Reading Notes: Turkish Fairy Tales, Part A

Cover illustration of Forty-Four Turkish Fairy Tales by Willy Pogany.
Source: UN-Textbook.

• Fear (Part 1, Part 2)
• Tells the story of a mother who tells her son to shut their door because she has fear, so the son asks what "fear" is and she tells him that it is when someone is afraid
• The son thought about this and decided to "go and find it" by leaving home and going to a mountain
• There he saw forty robbers sitting around a fire so he greets them and they question why/how he got there, which he responds to by saying he is in search of fear and asks the robbers to show it to him
• One of the men say that fear is wherever his group is, but the boy is still inquisitive so the man tells him to go to a cemetery and make helwa
• The boy arrives at the cemetery and while making helwa, a hand reaches out of a grave and its voice asks for some, but the boy tells it no and ignores it then takes the helwa back to the robbers
• They are surprised when the boy tells them about the hand encounter, but tells him to go to an abandoned building
• The boy gets to the building and finds a crying child on a raised platform and a girl running around who asks the boy if she can get on his shoulders to quiet the child
• The boy agrees and she seems to be choking him with her feet, but she suddenly jumps and disappears, leaving behind a bracelet which he takes
• A man claims that the bracelet is his on the boy's way back, so they go to a judge and cannot prove that it is either of their's, so it is impounded
• The boy then goes to the coast and sees a ship sinking with people screaming on it, so he shouts to them and asks if they have found fear and swims to them
• A person on-board claims someone is causing the ship to sway, so the boy dives to the bottom of the ocean, finds that the Daughter of the Sea is doing it, whips her away, then goes back to shore wondering if that was fear he experienced
• He left the shore and came upon a garden with a fountain and three pigeons around it who turned into maidens after diving into it with drinking glasses
• The first took a sip and said she was drinking to the health of the boy who was not frightened at the hand asking for his helwa
• The second took a sip and said she was drinking to the health of the boy who let her stand on her shoulders and was not frightened by her nearly strangling him
• The third took a sip and said she was drinking to the health of the boy who nearly killed her for tossing the ship on the sea
• The boy reveals himself saying that it is him who they are discussing and that he found one of their bracelets and that it is impounded
• The maidens take the boy to a cave with many halls full of riches so that he can take another bracelet to the judge and show that he owns the other one
• Once he returns, the maidens ask him to say but he refuses since he is on a quest to find fear
• The boy ends up in a crowd of people saying that a pigeon is expected to land on the head of whoever should take the place of their recently passed Shah (ruler/king), so of course it landed on his head
• He refused since he was looking for fear, so they did it two more times and each time the pigeon landed on his head, so he was taken to the palace where the previous Shah's widow said she would show him fear the next day
• He accepted this offer but soon learned that the last person who was Shah for a day was found dead the next morning 
• The boy comes across people making his coffin, so he acts like he's going to sleep, but burns it to ashes later that night and wakes the next morning healthy which excites the slaves
• The widow then commands cooks to put a live sparrow in the soup expected to be made for dinner, so when the time comes, the widow tells him to remove the lid from the soup dish, and when he does, the bird flies out and frightens him, which the widow explains is what fear is
• They then marry and the boy's mom is brought to the palace
• The Wizard-Dervish (Part 1, Part 2)
• Introduces a son-less ruler walking with his wife and deciding to stop near a well where a dervish suddenly appears and gives them an apple, telling each to eat half of it so that they may have a son
• The catch was that they would have the son for twenty years then the dervish would take him back
• They did so and a boy appeared in the palace for them to raise together until he was nearly twenty, when the ruler decided to find him a wife
• On the day of their wedding, the dervish carried him away to a mountain saying "remain in peace"
• The prince was scared upon seeing three white doves go into a river and transform into three beautiful maidens who bathed, then two transformed back into birds and flew away, but the third went to the prince and asked how he got there
• The boy explains that a dervish left him there, and the girl explains that the dervish is her father and when he comes back he will hang the boy by his hair, beat him, and ask "'dost know", to which the boy must reply "I know not"
• After some time, the dervish returns with a whip and does as the girl described for three days in a row until he is sure that the boy knows nothing so that he can set him free
• While walking one day, the dove-girl gives him a bird to hide and says that if the dervish asks which of the three maidens he desires, he should either point to her or say whichever one the bird flies to (in case he doesn't recognize her)
• This happens the next day and the maiden is given to the boy in marriage, but without the girl's mother's consent, who is a witch
• Another day, the boy and the maiden are walking together and see the witch approaching them, so she turns the boy into a garden and herself into a gardener
• The witch asks the "gardener" if a maiden and a youth had passed by, so the "gardener" pretends not to understand her, causing her to leave in frustration, so that the maiden can turn the garden back into the boy and herself back to normal
• The witch turns around and sees them then approaches them again, so the maiden turns the boy into an oven and herself into a baker and the same situation played out until the witch left
• Again, the witch sees the boy and maiden, so the maiden turns the boy into a pond and herself into a duck swimming in it, so the witch goes home after having nowhere else to go
• The maiden and boy arrive at an inn in the place where he was born and he goes to fetch them a carriage, but on his way the dervish sends him to his previous father's palace in the great hall where wedding guests were waiting
• The maiden believes that the boy has forsaken her, so she turns into a dove, flies to the palace and lands on the boys shoulder, and chews him out for leaving her there then decides to fly back to the inn
• The boy then goes after the maiden and brings her back so they can marry
• The Fish-Peri (Part 1, Part 2)
• Introduces a fisherman named Mahomet who becomes ill with no hope of recovering, so he tells his wife to let his son know that they live off of selling fish
• Years pass until the son decides he needs a job, but he can't get one and his mother passes away, so he goes through his house to find something to sell and comes across his father's old fishing net
• He goes to sea and catches fish, then decides to be a fisherman
• One day he catches a fish he feels bad selling or eating, so he keeps it in a well at his house
• The next day, he returns home to find a clean, organized home and thinks it's his neighbors, then it happens again the next day so he secretly stays home the next day to figure out what's happening
• He discovers that the fish is actually a maiden and throws her shedded fish skin into a fire, setting her free
• The maiden consented to marrying the boy, but word spreads that she's pretty enough to marry the ruler, so the ruler demands her to be brought to him
• The ruler instantly falls in loves with her and wants to marry her, so he tells the boy that he can keep her only if he is able to build a palace of gold and diamonds in the middle of the sea in forty days
• The boy goes home weeping, so the maiden asks why, and when he explains the situation, the maiden tells him to go to the place where he caught her and throw a stone in the water so that an Arab will appear and ask his command, then to tell it that "the lady sends her compliments and requests a cushion" so that he can throw it into the sea where the ruler wants his palace and to return home
• The boy did as the maiden said and the next day they found a palace where he had thrown the cushion
• The ruler then demanded a bridge of crystal or else he would marry his maiden, so the boy went home weeping again
• The maiden said to do the same as before, but to ask for a bolster and throw it near the palace
• The boy did this, and the next day there was a crystal bridge, so they told the ruler and he then demanded the boy prepare a feast for everyone in the land
• The maiden asked what he was thinking about at home, so he explained and she told him to ask the Arab for the coffee-mill and to not drop it on his way back, but when he did this and was returning, he accidentally let some plates of food fall out, so he picked them up and continued home
• One the set day, everyone in the land went to his home and feasted, with food left over, but the ruler still refused to lose the maiden and ordered that the boy produce a mule from an egg
• The boy explained the task at hand to his maiden, so she told him to get three eggs from the Arab and bring them home
• He did so, but dropped one on his way home, so only returned with two then went to the ruler and showed him a mule hatch from the egg when opened
• Still unwilling to lose, the ruler demand an infant less than a day old who could walk and talk, so he told his maiden and she said to go to the Arab and ask if she could see his baby nephew
• Since the baby was only an hour old, the Arab brought him some time later but still within the day, and it ran to the boy asking if they were going to see its Auntie, so they went and the infant was brought to the ruler
• The infant struck the ruler and chewed him out for asking so much of the boy until he agreed that the boy could keep the maiden so that the infant would leave him alone
• The boy and the maiden finally wed
• The Crow-Peri (Part 1, Part 2)
• Introduces a man with a son who catches birds and sells them then suddenly dies, leaving the son behind to discover what his father's occupation was when he found a bird trap one day
• He set it up in a tree and caught a crow in it that offered a prettier, more valuable bird in exchange for his freedom, so the boy sets it free and places the trap back in the tree
• Eventually a very beautiful bird lands in the trap, astonishing the boy, and the crow flies by telling him to take the bird to the ruler so he can buy it
• The ruler does so, giving the boy tons of gold, and puts the bird in a gold cage to amuse himself
• The ruler's lala gets jealous of the boy and wants to rid him of his riches, so he suggests that the ruler put the bird in an ivory kiosk made by the boy who brought the bird
• The boy asks how he is supposed to get that much ivory, but the ruler answers that it's not his problem and that if the boy can't build the kiosk in forty days that he'll kill the boy
• In the boy's grief, the crow appears and asks what's wrong, so the boy tells it and the crow tells him to go back to the ruler and ask for forty wagons of wine, then when he returns with it, the crow tells him to pour it in the forty troughs near the forest which elephants drink out of, and when they pass out drunk, to cut off their tusks and bring them to the ruler
• The boy does so, and the ruler rewards him greatly then the bird is put in its new ivory kiosk
• The excited bird was happy in its new home, but it never chirped, so the lala suggested that if its master were there it would do so
• The king wonders how they would find the master, so the lala suggests that the boy would know who its master was, so he is again brought to the palace and told that if he doesn't find the bird's master, he would be killed
• The boy got home and wept, then the crow appeared and asked what was wrong, so the boy explained his situation and was told by the crow to request a large ship from the ruler large enough for forty maidens, a garden, and bath
• The ruler granted this, and the boy set sail but didn't know whether to go left or right, so the crow appeared and told him to always sail to the right until he came to a high mountain where forty peris live
• All of them will want to board the ship, but the crow said to only let their queen aboard since she was the bird's master, then sail away while showing her the ship
• The boy did so, and when they got back and brought the queen to the palace, the bird started singing and the ruler also married her
• One day the queen got sick and the only medicine to cure her was at her home palace, so the lala suggested the boy go get it
• While sailing to the queen's home, the crow appeared and asked the boy where he was going, so he explained and the crow told him that her palace was on the other side of the tall mountain guarded by two lions, but to take a feather to stroke their maws so they wouldn't harm him
• The boy obtained the medicine, returned to the queen, and gave her the medicine which cured her
• When he went to the queen, the crow sat on his shoulder, so when the queen awoke, she chastised the crow asking why it had caused him so much suffering, explaining to the others that the crow was previously her servant who she changed into a crow as punishment for negligence
• Seeing that the bird still loved her, though, she pardoned it and it transformed into a beautiful maiden which the boy married
• The lala was also fired and the boy became a political advisor