Lithuania — The Clever Maid · The Lazy Maid · Who Could Lie the Best · The Poor Man and the Greedy Man · Out of the Robbers' Hands · To a Young Hare · The Crow and the Gunpowder · I Am a Man! · Mountain, Open! · The Great Bird Skalas · The Tender Princess · The Returning Shilling
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Twelve Lithuanian folk tales — Part 2 of the 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 clever maid answers a lord's impossible conditions in a net, on a goat, in the rut of the road. A lazy maid's fairy godmothers spin her tow and her flax while she sleeps — and talk her husband out of ever letting her spin again. A farmer out-lies a lord for two hundred dollars. An honest woodcutter refuses a golden axe, and a greedy one is left waiting on the riverbank. A lost man escapes the robbers' hounds by lying still under the stream. A young hare, a council of crows, and a company of boasting sparrows mind their whiskers, their noses, and their courage. A berry-girl walks the robbers' treasure hill and comes out with her apron lightened and her life whole. A king's son and a king's daughter grow up in the nest of the great bird Skalas. The tenderest princess in the world feels a pea through thirty feather-beds. And a poor man's shilling always comes home — until the day he changes it.
Stories in this episode:
1:38 The Clever Maid
4:48 The Lazy Maid
9:00 Who Could Lie the Best
11:43 The Poor Man and the Greedy Man
17:08 Out of the Robbers' Hands
20:48 To a Young Hare
21:38 The Crow and the Gunpowder
23:54 I Am a Man!
24:44 Mountain, Open!
27:37 The Great Bird Skalas
31:36 The Tender Princess
33:04 The Returning Shilling
Source: Jonas Basanavicius (ed.), Lietuviskos pasakos yvairios, Part I (Chicago: "Lietuvos" press, 1903) — public domain; tales recorded by August Schleicher (Kurshiai, Ragaine district, 1852) and Kristupas Jurksaitis (heard at Galbrasciai and Tilsit, 1860–1872). Fresh in-house English translation. Narrated by Felix.
Music: "Crimson Peak" (instrumental) — opening and closing theme, with a short excerpt between stories.
Left out of this part, by name, under the shelf's standing exclusions: The Horned Man; About the King's Daughter; About Green-Beard; How a Cottager's Son Outwitted a Very Rich Lord; About the King and His Three Sons; About the Nine Brothers; About a Farmer (the Three Counsels); About a Broom-Maker; About Silly Hans; The Latin Language; The Flying Ship; The Wonder Horse; The All-Knowing King; Shtuka (The Trick); and the fourteen period ethnic-mockery anecdotes of the volume's middle run (book Nos. 57–70) — each read in full and excluded as entered in the shelf register; four more — About the King's Beautiful Daughter, Light in Front Dark Behind, Little Thumbkin, and Hans and Grete — 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
