O is for Optic Organs (Body Folktales)

This year, my A to Z Challenge theme is Body Folktales. Enjoy! 

Yeah yeah, I'm cheating, but I used E for Elbows.

Eyes are also a very common theme in folktales; I have blogged about them in various contexts before (such as eye juggling, fairy eyes, and a cat-eyed princess). So once again, I went around cherry-picking stories that sounded new and fun.

The pelican bird (Hungary)

This story begins with a king whose eyes are doing different things: one is always crying, and one is always smiling. One smiles because he has a lovely daughter and one cries because he used to have a magic pelican bird that he lost. The princess announces that she'll only marry a man who can return the bird. Of course a hero presents himself and goes through many adventures for it. The motif of laughing and crying eyes is very common in Hungary; people often quote it when they talk about being sad and happy about different things at the same time.

Rabbit's eyes (Korea)

The king of the fishes falls ill, and he can only be cured by eating the eyes of a live rabbit. He sends a turtle to lure a rabbit into the sea. When the rabbit finds out why he's there, he bluffs, saying he's left his real eyes at home, and he's wearing glass substitutes. Thus, he tricks the turtle into bringing him back to shore.

The witches' eyes (Mexican-American tale)

A man is good friends with two elderly sisters whom everyone else believes to be witches. He doesn't listen to the rumors, and visits them almost every day. He notices that there are cats around the house at night, even though the women claim not to have any. One night he goes over to the house and finds no one at home - but he stumbles across two pairs of human eyes left out on a stool by the fire. He knocks over the stool, and the eyes burn. The next day when he comes to visit, the women are hostile towards him - and he notices they have cat eyes, sensitive to the light of day. He flees, and soon after the sisters move away from town.

Shirime (Japan)

This creature is a yokai, a supernatural being featured in Japanese anecdotes. It stops people walking at night, bends over, and flashes its anus at them - an anus that has one large eye staring out of it. That's it. That's the story.

The sandalwood merchant (Arabic tale)

A sandalwood merchant stumbles into a town where everyone is a cheat and a rogue (in some translations it's called Falsetown). He runs into various people who trick him, until he is brought to court by all the rascals demanding money from him. An old woman helps him out with advice. One rascal, who only has one eye, claims the merchant took his other eye, and demands an eye in return. The merchant, following the woman's advice, tells him he is willing to give up an eye - but the rascal should take out his own first, so they can measure both and make sure they match. (Read more about versions of this story here.)

The children with one eye (Canada)

This is an indigenous story from Canada, but sadly the source doesn't note which nation it belongs to. It's about two children who blind themselves by accident. An old woman gives them an eye they can share, but warns them to take good care of it. Brother and sister pass the eye back and forth, but eventually one day they get into an argument, the brother throws the eye at his sister, and it falls to the ground where a bird snatches it up. After that, the two blind children turn into a mole and a bat.

Sharing and ransoming eyes

This one might be familiar to you from the story of Perseus: three old women, the Graeae, share one eye between them that they pass around (the Disney movie Hercules combined them with the Fates). The motif number is F512.1.2. - Three women have one eye among them. Surprisingly, this motif shows up in a whole lot of folktales around Europe. 

La Maga is an Italian folktale version (from Tuscany) of the Perseus myth, complete with an evil sorceress, and a hero who steals an eye from two women to ransom it for a mirror that can help him kill her. In a German tale Rinroth a boy climbs a tree and from there spies three men who share one eye between them. As they are trying to see who's in the tree, he snatches the eye from them, and only returns it when they give him three valuable gifts (that he uses later on to kill three giants and rescue a princess). In the Norwegian tale Lillekort a boy encounters two one-eyed women separately, takes their eyes, and blackmails them into giving him magic objects (that he also uses to defeat three trolls). Another version of the same, titled Shortshanks, has the hero similarly steal eyes from two separate old women; what makes this tale more interesting is that the hero has a twin brother who is stronger than him, and only returns at the end of the story. The most fun one I found was yet another Norwegian version, The trolls in Hedale Wood, in which two brothers did not only outwit three trolls that shared one eye, but also managed to use that large eye to see in the dark.

(Read more about this motif in general here and here.)

Were any of these stories familiar to you? Are there other "eye" stories that come to mind?