StorySpotting: Body and soul mix-and-match (Locke & Key)

StorySpotting is a weekly or kinda-weekly series about folktales, tropes, references, and story motifs that pop up in popular media, from TV shows to video games. Topics are random, depending on what I have watched/played/read recently. Also, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. Be warned!

Locke & Key, in my opinion, is a seriously underrated show (I haven't read the comics but I hear they are good too). With the new season out, they gave me multiple things to Story Spot.

Where was the story spotted?

Season 3, episodes 4-6.

What happens?

The basic premise of Locke & Key is about an old house that hides various old keys, each with its own magical property. The Ghost Key has been a staple since Season 1. It essentially opens a door that separates one's soul from their body when they walk through. It has been used in various creative ways over the course of the show.

In this season Dodge, the demon who has been the main heroes' arch nemesis, manages to use the door to knock the young boy Bode's soul out of his body. She then leaves her own mortal shell, and takes over the boy's body instead. Bode, left as a floating ghost, eventually manages to regain his own body by projecting his soul into a sparrow, and then transforming back into human shape. (Complicated, I know, but kinda genius).

What's the story?

The whole body-snatching-taking-refuge-in-a-bird thing is actually one of the creepiest pieces of folklore I have ever encountered. And as I looked into it again, it seemed a lot more common than I had believed. It even has a couple of Thompson motif numbers: E725.1 - Soul leaves the body and enters an animal's, and K1175 - Minister dupe raja into entering body of a dead parrot, then enters raja's body. And yes, that latter one is hella specific.

The first time I encountered this trope was in a collection of Tibetan folktales titled Tales of the Golden Corpse. The tale of The Travelling Spirit was about two friends, a prince and a minister's son, who went to school together. The prince was lazy, but the other lad learned the secret art of projecting his soul out of his body (known as phowa). Jealous that the minister's son might upstage him, the prince tricked his friend into showing off his skills - and destroyed the unattended body. Seeking a new place, the boy's lost soul entered an old woman's dead parrot, reanimating it. Later on, the parrot managed to catch up to the prince, and tricked him into falling out of a window... And then the minister's son's soul entered the prince's empty body, and walked away home.

Excellent creepy revenge ending.

As I was reading my way around the world, I encountered this trope again in a collection from Thailand, in a tale titled The Weaverbird Princess. In this story, a silent princess is promised to the suitor who can make her talk. A prince comes along with his mentor, both of them versed in the art of projecting their soul. The mentor projects his soul into various objects in the princess' room, and the prince has conversations with the objects, telling them clever stories. The princess can't help but interject, and thus the prince wins her hand. 

Later on, the prince goes to the forest with his mentor, and, seeing a dead deer, decides to project his soul into the animal and go exploring. He trusts his body to his mentor. However, the evil mentor in turn takes over the prince's abandoned body, burns his own, and goes home to take the prince's place. The prince, not finding a body to return to, transfers himself into a dead parrot. He flies home and tells his wife what happened. The princess manages to trick the mentor into leaving the body and transferring into a goat to show off. The prince thus gets back into his body, and kills the goat in revenge.

Once I started pulling on the king-in-the-dead-parrot thread, a whole lot of other tales came tumbling out. 

There is one in the Turkish story collection titled The history of the forty vezirs, where the evil vezir, instead of burning his own body, puts a slave's soul into it for safekeeping (and the king, while in parrot form, also judges some court cases). Interestingly, in this version the queen recognizes that her husband is not behaving like himself, and refuses to sleep with him.

There is also a version from Pakistan in this book, where the king takes on the parrot's body to pick mangos for his queen. The queen, who is aware of the evil servant's soul in her husband's body from the get-go, devises a clever plan to trick the soul into a lamb's body.

The tale also appears in The Three Princes of Serendip, the English translation of the Italian translation of a medieval Persian tale collection. You can read the story about The Emperor who turned into a parrot here. Once again, the wife's suspicion plays an important part in restoring her husband to his body. Added bonus: the Emperor uses his body-switching ability to travel his kingdom in the disguise of birds, and right wrongs.

Another version of the story can be found in Hatim's Tales, a book of Kashmiri stories collected from storyteller Hatim Tilwon in 1896. The fun part of this one is that the vezir loses the king's stolen body when he goes hunting, and decides to inhabit a bear for greater efficiency. The king then shoots the bear, saying "we can't have a bear for a vezir"... The tale also appears in other Kashmiri collections. It even has a variation in the famous Ocean of the Streams of Stories. Here, a person takes over a recently deceased king's body, but a minister suspects the change. Still, the minister decides an impostor is better than the child heir, and makes sure the soul doesn't have another body to return to. Now this would make a great movie...

In India, the story is known as The Metamorphoses of King Vikramaditya (you can read it in two versions in this volume of North Indian Notes and Queries). In this one, the parrot ends up at his father-in-law's house, judging court cases. Once he actually judges the case of a woman whose husband has been replaced by a shapeshifting dev. Eventually his wife (who is suspicious of her "husband") hears of the parrot and discovers the truth. In the second variant, the evil servant is tricked into the body of a goat and then beheaded, and the head of the goat still laughs and weeps as it's hung in the bazaar.

(I even found a popular comic book adaptation of this story from India.)

A distant relative to this motif is a story from Melanesia, where an evil spirit pushes a girl off a cliff, and takes over her body and identity.

Conclusion

So here we have a folktale type that spans a continent at least, and also several centuries in time, all the way from 11th century Kashmir to 21st century Netflix. Traveling souls and body-snatchers are a rich topic for people to think about. It probably has something to do with our mortality...

(Fun fact: I originally started working on this post when I was watching The 100)

Fairy tales are crystal (Following folktales around the world 165. - Turkey)

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 here, or you can follow the series on Facebook!

Forty-four ​Turkish Fairy Tales
Kúnos Ignác
George G. Harrap, 1913.

One of the first collections of Turkish folktales, by Hungarian collector Kúnos Ignác, published in English. As the title claims, it contains 44 stories. The short introduction tells us about the world of Turkish fairy tales which, according to Kúnos, "are as crystal, reflecting the sun's rays in a thousand dazzling colours." The book itself is pretty, too, with elaborate decorative motifs, and the sometimes beautiful, sometimes caricature-esque illustrations of Will Pogány - although the latter often divide the text into two parallel columns, which makes it hard to read. The book has a short glossary at the end. While some of the illustrations are definitely weird and the tales have some questionable moments in terms of portraying "black Arabs," this book is still a classic, with a lot of very beautiful stories.

Highlights


One of my old favorites from this book is The silent princess, in which a roguish prince tricks the girl into speaking up by telling her riddle tales, and deliberately giving the wrong answer. She can't help but correct him, breaking her silence. Another old favorite of mine is The dragon prince, in which a queen gives birth to a dragon, and only a clever servant girl is persistent enough to tame him. They get married, but they get separated again; she has another husband and children, and then the dragon prince returns she has to make a choice. The best dragon story in the book, however, is no doubt The black dragon and the red dragon. Here, a padisah sets out to find his forty kidnapped children, and he succeeds with the help of two dragons. It turns out the children were taken by a dev whose own son had been kidnapped by another villain. Everything turns out all right in the end. My favorite moment is the one where the padisah, wandering in the desert, finds a brood of baby dragons, still blind like newborn kittens...
The horse-dew and the witch is a very pretty version of the "magic flight" folktale type. The horse is an enchanted prince, and the witch is his mother, who gives her son's bride all kinds of impossible tasks until the young lovers flee from her together. They could only get away after the bride gave up her little finger to the witch. Another steed, Kamer-taj the Moon-horse, rescued a princess from a demon multiple times. In the end when he died, the princess and her children hid in his stomach for a night - and by the morning, the horse turned into a palace (I have read a similar Italian tale too).

The bird of sorrow was a story about a princess who wanted to know what sorrow was. The bird took her on a wild adventure of a series of misfortunes, but it did reward her in the end for her perseverance (I have read similar Greek and Italian tales, but with Fate). Fate also places an important role in the story of the Fortune-teller, who told three sisters that their fortune would come from unusual places - a well, a cemetery, and shame - and in the end, all three of them found it.
The story of Prince Ahmed was exciting in a lot of ways. The prince's own father tried to have him killed multiple times, but with the aid of his mother and three gemstone fairies (who started a war against the king), Prince Ahmed managed to find happiness in the end.
I really enjoyed the story of The enchanted pomegranate branch, mostly because of the motif of the secret garden - and because of the princess who punched the false bridegroom in the end. The story of Shah Jussuf was a similarly beautiful version of Beauty and the Beast. Here, the wife seeking her lost husband was taken in and adopted by a dew (div) family, who did not only help her raise her child, but also devised a plan to make sure her returning husband would treat her better from that point on.
I was amused by a story that illustrated why the study of Astrology is important. It was about a skeptical man who picked up an astrology book, and was transported into another world. When, after many adventures, he finally got back home, he had to admit that astrology is a powerful topic... (this story started out with the Gemstone Mountain episode, which I love).
There was also a motif that appeared in multiple stories: when the hero struck down a monster (dew, dragon, etc.), it usually goaded him to strike again to show "he is man enough." The clever hero always refused, which was good, because a second strike would have brought the monster back to life. Control and decisiveness over blind rage.

Connections


Among the popular tale types I found Animal Sibling (Brother and sister), hero seeking Fear, Three Oranges, Valiant Tailor (Kara Mustafa), Magic flight (The wizard-dervish), Shoes danced to pieces (The magic turban, the magic whip, the magic carpet), Son of the hunter (The crow-peri), Snow White (The magic hairpins), Devil and the woman (Imp in the well), Fake fortune-teller, Magician's apprentice, and False bride (Rose Beauty - which started with thee girls shooting arrows and following them to seek husbands; also, the false bride gave birth to the child of the real wife somehow).
I also encountered the tale type from the Balkans (?) where a girl takes lunch to her brothers working in the woods, and is kidnapped by a monster along with them. Only the youngest, "Simpleton" brother can save everyone. In the second half of the story he descends into the Underworld and encounters the Emerald Griffin (also known in Cyprus). The storm fiend was a beautiful, colorful tale, a mix of Water of Life and Koschei the Deathless (and yes, this one had an Emerald Griffin too).


Where to next?
Armenia!

Love and integrity (Following folktales around the world 164. - Cyprus)

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 here, or you can follow the series on Facebook!

A ​fügemagbeli szép leány
Ciprusi török népmesék
Mustafa Gökçeoğlu
Attraktor, 2007.

This book contains 24 Turkish folktales from Cyprus, collected by Mustafa Gökçeoğlu in the 1990s (sadly, I don't think this collection has an English translation). Each story comes with notes that list the place and time of the collection and the name, education, occupation, and age of the storyteller.There is a glossary at the end, and an afterword that talks about folktale opening formulas, the past of collecting Turkish folktales (including the work of Kúnos Ignác, who wrote the book I'm reading for Turkey), and details about the folktale tradition.
(I would have liked a more complete collection from Cyprus, but this was the only one I could get my hands on.)

Highlights

Image from here

The title story of the collection, The fig seed girl, was an interesting love story: a prince fell in love with a girl born from a fig seed, then abandoned her, then started courting her again. She tossed all his gifts and messages aside, and only forgave him when he apologized honestly in person. In the story of Mehmed the Fisherman a mermaid fell in love with a fisherman, and insisted on marrying him even though he constantly worried that having such an exotic wife would bring trouble. It did, but every time they solved the problems with the mermaid's magic, until the husband accepted that everything can work out just fine.
There were some rare stories in the book too. One was about a king who got so into magic spells that he used them to cause havoc in the kingdom. Eventually a man saved his daughter (accidentally turned into a snake) and convinced the king to stop practicing magic. Basket of pears was a simple yet lovely story about three brothers who took baskets of pears to a king as a gift - but the only one who made a successful journey was the one who honestly declared what he was carrying.
My favorite tale in the whole book was titled The hodja with the bells. In it, a traveler went from one town to another, seeing strange things and asking people to tell their stories to explain them. One story led to another, and the traveler listened patiently to all.

Connections

There were once again a lot of familiar tale types. Three oranges, magic flight (Rose Honey), stolen golden apples and descent into the underworld (The emerald griffin), Love like Salt, Koschei the deathless (Lentilfire), animal husband (Ahmed the Fish - including the motif of a clever little girl bringing news to the princess about her lost love), prince made of jewels (Pearls and Coral), tablecloth, donkey, stick, Cinderella (The elder daughter of the jam maker), and the classic chain story where people get anxious about the fate of a child they don't even have yet (My dear son). Once again I encountered one of my favorite folktale types, about a magic pot that steals things and brings them to a girl - food, clothes, and eventually a husband. In another familiar story a clever woman helped a man get his stolen money back from a crooked pawnshop owner.

Where to next?
Turkey!