J’s observations about truth-telling, this tale ties into the trust involved in sharing knowledge within a group; the boy’s lies not only made him an unreliable source of information, but threatened the integrity of the information passed around the group as a whole, and as a result, the boy was cast out through a refusal to believe his cries for help. J’s statement that the boy found lying funny also suggests that finding humor in serious situations or not taking things seriously is frowned upon in her family and society.