H is for Hammerhead sharks (Folktales of Endangered Species)

Welcome to the 2020 A to Z blogging challenge! This year my theme is Folktales of Endangered Species. I am researching cool traditional stories about rare, fascinating animals - to raise awareness of what we might lose if we don't get our collective shit together. Enjoy!

Species: Hammerhead sharks (Sphyrnidae)

Status: Their nine species range from Vulnerable to Critically Endangered (Great hammerhead)

The brothers' escape

Pacific island legend*

Bakoa (a deity whose name means Shark) married twice. From his first wife he had many children: all the fish in the world. From his second wife he had two sons: Taburimai (Man) and Te-anoi (Hammerhead Shark). The fish got jealous of Taburimai because he looked so different from them, and had a secret meeting where they decided to kill and eat him. However, Te-anoi went to his father and revealed the plan. With a heavy heart, Bakoa decided that his human son should flee to safety, and asked Te-anoi to help him escape.

The next day before dawn the father woke up Te-anoi first, and told him where to travel. Then he woke up Taburimai, and said goodbye to his sons. Te-anoi told his brother to sit on his back and hold on to his hammerhead. He swam swiftly towards the east, following the eastern star. They traveled thus until they reached Samoa. There Taburimai went to shore, and said goodbye to his brother.

Te-anoi continued his journey until he reached the eastern sky, and swam upwards until he became a constellation. That constellation is till known as Te-anoi (the last five stars in the tail of Scorpio). Taburimai traveled a lot between the islands, and had many children.

*The source of the story is noted as "from Nui, an island of the Ellice group [Tuvalu] with a Gilbertese [Kiribati] population"

Sources: Read the story here or here.

How can I help?
You can adopt a hammerhead shark through the WWF here. Read about conservation efforts here and here. Read about Kiribati's shark sanctuary here.

If you could pick a shark brother (or sister), what kind of a shark would it be?

The pig (Feminist Folktales 8.)

Another Thursday, another post for Feminist Folktales! It's a series of traditional stories from around the world that display motifs that reflect feminist values. I am not changing any of the stories, merely researching and compiling them, and posting them here as food for thought. You can find the list of posts here.

Origin: Denmark

The story

A poor widow is working with her three daughters (combing flax, baking, etc.) when a pig runs into their garden. She sends her eldest to chase the pig away, and the pig lures the girl into a foggy forest where she gets lost. Suddenly the pig turns into a man who takes the girl home and locks her in a room. The same thing happens with the second daughter, but the third managed to win the man's approval, and gets free rein of the house. She finds her sisters in the locked rooms, and finds the keys to let them out. She makes a plan of escape.
One day the man comes home complaining it's cold outside. The girl asks him to take a bag of coal to her poor old mother. She hides her sister in the bag with gold and silver, and covers her with coal. The man carries her home on his back; when he tries to peek inside the bag, the girl yells "I can see you!" and he thinks the youngest daughter is watching him. He carries the first two sisters home, and then the youngest hides herself in a bag, so all thee make it back to their mother safe and sound. When the man comes home to an empty house, he bursts into pebbles out of anger.

What makes it a feminist folktale?


A brave and clever girl does not only rescue herself, but also saves her sisters.
This tale is related to the Bluebeard and Mr. Fox stories. But while in those (ATU 312) the previous wives are killed, in this type (ATU 311) the heroine finds a way out of danger, and she also saves the other girls. This is the reason I especially like this story: it is very rare in European folktales to find sisters who don't compete, but rather help each other and work together. This is a very important element to highlight, in the context of all the "evil stepsister" and "kind and unkind girls" tales. Traditional tales have very few female friendships to begin with, or good sibling connections in general, so it's good to emphasize the rare exception.
I also love this version in particular because it doesn't feature a romantic element. In many variants the girls go off to marry a rich and handsome stranger, and the moral of the story is along the lines of "don't marry rich and handsome strangers" (which is also an important message, but also kind of makes it all the girls' fault). In this Danish story the girls get lost in the woods chasing a pig, and they only go to the man's home because they "can't find the way home." They go to his house for shelter, not (misguided) romance, and none of them become his lover or wife.


Things to consider

The English text calls the animal a pig; in Hungarian I often say "boar" or "wild pig" because the creature comes out of the woods, and because "pig" is also a pejorative term for a pervert (which in this case is not entirely unfounded).

Sources

Clara Stroebe: Danish Fairy Book (1922.)
Sven Grundtvig: Gamle danske minder i folkemunde (1854.)

Notes

Interestingly, the name of this tale type in English is Rescue by the sister, but in Hungarian we call it Girl-killer. In some versions the man does kill the first two girls, but their sister usually brings them back to life somehow.

Research behind the scenes: Sibling tales from India

I like to show my work, so here is another behind-the-scene post about a fun project.
I was invited by the Hopp Ferenc Museum of Asian Art to tell stories at their Raksha Bandhan Siblings Day event. It sounded like an exciting theme, and I do love museum gigs, so I decided to bring a whole new bouquet of stories. Building the program was an adventure.

Here is what I had to go on: I needed stories from INDIA, about SIBLINGS. Of course, the usual criteria still applied:
1. I only tell stories that I enjoy and am excited about
2. I needed to prepare stories for various age groups, since at a family event you never know who is going to show up
3. I had to fill 30 minutes with stories, multiplied by possible age groups that meant I needed to prepare 6-8 stories
4. I have a habit of bringing at least one new story to every gig, just to keep my repertoire fresh
5. And, of course, I wanted to focus on stories where siblings love and help each other, or at least are not binary good/evil and murderous

I started building the program by looking at my existing repertoire. I do have some tales from India (I love folktales from South Asia), so I ran through my index cards, and fished out some that fit the sibling theme. I found three, but two went into the "maybe" pile, because one only really featured one of the siblings, and the other I needed permission for. I concluded that I will need a lot more than that, therefore I began my usual drill of finding new folktales for a theme.




Step One: Buy a lottery ticket
Sometimes it is easier to find stories than one would think, especially if someone else has already done the legwork. So I put folktales from India about siblings into Google Books, and waited for a lucky find. While the search did not bring up a full collection, it did show me a book about sibling relations in cultures in India, as well as a folktale collection that had a "brothers and sisters" chapter. Both had Preview options, so I flipped through them, and filed some possible stories away for later research.

Step Two: Open, Sesame
Then came the key phrase search in Google Books. I typed in phrases that might lead to a folktale text I wanted: "loved his sister", "helped her brother", "helps her brother", "rescues her sister", etc. All in all four he/she combinations, past and present tenses, etc. (because "" tells Google to look for the exact phrase only). I opened all likely results in new tabs.

Step Three: Sifting for gold
One by one, I looked at the Google Books results. Did the book have Preview? If not, was it available in a digital format? I use JSTOR, HathiTrust, Archive.org, Gutenberg, Sacred Texts,and occasionally Kindle for these, and pray to get lucky, since here in Hungary I am cut off from free Inter-Library Loan (which is, frankly, painful). Wherever I could get a glimpse of parts of a story, I tried to guess if it would be worth investigating further; many common tale types are recognizable from a paragraph. I threw out tales where siblings killed or tortured each other - and also the ones where they... um, were a little too close.

Step Four: Back to the source
Because the book search only yielded limited results, it was time to get serious: Go and hit up the Thompson Motif Index. Luckily, it has a searchable version, where I could type in "brother" and "sister", and search for India in the results. Sisters got 301 hits, brothers got 346, but not all from India. I jotted down the numbers that sounded promising (H1151.18: Husband rescues wife's sister from box in an elephant's ear).

Step Five: Sources of sources
The Motif Index itself has the nasty habit of referencing other motif indexes. In the case of India, the source noted is usually the Thompson-Balys Indian Motif Index, which I was lucky enough to acquire while I was studying in the US. So, with the numbers I noted down, I turned to this other book, and looked up the motifs again, searching for the texts they cited. Once again I did the "is there a digital version?" rounds on the Internet. Wherever I got lucky, I finally had the chance to read the story itself, and see if I liked it.

[At this point, I have been researching for 6-7 hours, too bad they don't pay me by the hour for gigs]

Step Six: Story selection
Now that I havecombed through forty or fifty folktales, it was time to pick the ones that I liked best, and wanted to include in the program. There were some that I loved at first sight, some that were new and exciting versions of tale types I love (such as the Gold-spitting Prince), and some I selected because I loved the message of the story (portraying humans and animals as brothers). I even picked one that was probably too violent for kids, but I was intrigued by the dedicated friendship of two half-brothers, one human and one half-rakshasa, who killed monsters together. Slowly, the new story collection began to take shape. I felt like a pearl diver coming up from the deep with magical treasures.

Step Seven: Bringing the tales to life
Of course, this was only the beginning. In order to make a performance good, I had to learn, digest, embody, and color the stories for live telling. I researched all the cultural elements, strange words, flora and fauna in each tale, and read up on the regions they originated from. I was happy to notice that, without paying attention, I managed to pick tales from various different parts of India, showing wonderful cultural diversity. The rest was the fun part: Practice the stories, taste them, love them... and tell them.

Step Eight: The performance
As it usually happens, I prepared way more stories than I needed. In the end, I had time to tell two of them at the event, to a lovely, attentive audience of mostly adults and older children. It was raining that day, which is probably why we didn't get a lot of the smaller kids at the museum, but the storytelling worked out wonderfully. I told about a brother and a sister who set out to find Soma, a washerwoman with magical powers, to help break a curse on the girl, and crossed seven seas together, and then I told about two brothers, a human and a tiger, running a race to see who gets to live in cities. In this latter one, the strength and speed of the tiger was balanced out by the human's cleverness, and a little help for their third brother, who was a spirit. Both tales were fun to tell, and the audiences seemed to enjoy them.

All in a good day's work.

One of the tales had baby eagles