This year, my A to Z Challenge theme is Body Folktales. Enjoy!
Noses are, once again, a pretty common theme in folktales. I have written about them during A to Z multiple times (e.g. here and here). Here are some fun stories to add to the list:
The Princess of Tomboso (Canada)
This is one of those folktales where a princess cheats a man out of various magical items. Eventually, exiled from her kingdom, he finds a tree of apples that make his nose grow long like an elephant's trunk - and another tree with fruit that has the opposite effect. He uses them to blackmail the princess into giving back his treasures. (Find more versions of this tale type here.)
Silver Nose (Italy)
Silver Nose is Bluebeard's Italian version, who also happens to be the Devil himself. If the girls who work for him don't obey his orders, he tosses them into hell. One clever girl, however, manages to rescue her sisters and herself from Silver Nose by trickery. (The mother warns her daughters in advance that the rich man with the silver nose seems suspect).
The magic pipe (Norway)
Three brothers set out to win a princess, and encounter a woman with a yard-long green nose that is stuck in the crack of a log. She begs them to free her, for her nose has been stuck for two hundred years, but only the youngest brother helps her. She rewards him with a magic pipe that he can use to win the princess.
The hyena, the dog, and Nose-of-Mud (Hausa people, Niger)
Nose-of-Mud, a man with a nose made of mud, goes out hunting with the help of Hyena. He makes Hyena rile up a bunch of antelopes by insulting their mother. The antelopes chase Hyena inside the nose of mud, where they die. After the successful hunt, Hyena decides to do the same and makes a mud nose for himself, inviting Dog along to repeat the trick. However, his mud nose breaks, and they both had to flee from the antelopes for their life.
What Spider knows (Ghana)
Anansi the Spider goes out hunting in times of famine, and encounters a strange little old man with a very long nose. He makes Anansi carry his nose around, and they go hunting together. When they want to kill an animal, the man makes Anansi point his nose at it, and the animal falls dead. When he returns home, Anansi makes a long clay nose for himself and tries to hunt with it - without success. The moral, claims the story, is not to be too ashamed to ask, to learn things properly.
Any more morals you can glean from these stories? Or any other nose stories you remember?
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