Reading Diary Week 4: Georgian Folktales

This week I chose "Georgian Folktales" as my reading unit. This unit had a lot of very interesting stories. As with "The Voyages of Sindbad," the protagonists of these stories primarily deal with problems through the use of tricks. There are a lot of clever heroes, and nearly as many incredibly dumb antagonists, in the Georgian Folktales.

The first story I read was a very engaging yarn about a peasant's son who is apprenticed by a devil for a year at his father's behest. Although the devil tries to forever keep the boy with him, the boy ends up using the sorcerous powers he is taught in order to escape from his master's clutches. He then goes on to use his shape shifting abilities to help his poor father acquire some money. The highlight of this story, in my opinion, was the concluding scene in which, after having been captured by the devil once again, the boy plays an all too literal game of cat and mouse with his former master. Master and student participate in an elaborate chase sequence in which the both of them shape change into different forms of hunter and prey, until finally the boy turns into a needle and lures the devil into transforming into a thread going through his "eye," at which point the needle somehow runs into a nearby fire and burns the thread. This bizarre sequence was like nothing I'd read before, and it marked the story as one of my favorites in this particular unit.

"The Serpent and the Peasant" was an interesting read also. The main thing that stuck out to me with this story was how it ended, I was expected the peasant to get his just desserts for being such a treacherous--ahem--snake, but in the end he comes out of the story alive and well. Although he repeatedly betrays the snake that helps him, the serpent, surprisingly, never begrudges him. Rather, he lays the blame of the peasant's cruel actions on the shoulders of the world around him. I thought this was odd, as most of the fairy tales I've read tend to lay the full blame of a person's poor decisions on that person and that person alone. I also found it interesting that the serpent, a figure with negative associations within Christianity--with the exception of the bronze serpent--is a positive character in this story. I don't know much about the Orthodox Church, so I don't know if this was an Orthodox thing or a Georgian thing.

"The Cunning Old Man and the Demi" was one of my favorites as well. The old man's prowess as a trickster is exaggerated by the extremely unintelligent nature of the demon who he constantly tricks, but the story makes for a pleasurable read regardless. It's humorous to see the old man make a creature of such considerable power into basically his doting servant. A later story, "The Strong Man and the Dwarf," uses the exact same story formula almost to a tee, but for whatever reason, I found this story a bit more engaging than that one.

Rioni River, Georgia (Wikipedia Commons)

The second half of stories in this unit were not quite as good as the ones in the first half in my opinion, but there was still a few strong ones among the bunch. 

"The Grasshopper and the Ant" is what's called a cumulative tale, and features a grasshopper going on an increasingly complicated fetch quest to find the items necessary to eventually allow him to save a drowning ant (as in the insect, not the relative). Unfortunately he takes too much time and the ant ends up dying as a result. One of the story's central themes is that only the earth gives freely of itself. Everything else in nature only gives if it receives something in turn. Although a whimsical tale--at least up until the end--the story is a very effective expression of the idea of the reciprocal nature of nature.

"The Fool's Good Fortune" was also one of my favorites of this unit. This story does a good job of utilizing the main character's innate foolishness to create humorous situations. I laughed out loud when I read of the fool telling the monks at a monastery to "be fruitful and multiply" and then receiving a beating at their hands as a result! It's also a good underdog story, since the foolish main character manages to use his brain just enough to outwit some bandits, steal their fortune, and become rich. 

"The Story of the Dervish" is an entertaining narrative about a dervish whose spouse cheats on him and then turns him into a dog. It's a bizarre tales in which a princess whose being plagued by nightly "brownies"--someone please explain to me what the heck that means--is saved from mornings of fatigue and enfeeblement when the dog-protagonist drives away the flock of swans that somehow manage to sneak into her room each night and trample over her without actually waking her. Yeah, a flock of swans essentially attack her each night, and she somehow can't figure out what's giving her the brownies, whatever the heck those are. Despite being a bit of an odd duck of a story, the tale is still a lot of fun to read, with a nice ending in which the main character is able to regain human form and take revenge on his wife and her lover. All's well that ends well!

A dervish (not of the whirling variety) (Un-textbook)