Father Tales

 

"The Holy Family with a Little Bird,” Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Ca. 1650.

It's Father's Day and in order to celebrate, we're going to look at some of the best dad-related folktales in the oral and literary traditions.

1. Untitled myth about Ares. The Library by pseudo-Apollodorus mentions an incident where a son of Poseidon tried to assault one of his daughter. Ares killed the guy to protect her. When Poseidon took Ares to court, he was acquitted.

2. "The Black Dragon and the Red Dragon." In this Turkish narrative, a man's children are kidnapped and he goes on an epic quest to retrieve them. He also helps a mother dragon reunite with her young.

3. "The Good Stepmother." Despite the title, this Icelandic tale features a wonderfully thoughtful king. After his wife dies he refuses to remarry because he fears that a stepmother will abuse his daughter. It's not until his brother vows to find a good woman that he relents. His fiancée even ends up saving the princess.

4. "The Doomed Prince" This ancient Egyptian text, with its lost ending, begins with a pharaoh wanting to know his son's destiny. The prophetesses tell him that the boy will die. He tries to keep his son in a tower in an effort to protect him, but eventually allows the boy to leave and live his own life.

5. "The Smith and the Fairies." A Scottish changeling tale in which a boy is abducted and enslaved by the fair folk and his father ventures into their domain to rescue him.

Fun fact: biological fathers experience sympathetic pregnancy symptoms.

L is for Liberia

 

The Good Child and the Bad

Two girls helped a witch doctor spin cotton. One of them spat on her staff and had to wash it in a river or disaster would strike. During her journey, she met a cat and a rooster, who aided her because she fed  them. The girl returned home with a treasure basket. The other girl wanted a basket too so she spat on the staff and set out, but didn't feed the animals. She chose a large basket, full of dangerous creatures, and barely survived their assault.

Source: Folk-Tales from Liberia (In Abstract) by Richard C. Bundy.

Tale Type: ATU 480, The Kind and Unkind Girls.

Variants: "The Fairy" and "Frau Holle" and "The Twelve Months"

K is for Kenya

The Great Famine

A drought caused problems for carnivores: the dwindling of their herbivore food supply. King Lion gathered his subjects and suggested they migrate. The one catch was that anyone who stopped along the way would be eaten unless they had a valid excuse. Everyone died except for Hare and King Lion. In their attempts to outfox each other, Hare prevailed and killed the king.

Source: Little Wise One: African Tales of the Hare by Phyllis Savory.

E is for Ethiopia

The Ungrateful Snake

A man encountered a talking snake. It whined about slithering over rocks and the man took pity on it. He carried the reptile on his head. However, the man grew tired and asked the snake to descend. It refused and threatened him. Terrified, the man persuaded the snake to allow someone else to settle their dispute. They asked an elephant, a lion, a leopard, a hyena, a baboon and a buffalo, and all sided with the snake because they feared its poisonous bite (can you say 'juror bias'?).

Then they asked a fox. It duped the snake into coming down so the man could beat it to death. The man promised his savior a sheep as payment for the help. On his way home, he decided that he was too poor to surrender a whole sheep, and brought his dog to kill the fox.

Source: Ethiopian English Readers

Tale Type: ATU 155, "The Ungrateful Snake Returned to Captivity"

Variants: "The Ungrateful Snake, the Fox, and the Man" and "The Man and the Snake" and this curated list.