Lithuania — The Cat and the Sparrow · The Little Owl on Guard · A Hundred Little Hares · What the Dogs Still Seek Today · The Old Sparrow Teaches His Son · The Two King's Children
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Six Lithuanian folk tales — the opening episode of a new shelf — from Lietuviskos pasakos yvairios (Various Lithuanian Tales), Part I, collected and edited by Jonas Basanavicius and published at Chicago in 1903. Basanavicius gathered the tales from the first printed collections of Lithuanian folklore: August Schleicher's recordings of the 1850s and Kristupas Jurksaitis's tales from the villages around Tilsit and Galbrasciai. The English here is a fresh in-house translation from Basanavicius's Lithuanian text.
A sparrow talks his way out of a cat's claws with one polite observation. A little owl, set to guard a mouse's hole, falls asleep with her great eyes wide open. A simple youngest son, kind to an old beggar, herds a hundred hares with a whistle and a hundred horses with a horn, and fills a sack with the truth. Two dogs still sniff beneath each other's tails, looking for a king's lost letter. An old sparrow finds his son cleverer than himself. And a king's son and a king's daughter, who dream the same dream on the same night, are brought together across the world by the swans whose speech he overhears.
Stories in this episode:
1:07 The Cat and the Sparrow
2:27 The Little Owl on Guard
4:33 A Hundred Little Hares
10:45 What the Dogs Still Seek Today
11:47 The Old Sparrow Teaches His Son
12:53 The Two King's Children
Source: Jonas Basanavicius (ed.), Lietuviskos pasakos yvairios, Part I (Chicago: "Lietuvos" press, 1903) — public domain; tales recorded by August Schleicher (from Urte Margematiene of Ragaine) and Kristupas Jurksaitis (heard at Tilsit and Galbrasciai, 1865–1896). Fresh in-house English translation. Narrated by Violetta.
Music: "Ancient Canopy" (instrumental) — opening and closing theme; with a short excerpt between stories.
Left out of this part, by name, under the shelf's standing exclusions: About the Old Horse, the Wolf and the Bear; About Little Thumb; About the Fox; About the Robber; About the Hunter and the Laumes; About the Golden Bridge; About the Poor Freeman Who Became Blessed; The Wolf and the Fox's Friendship; The Little Fox and Her Little Tail; The Origin of Tobacco; The Origin of the Germans; The Little Hare's Will; The Schoolmaster's Reading Lesson; and A Pity for the Little Man — each read in full and excluded or held as entered in the shelf register; two more, The Farmer and the Robbers and The Snake's Gift, stand held by name for the owner's ruling. This shelf claims no completeness that its exclusions contradict.
Lithuanian folk tales, Lithuanian fairy tales, Jonas Basanavicius, Baltic folklore, animal tales, wonder tales, world folk tales, free audiobook
