Victor Montejo’s The Bird Who Cleans the World and Other Mayan Fables (Curbstone Press, 1991)
Anita Brenner’s The Boy Who Could Do Anything and Other Mexican Folk Tales (Linnet Books, 1992)
George F. Schultz’s Vietnamese Legends (Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1965)
Hilary Roe Metternich’s Mongolian Folktales (Avery Press, 1996)
Rebecca Schacht’s Lights Along the Path: Jewish Folklore Through the Grades (Chelsey Press, 1999)
Kirin Narayan’s Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (Oxford University Press, 1997)
Luz knows more stories than anyone. She knows all kinds, and if you were an Indian and lived in Milpa Alta you could sit around the fire and hear her tell a different story every night until you were as old as your grandfather. But you would ask for some stories twice. Here they are.” — from The Boy Who Could Do Anything by Anita Brenner
The main thing these six books have in common is that they are all collections of folk tales. In a way, saying this is like pointing out six people at random in an international airport and saying, “The main thing these six people have in common is that they are all human beings.” These collections are distinctly different from one another. Some have been edited and rewritten specifically “for children”; others are presented in the context of serious anthropological and historical studies; one is designed as a school textbook. Even the stories contained in each collection differ widely in length and content, some being a few paragraphs long and others many pages; some being animal fables, others morality tales, “fairy tales,” or adaptations from the sacred scriptures of various cultures.
However, different as they are, the stories in these collections do share some commonalities. “Human-ness” is one of them. Regardless of whether the characters in the stories are animals or human beings, they are all recognizably people. They speak to one another, and they interact based on the interests and urgencies that are particular to humanity. These stories also contain a sense of shared themes. Each collection is exclusively devoted to the folk tales of one specific culture or people group. In several of the introductions, the authors attempt to describe the qualities that mark their culture’s tales as unique, distinct from the tales of other cultures. Fascinatingly, in each case the qualities they stress are the same: a sense of social order and connectedness with other beings, the importance of loyalty and familial responsibility, and an understanding of involvement in the ongoing creation of the world.
Additionally, as has been noted by almost all scholars of folk tales, from the noted Brothers Grimm onward, certain characters and plots appear in the tales of many people groups, even those widely separated geographically. The six collections described in this review were assembled by markedly different authors and published at unrelated times, by unrelated publishers. Yet the similarities between some of the stories in them are striking.
The Bird Who Cleans the World and Other Mayan Fables
Victor Montejo is a Jakaltek Mayan who first heard these fables from his mother in Guatemala, and much later wrote them down to preserve an oral tradition that was disappearing in his country and among his people. Allan F. Burns says in the introduction, “This volume is at once a collection of interesting, sometimes humorous fables that have animal protagonists, and at the same time a window into an indigenous way of thought and experience.” Burns goes on to explain that Mayan stories are developed and told in the form of conversations. As the stories in this collection show, the importance of dialogue is so great that stories are almost exclusively about conversations between characters, with very little emphasis on action or setting. This primacy of spoken interaction between people — whether human, animal, or divine people — is a distinctive characteristic of Mayan culture. The title story is a flood story that bears a strong resemblance to the account in Genesis. In the Mayan story, however, the buzzard has the role of the dove. Rather than bringing an olive branch as a sign of hope to the survivors of the flood, the buzzard flies back stinking of the dead creatures he has discovered and eaten on the reappearing dry land. In this way, the story shows that even a disgusting creature has an essential role in the well-being of the world.
Another story that stands out is “How the Serpent Was Born.” Although the story is intended as a frightening and cautionary tale, readers may find themselves smiling at the narrator’s exaggeratedly didactic tone. “A mother is a special being whom we ought to love every moment of our lives,” claims the first paragraph. “But many of us do not have hearts big enough to repay her for all that we make her suffer.” As the story triumphantly concludes with the downfall of the wicked son who scorned his mother, we can almost picture young Victor squirming as his mother shakes an admonitory finger in his face.
Montejo’s greatest contribution to these tales is his ability as a writer to preserve their oral nature. It is easy to almost “hear” the voice of his mother in the rhythms of the words. Another wonderful aspect of the collection is the inclusion of classical Mayan images as illustrations. The images are chiefly taken from eighth century ceramics, and are helpfully described in a “Notes” section at the back of the book.
The Boy Who Could Do Anything & Other Mexican Folk Tales
The stories in this collection have come through the crucible of the Mexican Revolution. Their author, Anita Brenner, was born in Mexico in 1905. After fleeing the violence in her country as a young girl, she returned in 1923 to become a part of the group of artists and intellectuals who are today considered responsible for the Mexican renaissance in the arts. One of these artists, the famous muralist Jean Charlot, met an Indian storyteller, Luz, from the village of Milpa Alta. Inspired by Luz, he drew illustrations for her stories that show the Mexican people as they appeared in their local setting, not as the Europeans, their former conquerors, tried to make them. Charlot later collaborated with Anita Brenner to compile the stories and illustrations in the form of this book.
The most striking character in this collection is the boy hero, Tepozton. Son of a god, yet raised as a human being, Tepozton is a cheerful boy with supernatural powers who, in a connected cycle of tales, matter-of-factly performs feats of strength and appears to help the poor and downtrodden. Another attention-catching character is Malintzin. Her story is reminiscent of the story of Mexico’s legendary La Malinche, also sometimes known as La Llorona (“She who weeps”). Loosely based on a historical figure, Malintzin is a woman with a gift for languages who falls in love with Cortes and eventually betrays her people to him. To this day, so the story goes, the spirit of Malintzin can be heard weeping when people die, especially when they die by violence.
“The Rabbit Who Wanted to Be a Man” in this collection is almost identical to a story in The Bird Who Cleans the World entitled “Sometimes Right Is Repayed with Wrong.” In both stories, the rabbit is a Trickster who discharges his debts to creatures such as the cockroach, the chicken, the coyote, the jaguar, and the hunter by hiding each in turn in his house and then leading the stronger animals to the hiding places of the weaker ones until all are eaten. Considering the proximity of Mexico and Guatemala, perhaps the two stories have a common source.
Vietnamese Legends
Unlike the Mexican tales above, the stories in this collection were gathered at a time of relative peace in Vietnam. Their adaptor, George F. Schultz, was Director of the Vietnamese-American Association, a center sponsored by the United States Information Agency, from 1956 to 1958. In his foreword, he writes, “I found the Vietnamese to be a friendly and hospitable people of a modest and retiring disposition. They prize erudition and I found that I could best gain their respect by learning something of their language, literature, and civilization.” His efforts to do so resulted partly in this collection of Vietnamese tales, translated into English but published in Japan in 1965.
Schultz has been praised by many Vietnamese for his respectful understanding of their way of life. That understanding is strongly evident in the stories gathered into this book. Although Schultz’s translations are written in graceful, confident English, he manages to maintain their Vietnamese flavor; the reader clearly senses that these tales are definitely not Western.
There are several teaching fables in this collection, as well as short morality tales about devious people getting their comeuppance, but the stories that truly shine are those which we might recognize as “fairy tales.”
“The Fairy’s Portrait” is the story of a young man who falls in love with the picture of a beautiful woman. One day, the figure in the picture comes to life and steps down into the room. She tells him that she is a fairy, and that the Queen of the Fairies has allowed her to come to earth to be his wife. Another story, “The Gambler’s Wife,” is a more particularly Asian-style fairy tale involving an obedient wife who commits suicide out of shame at her husband’s disgrace, but returns as a ghost to see that justice is done for her children. One of the latter stories, “Tam and Cam,” is an interesting evolution of the Chinese Cinderella story.
Mongolian Folktales
Mongolia lies on a high plateau between Russia and China. Dr. Pureviin Khorloo, in the introduction to this collection of twenty-five traditional Mongolian folk tales, notes that, unlike many other cultures which largely lost their oral tradition centuries ago, Mongolia’s nomadic way of life has made its oral tradition essential far into the present day. Nomadism also contributes to the fact that many Mongolian tales feature the horse, often as a magical or heroic figure. Dr. Khorloo adds that Mongolians make a distinction between “domog,” legends with some supporting fact, and “tuul,” which are simply understood as “stories.” Many — if not most — tuul were traditionally sung, either accompanied or unaccompanied. (Big Earl Sellars reviewed some Mongolian traditional music: Duo Temuzhin’s Altai-Khangain-Ayalguu; Ensemble Ardiin Ayalguu’s Solongo; Ensemble Temuzhin, Altai-Khangain-Ayalguu 2.)
Because Mongolia touches on both Eastern European and Asian boundaries, its folk tradition contains elements from both cultures. As Dr. Khorloo points out, a particularly Asian element is the use of the twelve-animal zodiac. “Why the Camel Rolls in the Ashes” tells how the mouse tricked the camel and won from the Buddha a position in the zodiac. In “How the Wasp Lost Its Voice,” the figure of Khan-Garid, King of the Feathered World, is derived from the Garuda, a monster from Indian mythology.
The stunning illustrations in this book reveal another link to Chinese culture. The illustrator, Norovsambuugiin Baatartsog, is a renowned papercut artist. Hilary Roe Metternich, the compiler of the tales for this collection, claims that Baatartsog’s work was her inspiration. The art of the paper cut has become increasingly important in Mongolia over the last fifty years, but it occupies an important place in Chinese and Japanese folk art as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_paper_cutting
Lights Along the Path: Jewish Folklore Through the Grades
Unlike the collections described so far, Lights Along the Path was designed for a far more specialized purpose. Metternich says that she hopes both children and scholars of Central Asian culture will enjoy and appreciate Mongolian Folktales. Rebecca Schacht, on the other hand, is a Waldorf educator who has compiled these Jewish folk tales as a teaching tool. Her introduction gives an overview of the Waldorf philosophy, which includes the belief that exposure to traditional folk tales from an early age aids children in forming strong imaginations and ethical reasoning skills, which naturally develop hand in hand. The tales themselves are presented in sections according to age and grade appropriateness.
The educational theory is fascinating in its own way, and some readers may find Schacht’s age designations interesting and helpful. Others may find them to be somewhat arbitrary. In any case, the tales are well-written; although intended for children, they will please adult readers as well. Schacht has included many marginal notes about the origins of each tale, definitions of small practices and objects distinctive to Jewish culture, and folklore about the Jewish alphabet. Once again, these notes are interesting in themselves, but taken overall they can appear as distracting clutter on the page. Certain readers will see a similarity between the layout of this book and that of the Jewish Talmud itself, in which marginal commentary is an integral part of the text.
In two cases, “The Story of Abraham” and “The Story of Ruth,” Schacht’s fictionalized retelling of stories that are considered historical by some and certainly as sacred scripture by many seems to take too many liberties with the original texts. However, that is a matter of interpretation more than of style.
It was interesting to discover that the story “The Two Brothers” in this collection is practically identical to the story “The Two Good Brothers” in Mongolian Folktales. In both stories, an older and younger brother secretly try to aid each other, and finally run into each other in the middle of the night, as each is taking an extra share of the harvest to his brother’s house.
Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales
Here again is a collection that is very different from those thus far reviewed. Kirin Narayan is an anthropologist who collected these stories in an extended series of interactions with Urmila Devi Sood, a Hindu Indian woman from a the small town of Kangra. Narayan maintains the careful structure of scientific “field work” in this book by writing it as an extended narrative. She faithfully relates the conversations that lead up to the telling of each tale, and inserts breaks in the tales to record the interjections of the listeners who are present, as well family members who enter or leave the room. Even more than Victor Montejo above, Narayan preserves the spoken nature of these stories by almost directly transcribing Urmila’s words rather than editing or rewriting them to create a smoother flow.
The tales in this collection are divided into two types, women’s ritual tales and “winter tales” — tales told chiefly to entertain. Narayan asks Urmila to describe the settings and proper uses for the ritual tales, and Urmila adds extensive commentary on the symbolic meanings of specific elements within each tale. Urmila’s sister, Nirmala, also interjects interesting commentary from time to time. Urmila is a traditionally pious woman who sees the tales from a theological perspective. Nirmala takes a more modern viewpoint and interprets the tales anthropologically.
The figure of Honi in these stories is particularly interesting. Honi is sometimes perceived as a sort of goddess, but can also be, like Providence or Lady Luck, simply a name given to the force that brings times of terrible, unexplainable misfortune. As Urmila says in one story, “King Bhoj was after all a great King. It was just when Honi came to him that things had changed. Honi comes to some people for eighteen years, to some for twelve years … but it destroys whatever a person has.” In stories involving Honi, characters achieve heroic stature by remaining steadfast in their principles and enduring until things change for the better.
Another story, “Love like Salt” surprises the reader by being delightfully like Shakespeare’s play King Lear. In Urmila’s telling, a King asks his three daughters to proclaim their love for him. Two of the daughters say that their love is sweet like crystallized sugar and sweetened milk. The third daughter says that her love is like salt, that is plain itself but adds essential taste to all foods. Naturally, her father drives her away in anger for her 
practical answer, but her truthful and faithful nature leads her to a happy marriage and a life of good work and great wealth.
Book reviews usually answer the question, “Is this story any good?” In this case, the question is not exactly answerable in that way. These tales have had a long life — in some cases thousands of years — as oral tradition before they were collected and written down. Their value has already been determined by many generations of listeners. As a reviewer of folk tales, I can only determine whether the person who has transcribed them has been faithful to the spirit of the tales, has been a good storyteller. In all of the collections I have described above, I can say yes. (Even given my criticism of Lights Along the Path, I still found that the stories it contains are themselves well-written and, in the main, true to their various sources.) These collections are certainly worth seeking out, enjoying, and pondering for yourself. In addition, as mentioned above, The Bird Who Cleans the World, The Boy Who Could Do Anything, and Mongolian Folktales contain splendid indigenous art work. Baatartsog’s paper cuts alone are worth the purchase price of the book!
So I end this review with the words which some Kangra storytellers traditionally use to end their tales, “They remained there, settled and flourishing, and we’ve come home.”
Grey Walker
