Folk Tales of Greece — Part 1 (The Clever Shepherd · The Figs that Grow Horns and Take Horns Away · The She-Ape)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part one — the premiere of a new shelf. Three Greek folk tales collected by Johann Georg von Hahn in Epirus and Greece and published in his Griechische und albanesische Märchen (Leipzig, 1864); heard here in a fresh in-house English translation made from Hahn's German. In The Clever Shepherd, a disguised prince learns at the shepherds' table that you cast no salt into another man's dish — and the shepherd who taught him takes a besieged city without a blow, by candlelight on rams' horns, asking only his pasture writ. In The Figs that Grow Horns and Take Horns Away, three rich brothers fail to win a single sight of the queen, until one copper piece, a shepherd's mischief, and two fig trees — one whose fruit grows horns, one whose fruit takes them away — carry the youngest to a sham doctor's cure and a crown. And in The She-Ape, the youngest prince's arrow destines him an ape bride, whose nut-magic wins the three contests — the adorned house, the winter fruits, and the beauty feast where she draws her own beauty from a hazelnut. The episode opens and closes with its theme, January Lament, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:39 The Clever Shepherd
8:22 The Figs that Grow Horns and Take Horns Away
20:11 The She-Ape
Two further tales of the book are not read on this shelf, each excluded by name after a full reading: Das goldene Huhn (No. 36) · Das Pfefferkorn (No. 56). The volume's Drakos and dragon-slayer tales, and Der starke Hans (No. 62), stand excluded as a class. The same volume's Albanian tales are a different shelf's ground and are not used here. No claim of completeness for the book is made.
From Griechische und albanesische Märchen by Johann Georg von Hahn (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1864), public domain — Greek tales 35, 44 and 67, complete and in book order, in a fresh in-house English translation from the German. Narrated by Felix. Theme: January Lament.
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