Beston - The Marvelous Dog and the Wonderful Cat (part 2 of 3) - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

The first part of our story ended last week with the old wizard bidding goodbye to his wonderful pets who want to see the world.  You may remember he taught at an academy much like Hogwarts until quarreling with the school's Lord High Chancellor, the wizard Zadoc.  The old enchanter gave his pets a year's rent to give to the Fairy Jocapa and said it would take them over all the kingdoms of the whole wide world.

There are no further illustrations than the story's title illustration, but the book's illustrator, Maurice E. Day, gave the book endpapers showing an adventure representing the stories in Henry B. Beston's The Twilight Fairy Book. 

I'll insert one photo to illustrate something in the story, but now let's journey on with the dog and cat.

Our dog and cat are walking into a trap and it's with the very wizard who ruined their master.  Our final episode in this story includes a Wizard's Duel, so be sure to catch next week's conclusion.  In the meantime, this coming Monday, February 26, is Tell a Fairy Tale Day, so go to 6 Ways to Celebrate Tell a Fairy Tale Day  for some festive ideas as it's good to enjoy fairy tales then or any day. 

***************

This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!

Beston - The Marvelous Dog and the Wonderful Cat - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

This past week began the Year of the Dog for Chinese New Year.  A whole year deserves a story, but what cat will permit a dog getting more attention?  They are both here.  This is a fairly long story, so I will split it into three weeks. (Phew!  That gets me past the insanity of Sister Act the Musical, but I still would love for you to catch the show.)

While the use of fairies in 1919, when the book was published, may be less popular today, the sorcerers in this story are very important, in addition to the animals.  I think lovers of Harry Potter books, by the final segment, will find it includes magic enough to satisfy the faculty of Hogwarts.  (Yes, that's a hint to pay attention to the wizards.)  Also this comes in time for Tell a Fairy Tale Day 2018 on Monday, February 26. 

Back in 2013, when I started the Keeping the Public in Public Domain segments, I included that first year a story from Henry Beston's The Firelight Fairy Book.  Because the blog format puts the most recent post first, I want to post again this link to Theodore Roosevelt Junior.  The son of President Roosevelt (who was famous in his own life) wrote a Foreword worth reading and reminding us of the child inside every "grown-up"and how this book has been favorably received and "universally acclaimed" by his own and other people's children.  (Also nowadays I don't try to do two pages at a time, which I hope makes it easier to read.  Because the book is old, any slight movements of the pages is not pushed down to avoid damage to the original book.)

 

The adventure has begun!  The Year of the Dog has begun, too.  Come back to see more next week in preparation for Tell a Fairy Tale Day.
****************

This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!

Trugg says 2018 is here!

We're solidly into the New Year, but Saturday, January 6 is the 12th Day of Christmas or Epiphany.  My puppeteer colleague, David Quesal, and his "monster", Trugg, send this message.

This is Trugg

For some enjoyable videos of David and his Puppet Troupe, check out his YouTube videos.  I especially loved his fairy tale mash-up, A Fairy Tale of Errors, and gladly would recommend it to groups looking at ways to creatively use several folk tales to create a new story.  Just as with "Fractured Fairy Tales" it's important to know the original.  In this case it could be considered a look at what might happen after the tale ends or "and they all lived happily ever after...NOT!"  Whether intended or not, David follows the same sort of "down the garden path" in the musical "Into the Woods." 

I'm looking at a rapidly filling "dance card" of commitments, including a local residency with an adult special education class creating a puppet show and video version of Snow White.  Since the aim of the production is performance for preschool classes, it will be interesting to see how the group chooses to balance the original story's repeated efforts by the queen to kill Snow White and also its ending with a rather gruesome execution of her with Bruno Bettelheim's view of the necessity to recognize such evil exists and the need to show justice when it is punished.  Just as with this past year's Young Writers program, it will be in the hands of the students and they create their version of the story.  The fact that those young writers only created as much as they could handle was part of the solution with another grisly Grimm tale.  That Bettelheim label takes you to, among other posts, my earlier consideration of how to approach it. 

Interestingly enough two Caldecott award Honor books each chose to include the traditional ending. You may choose to look for yourself at the 1938 book by author/illustrator, Wanda Ga'g, known for her accurate translations of Grimm.  Wikipedia offers a very brief article saying she was approached to do a version more faithful to the original after the success of the 1937 Disney film.  The book's critical reception focused on the visual  way Ga'g handled it, but that is precisely the focus for Caldecott awards as long as the book is considered worthy.  Also worth noting, prior to 1971 an Honor book was called a "runner-up", with all previous books in that category changed to the new term. 

If you dismiss that book as coming from an earlier time, look at the 1972 version translated by poet and author, Randall Jarrell , who also translated a few other Grimm tales.  It, too, retains those same elements possibly considered too mature or troublesome.  This version won the Caldecott Honor award for illustrator, Nancy Ekholm Burkert.  While Caldecott awards require a text of merit, the award goes to the illustrator (although it never hurts the book's sales for its status).  This is her most celebrated work, but she has won more recently the Boston Globe-Horn Book award for Valentine and Orson and was recognized by the Wisconsin Library Association as a Wisconsin Notable Author.  She will be 95 in mid-February, so this will probably remain her best known work although not all she illustrated.  It's worth prowling reviews, even the positive ones, to notice how some view the ages able to handle the queen and also her ending.


Over all of this lurks the 1937 Disney version.  No less than the Library of Congress cites its value as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" when placing it into the National Film Registry and it's among the American Film Institute's 100 greatest American films, going even further by naming it the greatest American animated film of all time (2008).  Whether we like Disneyfication of literature or not, it is a fact that this first feature length film by the Disney Studios has influenced how the story is viewed.  The dwarfs are not named nor all given personalities in the original tale.  Their comic value is important to the film's tone although a lot of the suggested gags, while developing the movie, were dropped.  Disney even paid $5 per suggested gag in that early stage.  Reading the previously mentioned Wikipedia article shows the same type of planning the students will need to consider.  They will be seeing the film.  Much as I personally love the movie's songs, we'll not be tempted to use them because of copyright royalties.  The movie was a critical and long-time economic success.  Beyond that, I think the Library of Congress is correct in considering it of significant value to our culture.  Growing up with Little Golden books, here's their children's book using the film version.

I think it's safe to say that almost every American grew up with this version of the story and a great many haven't a clue that the original story is so dark.  Now the trick is to gauge how much of the original is appropriate to a preschooler or, possibly more importantly, a preschooler's parent...remember those review comments mentioned in the Jarrell/Burkert edition.

We should have our script ready by National Tell a Fairy Tale Day and working on puppet, scenery, and prop creation.  This year's NTaFT day falls on a Monday, since February 26 is the celebration date.  Mondays are when this group will work on their production.  I hope they also choose to celebrate Fairy Tales and grow from this project.

Croker - Flory Cantillon's Funeral - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

February 26 is the international "Tell a Fairy Tale Day", also it's time to get ready for any Irish storytelling during the month of St. Patrick, so this is a wee bit earlier than my usual Saturday posting.  Added to that, this story is probably one of the spookiest tales of the merfolk, both mermaids and mermen.  I needed also sea songs as part of what I was working on and this fit the bill, but that song they sing in this story is most likely the Requiem song of "Dies Irae" -- which translates as "Day of Wrath."

Enjoy!

 

Back in March of 2014 I posted another story that would pair well with this story, a long-time favorite of mine, "The Wonderful Tune" also collected by Thomas Crofton Croker.

Have fun with both!
******************
This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  


At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.    

There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I recommended it earlier and want to continue to do so.  He has just loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so one can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression he likes by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

He also loaded to his server the doctorate thesis of Prof. Dov Noy (Neunan) "Motif-index of Talmudic-Midrahic literature" Indiana University, 1954, as a PDF file.

http://folkmasa.org/motiv/NOY_%20Dov_%20Motif-Index_of_Talmudic-Midrashic_Literature.pdf

in the hope that some of you would make use of it.

You can see why that is a site I recommend to you.

Have fun discovering even more stories!