Not One Damsel in Distress: World Folktales for Strong Girls

  Masha heard what he said and called out from the basket in a far-away voice, “I see you, Bear! Don’t sit on that stump. And don’t eat any of my pies. Carry them on to Babushka and Dedushka without fail!”

  Bear looked around and then looked far behind him. But he couldn’t see Masha or the oak where he believed she was spying. In fact, bears have very bad eyesight, so it’s not surprising.

  “Dear me,” he said strictly to himself, “what sharp eyes Masha must have. She sees everything.”

  Bear lumbered to his feet and went up another hill. Then he crossed another river. He said as he climbed up the bank, “I must rest again. And this time I will have a pie.”

  But Masha heard him and called out again, “I see you, Bear. Don’t you rest and don’t you eat a pie!”

  Bear muttered, “How clever little Masha is, so far away but still able to see and hear everything I do. I’d better get to her grandparents’ house and give them the pies. Perhaps they will let me have some tea from the samovar, and a bite of pie.” And then he added, chuckling, which was hardly distinguishable from his growl, “Perhaps I’ll bite them, too!”

  “Beware, Bear,” called Masha from the basket. “I heard you even as far away as this tree. If the gods don’t curse you, I may.”

  Bear shuddered and went on, faster than before.

  At last he came to the village. From Masha’s description of the house, he knew when he’d gotten to the right place. Raising his left front paw—​for his right was now aching from a thorn between two claws—​he knocked on the door.

  Bangity-bangity-bang!

  Then he shouted, “Babushka! Dedushka! I’ve brought something from your granddaughter Masha.” His voice was mostly growl, but the words were still quite understandable.

  The commotion raised the town dogs, and then they smelled the bear. They rushed out of every door and every kennel, yelping and howling and woofing. This so discombobulated Bear that he dropped the heavy basket and ran away back into the woods, never to be seen again.

  WHEN IT WAS QUIET once more, the dogs back inside, sleeping by their fires or kenneled up in their comfortable beds, Dedushka opened the door. Then he and Babushka peeked outside and saw the basket.

  “What’s in the basket?” they asked one another.

  Hearing their dear voices, Masha leaped out and gave them hugs and kisses quite mixed with pieces of blueberry pie.

  When she told them how she’d escaped from the bear’s clutches, Dedushka said, “Caution is a virtue. It is how you stayed alive all this time.”

  But Babushka added, “However, you used your wits. And that’s how you escaped. You are a hero, dear girl.”

  They all three lived long lives in the village and told many stories by the stove. And when Masha grew up and married the blacksmith and they had three babies, their great-grandmother and great-grandfather told them this tale.

  An Open Letter to Nana

  YOU SAID WE NEEDED this book, and we do. But not for the reasons you think. We already know that girls have power, that we can be heroes, too. We already take kendo and judo and have black belts in karate. We are already on school wrestling teams and soccer teams and can outrun the boys in track. And we can do it all with polished nails, if we like.

  Hi, Xena!

  Hi, Diana of the Hunt!

  Hi, Atalanta!

  But we need this book to remind ourselves that girl heroes have always been around, hidden away—​as you say—​in the back storeroom of folklore.

  And we need this book because these great stories need a shaking out every so often, like some old camp blanket that’s been packed away all year.

  And boys need to read it, too. Because while we know girls can be heroes, the boys need to know it even more.

  Your loving daughter and granddaughters

  Notes on the Stories

  An Open Letter to My Daughters and Granddaughters

  I learned about many of the fighting women mentioned in this introduction in a marvelous chock-full book called Women Warriors: A History by David E. Jones (Brassey’s, Inc., 1997). But I already knew about the women pirates. The very first book I ever wrote was Pirates in Petticoats (David McKay, 1963), a nonfiction book about women pirates for which I did a year’s worth of research.

  “Atalanta the Huntress”

  The story of Atalanta begins like many of the great hero tales and stories about feral children. A child is set out on a hillside, is nursed by an animal, and grows up with amazing powers. In this instance she becomes a great huntress and runner.

  I have taken the actual story of the Calydonian hunt from the poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book 8, lines 273–532, and the story of Atalanta’s race from there (book 10, lines 560–707) and numerous other sources as well.

  These are really two separate stories and may actually be about two different girls called Atalanta, one a legend from Arcadia and the other from Boeotia.

  The spelling of Melanion’s name is also given as Milanion. In Ovid’s telling he is called Hippomenes, and Aphrodite is, of course, called Venus.

  Though I have ended the story happily ever after, it usually goes on as follows: Traveling home from a long trip, Atalanta and her husband come upon a hidden temple in the forest. The temple belongs to Zeus, to Rhea, to Aphrodite—​the stories vary. They lie down to sleep. Overcome by passion the couple desecrate the temple by making love there. The god (Zeus, Rhea, Aphrodite, whoever) is furious and turns them into great lions with—​as Ovid puts it—​“tails sweeping the sandy ground.” This is a terrible punishment, even more terrible to the ancients, who believed that lions only mated with leopards. But I prefer to leave our hero and her new husband with many happy years ahead. Peace, Artemis.

  “Nana Miriam”

  Nana Miriam is a culture hero of the Songhai people. And as with many culture heroes, her power is more magical than physical, though what is particularly interesting about her is that she is quite strong as well.

  This story can be found in Steven H. Gale’s West African Folktales. I have added both cultural information (names of Niger River fish and Niger proverbs) and storytelling bits (like the descriptions of the dogs). And I have made more distinct the fact that the cliff rock—​and not a human being—​actually kills the unkillable monster, a theme that is only hinted at in the Gale version of the tale.

  The transformational powers of a monster/ogre/devil are quite common in stories from around the world. What makes this one different—​and very African—​is that the monster’s main shape is that of a hippopotamus!

  “Fitcher’s Bird”

  The tale of Fitcher’s bird is in a long tradition of demon-lover stories. It comes from the Grimms’ collection of folktales. Known as Mr. Fox in England, Reynadine in other parts of the British Isles, Bluebeard in the Perrault collection, Silver Nose in Italy (see the Italo Calvino Italian Folktales collection), Fitcher’s bird can be found throughout Europe in innumerable versions. There are American adaptations of Mr. Fox as well. The story always involves a murderous king or sorcerer or merchant or troll—​or the devil himself. This evil character marries (or hires) a succession of sisters, all of whom are warned about a certain door into a forbidden room.

  Interesting to note, there is a custom stemming from the nineteenth century to illustrate the wicked sorcerer as an “Oriental”—​the consummate outsider to Europeans and Americans.

  This story is so well known, it is called tale type 311 in Stith Thompson’s great database of story types, which folklorists use. But its various parts have their own motif numbers as well, for example: “forbidden chamber,” C611, and “forbidden door,” C611.1.

  Sometimes the sisters are saved by their brothers. More often the youngest sister saves them all. Usually she is clever—​as in this story, “Fitcher’s Bird.” Occasionally—​as in a Basque version of the story—​she actually dispatches the villain with a saber herself! But as Marina Warner says in her fascinating book From the Beast to the B
londe, “the narrative concentrates on [the girl’s] act of disobedience, not on [the sorcerer’s] mass murders.” In many versions there is a subtitle to the story: “The Effect of Female Curiosity” or “The Fatal Effects of Curiosity” and similar tags. And in the Mr. Fox variant, the very walls of his house have the following legend painted on them: “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.” But in fact, if the one girl were not bold and clever—​as is Erna in this story—​all would be lost.

  I have used the basic outline of the Grimms’ story, but I have told the story in my own way—​adding such things as the girl’s names, the dialogue, the way the devil walks, and the use of the egg in the end (the Grimms’ story says she uses a “death’s head”)—​to make the story fresh again.

  “The Girl and the Puma”

  This story is a legend rather than a folktale—​that is, it is a magic story set in a real place. Buenos Aires was settled first in 1536, but inadequate food supplies and poor treatment of the local Indians were to be the settlement’s undoing. The siege and the battles with the local indios mentioned in the story are real. In 1541 the few remaining settlers of Buenos Aires moved to Asunción. Buenos Aires was not to be resettled for another forty years. In Uruguay there is a city called Maldonado, which is supposedly named after the brave and kind señorita. Although in this telling I make the villain Captain Francisco Ruiz Galán, in other tellings his part is taken by a certain Captain Alvarado.

  Farming among the Indians was confined to the lower slopes of the Andes and the borders of the Río de la Plata.

  The rest of the story is pure folktale, some influenced by Spanish lore and some—​no doubt—​by Indian tellings.

  I found this story both in The King of the Mountains: A Treasury of Latin American Folk Stories, collected by Moritz A. Jagendorf and R. S. Boggs, and through my Argentine friends Sibela Martin and her son, Chris Pedregal Martin. Sibela translated it for me from the famous Argentina manuscripta, the account by Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, a nephew of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Ruy Diáz de Guzmán was born in Asunción between 1554 and 1560, and died in that city in 1629. Between 1610 and 1614 he wrote the report, which went unpublished for two hundred years. Doubtless related to the founders of the fort, he was writing about events that took place from around 1536 to 1540.

  Isabel de Guevara was one of the women actually in the fort, and she wrote to Queen Juana of Spain:

  Very High and Mighty Lady: to this province of the La Plata river, with its first governor, don Pedro de Mendoza, came certain women, between them my fate has determined that I am one of them. And as the Armada arrived to the port of Buenos Ayres with thousand five hundred men and they lacked supplies, hunger was so terrible that it cannot be compared to the one of Jerusalem, there is none that can be compared to it. The men became so weak that all the work was done by the poor women, they washed their clothes, they healed them, they prepared meals with what little they had, they cleaned them, they were the sentinels, they kept the fires, they armed the crossbows when sometimes the Indians came to make war . . . they gave the alarm out in the country sometimes, giving orders and ordering to the soldiers, because in that time, as the women survive with little food, we weren’t as weak as men. Her Majesty will have to believe it that without so much the care of the women, all would have been finished, and if it wouldn’t be because of the honour of those men I would write much more and would call them as witnesses.

  The story of Señorita Maldonada and the puma is a popular folk legend of the area, but it is based on the real and terrible founding of Buenos Aires. My telling combines elements from both story lines, but the dialogue, descriptions, and wordings are my own.

  “Li Chi Slays the Serpent”

  The story in a much plainer telling—​without dialogue or ornamentation—​can be found in Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies, translated and edited by Moss Roberts. The story is from the Chin dynasty of China.

  There are hundreds of stories in China in which snakes or serpents figure, most often as dangers, but occasionally—​as in the story called “The Tale of Nung-kua-ma” (see Wolfram Eberhard’s Folktales of China), in which a snake catcher uses poisonous snakes to kill a monster—​they are helpful creatures. However, Chinese snakes must never be mistaken for dragons. In Western tales snakes and dragons are often interchangeable. But in China the dragons are of a higher nature, elemental creatures—​gods of the rains and floods.

  The sacrifice of young maidens to a serpent-monster is certainly a popular motif in European folk stories. In the most popular European version (tale type 300) there are recognizable parallels to Li Chi’s story: A dragon lives in the mountains. It devours sacrificial maidens on a regular basis else—​it warns—​it will lay waste to the countryside. A princess is the next chosen one. (From then on the Chinese story is quite different.) A young man of little stature or worth volunteers, with his dog, to slay the creature, and his reward is marriage to the princess, and half the kingdom. He does slay the monster, and at this point—​when the Chinese story effectively ends—​the European story takes off in an entirely new direction.

  “Brave Woman Counts Coup”

  This story was first recorded by folklorist Richard Erdoes at the White River Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, 1967. The teller was Jenny Leading Cloud. That version can be found in American Indian Myths and Legends, selected and edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz. It is clear from that telling, Jenny Leading Cloud considered this not a folktale but a true story.

  Even as a true story it has many elements of a folktale—​or a legend, which is a traveling story that gets set in a real time and place but is problematical as to its authenticity.

  “Pretty Penny”

  Much-condensed variations of this story can be found in Vance Randolph’s The Devil’s Pretty Daughter and in “The Maid of Rygate,” a British ballad sung also in America that goes back as far as 1769, when it appeared in Logan’s Pedlar’s Pack, number 133. Both are based on the more widely known song “The Crafty Farmer,” Child ballad number 283, in which a farmer throws his old saddlebag over the hedge to tempt the thief, then rides off on the robber’s own horse. The Randolph version and “The Maid of Rygate,” like mine, make the hero a girl.

  My plot is somewhat similar to that of the prose story, but I’ve added a particular voice, named the characters, given them dialogue, described the girl (she is only called “a big stout girl about sixteen years old” in Randolph’s version), and so forth. Because Penny first fights the road agent and then fools him, I think of her as a double hero.

  “Burd Janet”

  This story is most often called “Tam Lin,” but as this book is about strong young women—​which Janet surely is—​I have renamed the story for her.

  The story comes from the popular Scottish border ballad—​Child ballad number 35—​which was first mentioned in a ballad book from 1549 as “The Tayl of the song Tamlene.” It has been told in story form for at least the past hundred years, most popularly by Joseph Jacobs. The telling in Not One Damsel in Distress is based on my own picture-book telling, Tam Lin, with glorious pictures by Charles Mikolaycak. There are also short story versions (one by Robin McKinley is especially wonderful) and three novels, which all use the ballad, that are particular favorites of mine: Tam Lin by Pamela Dean, Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, and The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope.

  Most of the details in this telling come from the ballad, though certainly the idea of shape changing goes even further back than that in world folklore—​to Greece even before Homer. And some of the details in this telling also come from Scottish folk wisdom (the bit about the bones of the herring, for example).

  There is a plain on the river Yarrow, near Selkirk, called Carterhaugh, as well as a great old farmhouse (not a castle). I have been there.

  “Mizilca”

  This Romanian story from an old ballad can be found in a shorter version in Clever Gretchen and Other Forgot
ten Folktales, in which it is retold by Alison Lurie, and in a longer and more Victorian version as “The Girl Who Pretended to Be a Boy” in Andrew Lang’s The Violet Fairy Book. The ballad itself—​in a version that includes a magic talking horse—​can be read in Erich Seeman’s European Folk Ballads.

  This is a folk story that is popular throughout Europe and is directly related to the German story “The Twelve Huntsmen,” as well as to the Arabic story “The Story of the King, Hamed bin Bathara” and to the tale of the “Fearless Girl” (see C. G. Campbell’s From Town and Tribe), which can be found in Oman and Iraq. It is also quite close to the Sudanese story “Yousif Al-Saffani,” found in Ahmed Al-Shahi and F. C. T. Moore’s Wisdom of the Nile collection. I have borrowed one of the gender tests—​the peas underfoot—​from the German tale and added it to the story to make three (that magic number) tests. In “The Twelve Huntsmen” the other tests include displaying spinning wheels in the hall “because women always look at spinning wheels with eager interest” and shooting bows “because a woman cannot shoot an arrow as a man can.” “The Twelve Huntsmen” can be found in both The Green Fairy Book by Andrew Lang and The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from Around the World by Ethel Johnston Phelps. In the Arabic story the tests are silks and swords, a pepper-and-cloves meal, whipping a child, and bathing in the sea. In the Sudanese story the tests are dates with stones in them, hunting and catching something, climbing a tree to the top (this is a menstrual-cycle trial), swords and dresses at the market, a massage, and bathing in the river. In each case the girl outwits the sultan/king.