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.

Miserably Ever After: Fairy Tales with Sad Endings

 

"Happily ever after" is the most famous closing formula for fairy tales in the Anglosphere. But plenty of folktales, even traditional fairy tales, end on a real down note. It's not be a pleasant aspect of the genre (naturally), but it adds dynamism to it.

The Fisherman and His Wife

The Adventure of Cherry of Zennor

The Angel of Death

The Story of the Man Who Went to Wake His Luck

Yallery Brown

There's even a book about narratives, old and new, that upend our expectations: Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment by Catriona McAra.

Folktales and Law

The legal system, its representatives, and principles rarely appear in traditional folktales despite the importance it has in daily life (don't jaywalk kids!). However, a few exceptions stand out.

“Tainted Witness” in Burmese Law Tales by Muang Htin Aung. 

“The Fly” in Best-Loved Folktales of the World by Joanna Cole. 

“The Peasant and the Workman” in Folk Tales of All Nations by F.H. Lee. 

“Nature’s Way” in 100 Armenian Tales and Their Folkloristic Relevance by Susie Hoogasian-Villa. 

“The Five Queer Brothers” in Chinese Nights' Entertainment by Adele Marion Fielde.   

Orestes at Athens by Aeschylus, translated by Oliver Taplin 

Judgement of Solomon in the Bible (1 Kings 3:16–28) 

There's also a criminological study a German fairy tale corpus:

The Criminological Significance of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1987) by Gerhard O. W. Mueller.

Folktales Throughout History

Where and when did folktales originate? That question's unanswerable because the stories likely predate literacy and printing. And contemporary folklorists prioritize function over origin. Nonetheless, scholars have unearthed old written versions of popular tales, possibly the first recorded variants of certain stories or tale types: 

1290s - 1210s B.C.E., The Doomed Prince (ATU 934 Tales of the Predestined Death)

1200 - 1194 B.C.E., The Story of Two Brothers (ATU 318 The Faithless Wife)

300 - 200 B.C.E., Book of Tobit: II 3 -7 (ATU 505 The Grateful Dead)

1 - 200 C.E., Perseus and Andromeda (ATU 300 The Dragon-Slayer)

120s - 170s C.E., Cupid and Psyche (ATU 425B Son of the Witch)

850 - 860 C.E., Yeh-hsien (ATU 510A Cinderella)

1022 - 1024 C.E., About a Girl Saved from Wolf Cubs (ATU 333 Little Red Riding Hood)

1225 C.E., Ejemplo de Dos Compañeros (ATU 613 The Two Travelers)

1330 - 1340 C.E., Troylus and Zellandine (ATU 410 Sleeping Beauty)

1382 C.E., Culhwch and Olwen (ATU 513 The Extraordinary Companions)

1462 C.E., The Wright's Chaste Wife (ATU 882 The Wager on the Wife’s Chastity)

1605 C.E., Conomerus and Trifina (ATU 312 The Maiden-Killer)

1675 C.E. The Woman to the Plow, the Man to the Hen-Roost (ATU 1408 The Man Who Does His Wife’s Work)

This barely scratches the surface of what's out there but it's a start for reading and research. 

Variants of "The Clever Farmgirl" (ATU 875)

 

Does solving a man's riddles make him love you? Probably not. The female protagonists of these tales, however, manage to turn it into an effective mating strategy. The downside is that the man won't stay in love. That's the part where kidnapping and (possible) Stockholm syndrome come in.

The Peasant's Wise Daughter

Clever Manka

A Female Solomon

The Poor Girl That Became a Queen

The Clever Girl

Variants of "Sleeping Beauty" (ATU 410)

 

"Sleeping Beauty"(?) by Rene Cloke

We all know this one: an innocent woman put into a coma, then revived by further violation of her personhood. It's dark. It's tragic. It's old. The earliest stories appear in medieval times: Pandragus et Libanor, reportedly composed in February 1294 by Baudouin Butor. Every other variant seems to postdates it, but the trope of an enchanted sleeper goes back to Greek mythology with Endymion.

Troylus and Zellandine

Frayre de Joy and Sor de Plaser

Sun, Moon Talia

The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood

Source: Sleeping Beauties: Sleeping Beauty and Snow White Tales From Around the World by Heidi Anne Heiner.

International Folktales: A to Z

Van der Grinten map

 

For the annual A to Z Challenge, I decided to summarize folktales from all over the world. This is a list of all the posts:

Australia

Brazil

Canada

Denmark

Ethiopia

France

Germany

Haiti

India

Japan

Kenya

Liberia

Mexico

Nigeria

Oman

Puerto Rico

Qatar

Russia

Sweden

Thailand

Uganda

Venezuela

Wales

Xinjiang

Yemen

Zambia