Homeschooling Notes: International Folk Tales

Topic tag: Homeschooling.

Somehow I’ve become the folk tales guy at the Homeschool Hub.

Well, I know how. Kids like stories, and as an experienced lecturer, memorizing one and telling it is pretty easy for me. Also, since most of us homeschool parents already deliver “three R’s” curriculum on our own, it’s good to have the Hub classes be something a little more fun.

But I do take folk tales seriously. I think there’s value in cultural heritage and continuity. Westerners ought to know at least the basic outlines of Homer, and Americans ought to recognize the names of John Henry and Paul Bunyan. That’s one reason I did three renditions of my American Folk Tales class.

With those under our belt, I thought it worth expanding their horizons with International Folk Tales.

For each class in this session, I introduced a country or people, talked about their location and language (giving some vocabulary words), told a few stories, then had them do a related activity. Here’s what we covered.

We started by finding Ireland on the map, then covered some words of Irish:

• Hello = Dia dhuit (dee-uh gwit)

• Goodbye = Slán (slawn)

• Storyteller = Seanachie (shan-a-khee)

Then we turned to stories of Finn McCool (Fionn mac Cumhaill). There are several varieties. Some tales make him out to be a giant, others a normal-sized warrior-hero. I split the difference by describing him as a normal person who eventually grew into a giant.

We started with the story of the Salmon of Knowledge. I told a quick version that skipped over Finn’s ancestry and stuff about kings and druids. Young Finn was a student to the wise Finegas, who had long sought to eat the magical salmon and absorb the knowledge it carried. Finegas finally succeeds in catching the salmon, but while cooking it he needed to run off to the latrine, leaving Finn to tend the frying pan. Finn gets some hot grease on his thumb, which he instinctively puts in his mouth—and boom, Finn is full of knowledge, though he can only access it by biting his thumb.

Then I described how Finn grew into a hero, leading his band of Fianna, the protectors and peacekeepers in old Eire. I illustrated with a quick version of his encounter with the Fire-breather of Tuath de Danaan, in which he used a magic spear to defeat a monster that burned down villages.

Funny thing about Finn, I said, is he kept growing all his life, and eventually became a giant. This was the segue to the story of the Giant’s Causeway.

I began by introducing the Causeway with pictures. Then I told a version of the story where Finn gets into an argument with the Scottish giant Benandonner, and they build the causeway to meet and settle things. An idle bite on his thumb reveals to Finn that this giant is too much for him to handle, so he turns to his clever wife Oonagh. She dresses him as an enormous baby and tricks Benandonner into fleeing back to Scotland.

I cobbled together Finn stories from various sources, including the Wikipedia article, James Stephens’s Irish Fairy Tales, this Youtube video on Finn and the Fiana, this Youtube version of the Giant’s Causeway story, and another version in Julek Heller’s book Giants. See also Harold F. Hughes, Legendary Heroes of Ireland.

After the Finn stories, I told one of my daughter’s favorites: “Hudden and Dudden and Donald O’Neary” (in some versions, “O’Leary”). It’s the story of a farmer bullied by his greedy neighbors. Through a deft series of tricks, he increases his fortune and brings their comeuppance. The kids found it amusing.

I already had it half-memorized from reading my kids the version edited by Joseph Jacobs in Collier’s Young Folks Shelf of Books, Vol.2, Once Upon a Time. There’s also a version by this Irish storyteller on Youtube.

The activity was based on the craft project in this video where kids make their own Giant’s Causeway with construction paper. I cut out multiple colors of paper octagons and hexagons for them beforehand, so each had a pile of them to work with. They then pasted them on construction paper to make their own Causeway. I told them to draw a scene from the story on top of that and got many cool pictures of giants fighting (and in one case, surfing).

After finding Korea on the map, we introduced vocabulary:

• Hello = Annyeong haseyo (안녕하세요)

• Thank you = Gamsa hamnida (감사합니다)

• Frog = Kaeguri (개구리)

• Rabbit = Tokki (토끼)

For stories, we began with “The Green Frog” (청 개구리 ). It’s about a young frog who habitually disobeys his mother. Because he always does the exact opposite of what she asks, his mother requests that he bury her down by the river rather than up on the hill. But after she dies, in his grief, he decides to finally listen to her. Thus he buries her by the river, where every rain threatens to wash her bones away. So, whenever it rains, the green frog cries, reminding children to obey their mothers.

It’s a dour lesson about filial piety. To lighten the mood, we turned to a more humorous trickster tale: “The Rabbit’s Liver” (토끼의 간). A turtle finds a rabbit on the beach and tells him the Sea King is in trouble and needs his help. The rabbit follows him down to the halls of the Sea King, only to learn that the Sea King wants to eat his liver. The quick-thinking rabbit agrees but says that his liver is so valuable he doesn’t carry it on him and has left it back at home in a box. He is taken back to the surface to get it, and so makes his escape.

Next, I introduced the dokkaebi, magical creatures of Korean folklore. The word is sometimes translated into English as “goblin,” but in behavior they’re more like the “fair folk” of European tales. Our dokkeabi story was “The Man with the Lump” (혹부리 영감). In this one, there’s a kindly man who is disfigured by a big lump on his face. Some dokkaebi hear him singing to comfort himself during a frightful storm. Believing the lump on his face is the source of the song, they remove it from him. A similarly disfigured but much less pleasant man hears of this, and tries to replicate the feat, with disastrous results.

I assume it’s convergent evolution, but there’s a near identical Spanish tale about a hunchback named Tonino and his encounter with faeries (which I found in the Young Folks Shelf of Books, Vol.2, Once Upon a Time).

See also “The Goblins’ Club,” another dokkaebi story with a similar structure.

For an activity, we made a banmangi (방망이), the magical club of the dokkaebi. The simplest method, useful for little kids and if you’re wrangling a large number of them, is just to have them roll up a large rectangular piece of paper into a funnel shape. Then tape the wide end shut so it looks somewhat rounded or squared. Then use glue to decorate the club with craft pom poms.

If you want something a little more elaborate, make a tube with paper and wrap it with aluminum foil, then add the pom poms.

Kids like clubs!

We started with the observation that this batch of tales isn’t from a particular country, but from a particular people. After a brief account of the Jewish diaspora and the Yiddish language, we introduced some terms like:

• Peace be upon you / hello = Sholem-aleykhem

• Thank you = A dank

• Oh no! / Oh dear! = Oy vey!

The kids requested funny stories, so I started off with a series of fool tales. The Wise Men of Chelm stories are short and goofy, so instead of elaborating, I went through them quickly in the manner of a comedy routine:

“Boy, the people in Chelm are foolish. How foolish are they? Once they were building a new synagogue, and had just dug up the dirt for the foundation. ‘Where do we put the dirt?’ the men ask. Then someone gets the idea: ‘Let’s dig another hole to put it in.’”

At this point, several kids shout out why this is a dumb idea.

“Yes, and a few of those men of Chelm pointed this out. ‘What will we do with the dirt from that other hole?’ they asked. But then they settled on the solution: ‘We’ll dig a third hole, and put all the dirt in there!’”

Then came the story of how they tried to protect the poor box from thieves by hanging it from the ceiling of the synagogue, only to build a staircase to it so the poor could reach it. After that, I told story of when the men saw the full moon reflected in a water barrel and tried to seal the barrel to capture it.

But the most foolish fool of all the fools, I told them, was young Kushim. The tale of “Manners and Foolish Kushim” is about a boy who can never manage the socially appropriate response to any situation: He offers cheerful greeting to the funeral procession, condolences to the wedding procession, and congratulations to the people whose house is burning.

To balance out all the fools, we then turned to “The Clever Girl,” in which our protagonist brings good fortune to her father and herself by answering a nobleman’s riddles: Thus she arrives at his castle neither clothed nor naked, neither walking nor riding, bearing a gift that is not a gift.

Finally, we covered that supernatural classic, “The Golem of Prague.” There are many variations, but the core narrative is that a rabbi wants to protect the Jewish Quarter from attack, so creates a giant out of clay and animates him with magic. The giant is a mighty defender, until the rabbi forgets to deactivate him on the Sabbath, causing him to go berserk.

I got most of my stories from Yiddish Folk Tales edited by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich. There’s also Wise Men of Chelm stories online at My Jewish Learning and some more at Commentary.

The activity for this one was to make their own golem, or anything they liked, out of sculpting clay.

Next on the list were the Anansi tales from West Africa. We found West Africa on a map, and then focused on the country of Ghana and the Akan language:

• Welcome = Akwaaba (ah-KWAH-bah)

• Good morning = Maakye (MAA-chyeh)

• Listen! = Tie!

I then introduced Anansi the spider, a trickster in the vein of Coyote and Br’er Rabbit.

Our first story was “Anansi and Turtle.” Turtle pops in for supper. According to hospitality customs, Anansi can’ t refuse—but he can trick Turtle into running back and forth to the river to wash his hands while Anansi scarfs the food on his own. The Turtle later pays him back with a similar trick. It’s much like Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Stork.” I got this one from Susan Wise Bauer’s The Story of The World: Volume 1, Ancient Times.

Next came “Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock.” Our spider finds a strange rock in the jungle, and whenever anyone stands near it and says, “what a strange moss-covered rock!” they pass out. He uses this to trick other animals and steal their food, until once again getting hoisted by his own petard. The technique for telling this one is to sell the physical comedy of animals passing out.

Then there’s “Anansi Searches for Food.” It’s similar to Aesop’s fable about the picky heron. During a time of famine, Anansi searches for something to eat. At every village he encounters magical talking food, but is curious about whether there’s better food at the next village on the horizon—and so he proceeds to pass up one meal after another until he finds himself back where he started, hungry. This is another from Bauer’s The Story of The World: Volume 1, Ancient Times.

The final tale was “How Anansi Brought Stories to Earth.” Now our intrepid spider has a wife who advises him and a son who assists him in capturing various fierce creatures with creative tricks. In return, the sky god gives him a mysterious box that turns out to be full of all the stories of the world.

Nothing especially creative for an activity on this day: I just handed out paper and crayons and let them draw. There were some good pictures of Anansi.

I wanted to round out the session with tales from South America. I leaned into the diversity of the place and introduced three languages: Spanish, Portugues, and Quechua.

• Hello = Hola

• Hello = Olá

• Hello = Rimaykullayki (ree-my-kool-LYE-kee)

Our first story was from Brazil: “How Night Came from the Sea,” from the book of that name by Mary-Joan Gerson. Long ago, the daughter of a sea goddess married into the people of the land. She was happy, for a time, but the never-ending light and heat of day made her weary. No one on land had ever heard of night, but her loving husband agrees to send for a bag of the stuff from under the sea.

Next was a flood narrative from Peru: “The Crying Llama.” A man gets annoyed when his seemingly picky llama won’t graze in the wonderful field he found, only to find out that the llama is upset over impending doom. Following the llama’s warning, man and beast scale a mountain just in time to avoid drowning in a deluge that covers the fields all around.

Finally, another Peruvian tale: “The Condor’s Wife.” A condor falls in love with a woman tending her flocks and takes her up into the mountains to be his bride. Things don’t go well—even though the woman grows some feathers, she can’t survive on a condor’s diet. Meanwhile, her mother misses her and enlists the aid of a parrot to bring her home.

For an activity, I printed out sheets with various South American animals on them. We talked about what the animals were and what they were like, and I asked them to cut out the images, or copy them by drawing, and make their own nature scenes.

And thus ended another session at the Hub. My next challenge is teaching introductory Korean.

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