A is for the Amber Tree (Gemstone Folklore)

Welcome to the 2022 A to Z Blogging Challenge! My theme this year is Gemstone Folklore. Because I love stories about shiny things. Read the introduction to the project here.

AMBER

There are many gemstones that start with A, but I have always been fascinated by amber, and the memories of the distant past it contains. Around the Baltic Sea, there are many old stories about amber. The most famous among them is the Lithuanian legend of Jurate and Kastytis, but of course I wanted to go and find a less well-known story...

The Legend of the Gauja Bird

Latvia

This legend says that long ago in a distant wilderness by the Baltic sea lived the magic, blue-feathered Gauja bird. In its nest it guarded a necklace of 77 amber pieces. Each stone, when turned to the light, revealed a different image. They showed cities, forests, mountains, orchards, different peoples. The King of Tuscany sent a hunter named Koso to steal the necklace for him. Koso set out into the wilderness and managed to find the Gauja's nest. At first he wanted to shoot the bird, but it proved too big, so Koso waited until it flew away, then climbed the tree and stole the necklace.

However, as he was sailing home on a ship, the bird caught up with him, plucked him up, and threw him into the sea. Koso managed to swim back to the ship, but the necklace fell into the water and sank. Each piece of amber became a seed, and a forest of thees grew at the bottom of the sea. The trees weep for the Gauja constantly; their teardrops turn into amber, which washes up on the seashore. What the greedy king could not obtain, the sea now gives away for free.

The Gauja was never seen again, but a river in Latvia still bears its name.

Sources: 

I managed to track this legend back to this book (read online here). It is also mentioned in this book, and on websites here, here, here, and here.

Other tales:

In another Latvian folktale, the sea queen who marries the hero has a castle made of amber under the sea. There is also a Silesian tale titled Amber Mountain, a variant of the Seven Swans / Seven Ravens type. There, the girl rescues her brothers from inside an Amber Mountain by the Baltic Sea by making a deal with the three-headed monster that lives there.

What thoughts, feelings, memories does amber bring to your mind?

Kokles-music saves the day (Following folktales around the world 56. - Latvia)

Today I continue the blog series titled Following folktales around the world! If you would like to know what the series is all about, you can find the introduction post here. You can find all posts under the Following Folktales label, or you can follow the series on Facebook!

A Laima és a két anya
Lett népmesék
Voight Vilmos
Európa Könyvkiadó, 1972.

Once again I had the luck of reading a volume of Tales of Nations, because I already had it on my shelf, and because it is a very useful, high quality publication. It contains 164 Latvian folktales, selected to show a range of folk genres, from origin legends and pourquoi stories through elaborate fairy tales all the way to jokes and anecdotes. The editor, famous folklorist Vilmos Voight, penned the afterword on the history of Latvia (up to Soviet times, obviously), the origins of the Latvian folklore movement, and the Latvian folklore archives that contain more than 150k stories. The book contains extensive notes, sources, tale type numbers, and a glossary. The translation aims to reflect the original, uncensored language of the oral tradition.
For those of you who don't read Hungarian, I recommend reading other collections of Latvian folktales, like this one or this one.

Highlights

Among the pourquoi stories, my favorite was titled How the birds learned their songs. It features a whole bunch of birds that all went out to see the world, observe sounds, and learn their song. It would make a great educational story.

The kokles is a folk instrument

Among the fairy tales, I especially liked the Strange deer, in which a princess fell in love with a poor kokles-player, and they could only be together after a series of marvelous transformations. Kokles-players were definitely the elite of folktale heroes: One of them tamed a wolf with music, whole another was helped by the mysterious Green Man in defeating giants and winning a princess.
The tale of the Magic Word came to a less celebratory ending: After the hero released his spirit-servant, the spirit disappeared along with all his wealth. The tale ended with the hero sending his princess-wife back home, so that she would not have to live in poverty.
The most adventurous of the legends was that of The Siege of Riga, in which a soldier hero shot silver bullets at a witch transformed into a magpie - and the magpie shot back. The most endearing was The peasant who wrote a letter to the emperor. The letter was a series of doodles, explaining a claim, but since the emperor met the peasant in disguise, he could later pretend at court that he could read exactly what the doodles meant, granting the poor man his request. I also really liked the Devil and the clerk, in which the Devil refused to take anyone who was wished to hell, because people were not saying "go to hell" from their true heart.

Connections

There were two variants in the book for the Beanstalk tale, except it was not jack who climbed up to the sky, but two very capable maidens, who won their fortune by helping an old man, rather than robbing him. The Witch's Birch Tree was a variant on the Twin Princes tale type, except in this one the witch was a lot harder to kill, and the companion animals (wolves! bears! deer! goats! foxes! rabbits! lynxes! dogs!) got a more active role (you can find this story in a picture book format in English here).
The golden apple tree, golden bird, and three princes story was a variant of what is usually known as the Firebird, Golden rain and Tar rain was a variant of Frau Holle, and the Radiant Bird was that of the Princess on the Glass Mountain, except this one also featured a tiny, feathered underground gnome king (which is pretty cool). Reading the title of the Flying Boat I was all ready for some Extraordinary Helpers, but the story really did only feature a flying boat...
The frogs from Riga and Liepaja were the Latvian cousins of the Japanese frogs from Osaka and Kyoto. No news is a favorite of American storytellers, and the Old man's glove was a variant of the Ukrainian Mitten tale. And of course, because we are still in the Baltic countries, there was a Magic Mill grinding salt into the sea.

Where to next?
Lithuania!