User blog:NibiruMul/Forgotten fairy tale collection reviews, part 5

I know it's been six months since I've reviewed an old fairy tale collection, but I've finally come across another worthy of reviewing. I remember reading a Spanish fairy tale called The Princess Bella-Flor in The Orange Fairy Book, and I found that the source was an author named Fernan Caballero. (Despite the masculine-sounding name, Fernan Caballero was actually a woman. It was a pseudonym - her real name was Cecilia.) Andrew Lang also used two of her other stories (The Knights of the Fish and The Bird of Truth) in her collection. I figured I'd try to find her collection online, and surely enough, I found the whole thing. The book I found is called The Bird of Truth and Other Fairy Tales. The original collection was published during Caballero's lifetime, but this English translation came out after her death.

The collection isn't too big - only 33 stories are contained within it. These stories are based on Spanish folklore - most of them originated in Andalusia in southern Spain. The stories really do reflect it, especially the strong Catholic influence (I am Catholic myself, albeit a nonpracticing Catholic, so this tends to be a bonus for me!). But, as one may expect, my opinions on the stories depend on the specific story.

First we'll look at The Bird of Truth. This story is a variant of Madame d'Aulnoy's Princess Belle-Etoile. This variant involves twins instead of triplets, and the villains are a witch and wicked courtiers. Overall, the wording is somewhat similar to Andrew Lang's version, and the basic plot is exactly the same. I quite enjoyed this story.

The Princess Bella-Flor is in here too, under the title Fair-Flower. (She is called Bella-Flor in the original Spanish version.) This version was a bit different from Lang's. In this one, Jose (here called Joseph) is the older brother rather than the younger brother. I'm not sure which one is correct (as per Victorian custom, this translation isn't a direct translation of Caballero's Spanish version and has the grossest parts taken out) - I can't really account for this discrepancy. I liked it, but I think I prefer Lang's version.

Now we're moving on to the other stories. The first of these is a story called The Girl who Wanted Three Husbands. This one was pretty good - it's about a girl with three suitors who will only marry the one with the rarest gift. The gifts in the story are a mirror, a phial of balsam, and a boat. The three men come home to find the girl dead, but they revive her with the gifts they bought. The girl then declares that she must marry all three of them. The story simply ends there - it does not reveal which suitor she ends up picking. I kinda thought that was interesting how it just stops there.

Another good story we encounter is The Foolish Wolf and the Shrewd Fox. This story is clearly a variant of the Brothers Grimm story Cat and Mouse in Partnership, only it's less graphic. The stars of the story are a she-wolf and a vixen - I like that this is an animal fairy tale about female animals since most of them seem to star male animals. This one actually made me laugh a bit. The wolf brings home some honey, which she is saving for a banquet, but the fox wants the honey for herself. One day, the fox tells the wolf she is going to a christening, only to go steal some honey. She goes back and tells the wolf that the child's name was Commencement. She repeats this twice, with the next name being Moiety and the last Finis. Eventually, the wolf realizes that the fox stole all her honey. After arguing, the two then decide to take a nap - the fox wakes up and covers the wolf in honey. Pretty good story - and at least no one gets eaten!

Another story in this collection is A Tale of Taradiddles. It's about a dishonest princess who will not marry anyone unless he is a better liar than her. A shepherd is able to make a better lie than her, but as he had told one truth, the princess doesn't marry him, but she does make him the editor of the gazette. I liked this story a lot too. Nice to see a somewhat non-traditional hero reward.

Now here comes a story I didn't like. It's called The Tribulations of a Cobbler. It's about a grouchy cobbler named Uncle Hormazo who is humiliated by others. This did seem interesting at first, but the extremely heavy-handed religious message really ruined it, not to mention the anti-Semitic language used in the story. (Sadly, anti-Semitism can be found in some fairy tales. It appears in numerous European and Middle Eastern fairy tales - even the Brothers Grimm's collection contains three anti-Semitic stories.) On top of that, nobody in the story was likable or interesting, not even Hormazo's daughter Mariquita. I hate to say it, but I actually hated this story. It's not too often that I say I hate a fairy tale. Still, I know I shouldn't let one bad story ruin an entire collection. I recommend skipping this one.

Immediately following The Tribulations of a Cobbler is The Little Ant, which is much better than the previous story. It's about a virtuous ant. She has two ladles, a small one and a large one. She looks for a husband, and after several failed attempts, marries a ratonperez (which is a little grey insect, although I still don't know which insect exactly). The two live together happily until one day, when the ant is going to church, she tells her husband to use the large ladle when cooking. However, the ratonperez uses the small ladle, The ratonperez falls into the stew. When the ant comes home, she finds him dead and mourns him. Other animals, a fountain, and even a human princess, mourn him too, doing stuff such as breaking their beak (in the case of a bird) and breaking a pitcher (in the case of the princess). All in all, a sad ending, but still an interesting story!

The Hunchback is another story I liked, although it is a bit creepy and the princess in it is very unlikable. It's a variant of Giambattista Basile's The Flea, although it's also somewhat similar to the Brothers Grimm's Allerleirauh. It's about a spoiled princess who is given a flea by a hunchbacked beggar whom she refused to help. She makes the flea grow by feeding it milk. Then she has it killed and has its skin made into a drum. She will only marry the guy who correctly guesses what animal her drum is made of. She sees a prince she particularly likes and calls out to him telling what her drum is made of. The beggar overhears her, guesses correctly, and her angry father forces her to marry the beggar. As it turns out, when the beggar orders his new wife to carry him across the river, his body falls apart (I'm guessing he's some kind of demon) and his hump attaches to the princess. The wretched hump mimics her every word, so she vows silence. She ends up working in her beloved prince's kingdom as a maidservant. The prince is planning to marry another princess. While she is preparing the cakes for the wedding, She asks the hump if it wants a cake. After the hump replies, she seizes it and destroys it. She rushes to put on her finest clothes and confesses her love for the prince. He marries her instead of the other princess. I don't think the story's heroine really deserved the prince, but oh well...

Another story I liked was The Promise, which is about a woman who has a son that she must give up to the Evil One when he is fourteen. When that day comes, the boy tries to escape his fate. He is assisted by the Evil One's daughter, and eventually the boy is successfully freed. This story is kinda similar to The Sunchild from The Grey Fairy Book.

The Fairy Hen is the next story in the collection. It's very short - it literally takes up only one page. It's about a woman with a black hen that gives her an egg every day. One day, the hen stops giving the woman eggs, and the woman denies the hen food as punishemnt. The hen tells her owner that she was not born to lay eggs and get no food, and she escapes. The woman then realizes the hen was a fairy sent to teach her a lesson about being greedy. I think the story had a pretty nice moral.

Towards the end of the book is a long story called Moro's Ears, which stars a priest named Don Toribio and his acolyte Pedro. I thought that was a pretty interesting to have a priest as a main character in a fairy tale. Unfortunately, the story was rather jumbled, so it was kind of hard to follow.

All in all, I consider this collection average as far as fairy tale collections go. I kinda wish it had more stories about princes and princesses - but then again, sometimes it's refreshing to get away from them. It was definitely a good source of animal stories. Unfortunately, I don't think this collection is for everyone. People who aren't religious might find the overt Catholicism to be too much - I would definitely say this is one of the most overtly religious fairy tale collections that I've read. As I've stated, most of the stories are from Andalusia, which is one of the most religious areas in all of Western Europe. The collection doesn't really represent the whole of Spain since the stories are overwhelmingly Andalusian, so it would be better to look to other Spanish fairy tale collectors for stories from other parts of Spain. On the plus side, it did teach me a lot about Andalusian folklore. Where I live, a lot of people don't know much about Spain and many people confuse it with Latin America (which is a major pet peeve of mine). But I would definitely recommend reading this collection!

Here's a link to the book: https://books.google.com/books?id=hBYCAAAAQAAJ&pg=PP5&lpg=PP5&dq=fernan+caballero+fairy+tales&source=bl&ots=i_gMFXmJF3&sig=RaS-2EAClA1fomeOYKoN0qVkap4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiKgZSnu6PMAhUKWj4KHZgtBoYQ6AEIMTAE#v=onepage&q=fernan%20caballero%20fairy%20tales&f=false