Thursday's Tale: Don Joseph Pear by Thomas Frederick Crane

Don Joseph Pear is a fairy tale from Italy. It is in Italian Popular Tales by Thomas Frederick Crane. I had never heard of this one before but thought it looked interesting.

Three brothers own a pear tree. They notice that someone keep picking their pears. So one by one the brothers stay over night by the tree. The first two fall asleep but the third one, Don Joseph, stays awake and catches a fox trying to steal their pears. The fox convinces Don Joseph to set her free and that she will have the king's daughter marry him.

Two times the fox hunts and brings a large amount of game to the King. He visits the king a third time and asks for a measure so the King will think Don Joseph is rich. 

Eventually Don Joseph marries the King's daughter and goes to live in castle that used to be owned by an Ogress. The fox kills the Ogress by convincing her to hide in the well when Don Joseph and the kingsmen ride up to the castle.

One day Don Joseph throws dust on the foxes head and the fox threatens to tell his wife everything. Don Joseph throws a clay pot at the fox killing her. Don Joseph is left with all of his riches and his wife after killing the fox who got it all for him.

This story was really fascinating. You can't help but feel bad for the fox in the end since she did all the work and Don Joseph just kills her and still gets to keep everything. It's frustrating when people who don't deserve things win them anyway. But that is how the real world works all the time. 

Thursday's Tales is hosted by CarolsNotebook. Feel free to join in and read a tale of your own!

Thursday's Tale: King and King by Linda De Haan and Stern Nijland

Being that it is banned book week I thought it would be appropriate to read a modern fairytale book that has been challenged/banned from schools. In King & King a young prince still has not married. Princesses from far and wide come to the castle. But the prince is not interested in any of them. Though the prince's page falls in love with the princess from Greenland. Soon all that is left is one Princess. Princess Madeleine enters with her brother Prince Lee. It is love at first sight. The prince has fallen in love with Prince Lee. They both exclaim "What a wonderful prince!". Soon they are married and all the rejected princess attend their wedding. At the end the two share a kiss.

Normally, I would read this book with my son. But as I read it this morning while he was still in school but I plan on reading it to him later. Why? Because we are an LGBT friendly family. This book has been challenged many times all because two princes fall in love and share a kiss. There is no propaganda to this book. It is a straight forward fairytale that just happens to feature two gay characters. I love that there are books out there that now for children that feature gay characters. I honestly wish there were more. As a society we need to get over our hatred for others.

Thursday's Tales is hosted by CarolsNotebook. Feel free to join in and read a tale of your own!

Thursday's Tale: The Wonderful Birch

Ok this tale was a wee bit...well messed up. This story is a Cinderella variant and you find a lot of similarities to the tale that we know. And then there are some really wacky things. This one was in Andrew Lang's The Red Fairy Book.

I don't even know how to summarize this tale as it is rather long. But basically a woman is turned into a sheep by a witch. The witch takes on the form of the woman. The witch has a daughter with the peasant woman's husband. The peasant woman had already had a daughter. The witch treats her daughter better than she treats her stepdaughter. The witch has the husband kill his wife who is in sheep form. Before the sheep is killed she warns her daughter not to eat any of her meat and to bury her bones. A birch tree grows where her bones were buried.

One day the prince holds a festival. The witch tries to keep her stepdaughter from going by throwing barley corns in the ashes. But the stepdaughter uses a branch from the birch tree and goes to the festival where the prince falls in love with her. At one point the witches daughter is gnawing on bones under the table and the prince kicks her thinking she is a dog. Her arm breaks. When the stepdaughter goes to leave her ring is left on the latch of the door because the prince has smeared it with tar.

Basically after that the stepmother twice more tries to keep her away from the prince. She throws milk and she throws hemp seed among the cinders but the stepdaughter used birch branch both times. She also gets her circlet and her golden slipper stuck in tar left by the prince. The witches daughter is again kicked twice more. Once breaking her leg the other time knocking her eye out.

Like in the regular Cinderella story the prince uses the object left behind to find the maiden. However the witch pares away at her daughter to make the items fit. The prince was ashamed of his strange bride and when he was about to take her away the stepdaughter ran up to him and asked him not to rob her of her silver and gold.  The prince then uses the witches daughter as a bridge so they can cross a river. The witches daughter wishes that a golden hemlock would grow out of her body so that her mother would recognize her.

From there the stepdaughter has a baby the witch hearing about it thinks it is her own daughter but then finds out it is not. She turns the stepdaughter into a reindeer and sends her own daughter in her stepdaughter's place. The baby is restless and finally the prince finds out that the witch turned his wife into a reindeer. He is told to burn her skin she takes it off. Eventually they live happily ever after.

Thursday's Tales is hosted by CarolsNotebook. Feel free to join in and read a tale of your own!

Thursday's Tale: The Gingerbread Man

This week I decided to break out a book I had from when I was a baby. This was a Little Golden Book illustrated by the famous Richard Scarry....The Gingerbread Man. We all know that chant "Run run run as fast as you can. You can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man." In fact when my son was a toddler I used to say that to him and he would be off and running. Giggling cause he knew I was about to scoop him up and give him tons of tickles and hugs.

The Gingerbread Man tells the tale of a woman baking a gingerbread man who comes to life. He runs past her and many others who give chase. A kindly fox offers to help the Gingerbread Man cross the river. This of course is a trick and the fox eats the up the goodie.

I fondly remember this book and it was fun to go back and read it. I probably haven't read it in 30 years. I've heard many different versions of the gingerbread boy/man. Also who can forget Gingy from Shrek. All I know is right now I could go for a piece of gingerbread.

Thursday's Tales are hosted by CarolsNotebook. Stop by and see what she has read this week or better yet join in and read your own tale this week.

Thursday's Tale: In Search of the Magic Lake

Image by Rusty Clark

This week I decided to go with a South American tale. This one comes from an Incan folktale in Ecuador. I can't remember ever having heard an Incan folktale before. So this one was a first for me (or at least I think it is).

A young girl named Ampata lives with her poor farming family. One day her brothers set out in search of the magic lake. The Sun King's son is very sick and the only thing that will heal him is the water from the magic lake which is at the end of the world. The Sun King has declared that anyone who brings back the healing water will join the royal family. The two brothers give up after climbing over mountain after mountain after mountain. The scoop up some water and try to deceive the Sun King. But the court magician has a flask that will only hold the magic water. When the water desolves the brothers are found to be frauds and thrown in jail.

Ampata decides she is going to try and find the magic lake. One day she shares some of her food with two macaw's. Once they find out about her mission the two macaws reward her kindness with three magic feathers. The feathers will transport her anywhere she wants. She uses the feathers to transport to the magic lake. There she encounters a swarm of army ants, a poisonous snake and a scorpion. All three foes are vanquished by the fan of feathers. When she arrives back to the Sun King he offers her to join the family. Instead she asks for more land and cattle for her family. She also asks for the release of her two brothers, which the king grants. Eventually she ends up marrying the prince after many years of visiting the castle and becoming friends with him.

I liked that in this folktale a young girl is the hero. I also like that instead of just joining the royal she wants to stay with her family and she asks for things that would make them successful without just sitting around. They still will be working but they have the means now to survive. I really want to check out some more Incan stories. This one was just so different.

Thursday's Tales are hosted by CarolsNotebook. Stop by and see what she has read this week or better yet join in and read your own tale this week.

Thursday Tales: Johnny Appleseed

Since it is almost the fourth of July I decided to go with an american folk tale- Johnny Appleseed. It seems appropriate as many an American will be consuming a slice of apple pie this weekend. As a child I remember watching the Disney Johnny Appleseed cartoon more times than I can count. I watch an opening clip of the cartoon on Youtube and it brought me right back to being a kid.  A time when I would be sipping a glass of milk while thickly slathering peanut butter onto apple slices and humming along to the catchy tunes they sang.





Johnny Appleseed was actually a real person. John Chapman lived in the late 1700's- early 1800's. According to Wikipedia he " was an American pioneer nurseryman who introduced apple trees to large parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, as well as the northern counties of present day West Virginia. He became an American legend while still alive, due to his kind, generous ways, his leadership in conservation, and the symbolic importance he attributed to apples".

Apparently, Johnny Appleseed is always portrayed as just randomly throwing around appleseeds but the truth is that he developed nurseries and earned a profit from them. Also most of his apples were not suitable for eating but rather they were used to make alcohol. That's definitely something Disney failed to mention. Also it seems ironic as he was a devoutly religious man. He was a missionary for The New Church.



Thursday's Tales are hosted by CarolsNotebook. Stop by and see what she has read this week or better yet join in and read your own tale this week.

Thursday's Tale: The Pen and the Inkwell by Hans Christian Anderson

So I wasn't sure what I was going to pick this week for Thursday's Tale. I wasn't prepared at all this week so I just randomly chose a Hans Christian Anderson tale. This is one I have never heard of before and it was a nice short one.

The Pen and Inkwell is basically a tale that starts with the inkwell boasting about what comes from him. That wonderful poems etc are written from the ink drawn from him. The pen then boasts that he is actually one that causes such wonderful things as he is the instrument that writes them. The inkwell points out that he has been there forever and that he has seen many a pen. Soon the writer comes home after attending a violin performance and decides to write because he is filled with inspiration. He writes not about the bow or the violin nor really the man who performed but about the higher power that inspired the man to perform.

So obviously this one is a religious tale. About praising and recognizing that God is the one that creates all things. Even as an agnostic I can understand where this was coming from. Though of course in my belief it is the man not the instruments nor a god who creates such beauty.

I did like the back and forth between the pen and the inkstand. I found it amusing how they boasted to each other and called each other names. The names of course were not bad but basically things like "ink pitcher" and "writing-stick". Which of course is the most simplest way of explaining what they are and thereby simplifies them. Did that make sense?


Thursday's Tales are hosted by CarolsNotebook. Stop by and see what she has read this week or better yet join in and read your own tale this week.

Thursdays Tale: Fixed Fairy Tales- The Princess and the Pea

Ok so I know I'm not the only one who notices in our modern age just how messed up some fairy tales are. Some are not just gruesome but just plain horrible. Well, I came across this youtube series by HISHE Kids called Fixed Fairy Tales. And guess what? It is down right funny

I checked out The Princess and the Pea. A fairly harmless story on the surface. Princess shows up at a castle one stormy night. The prince's mother not believing she is truly a princess places a pea under 20 mattresses. The princess can't sleep all night long. The prince rejoices and the two are happily married.

You'll have to watch the video to see not only just what is wrong with that tale but how they decided to fix this dated tale. I can't wait to check out more of their Fixed Fairy Tales.


Thursday's Tales are a weekly feature over at CarolsNotebook.

Thursday's Tale: Clever Grethel (Gretel) by Brothers Grimm

Thursday's Tales are hosted by CarolsNotebook. I'm just a tagger on joining her in reading tall tales, fairy-tales and retellings every Thursday.

Today's tale is one I have not seen nor heard before. Clever Gretel is the story of a cook who likes to drink. And when she drinks she likes to eat. Her master has a guest coming over and the guest is very late. Her master leaves to fetch the guest and Gretel decides to have herself a drink. One drink leads to another and then to another and soon she is eating the two chickens that were meant for her master and his guest. But Gretel is clever and when her master comes back she tells him she will serve up the food promptly. Meanwhile the guest shows up and clever Gretel tells the guest to hurry away because her master wants to cut his ears off. She then tells her master that the guest ran off with the chickens leaving the master to run off after the guest begging for one of the chickens but the guest of course thinks the master is begging to cut off one of his ears.


I have to say I actually laughed when I read this one. It was a unique tale that had a great twist of an ending. I had not realized that there was any humor at all in the Grimm stories. I really enjoyed this one and hope I can find other "clever" tales like this one.