Folk Tales of Estonia — Part 1 (The Milky Way · The Lucky Egg · The Spirits of the Northern Lights)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part one — the premiere of a new shelf. Three folk tales of Estonia, heard in the English renderings of W. F. Kirby's The Hero of Esthonia (London, 1895), which Kirby compiled from the Estonian collections of Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald and of Jannsen; Kreutzwald is known to have shaped the tales he gathered into literary form, and they are heard here as the book prints them. In The Milky Way, Lindu, keeper of the birds, refuses the North Star, the Moon and the Sun, and accepts the Northern Light — who never returns for the wedding, so Uko's winds lift her to heaven, where her bridal veil still streams across the sky. In The Lucky Egg, the herd-boy Pärtel, sponsored at his christening by a beggar and a noble lady, keeps the egg of Good Fortune safe for years, until the milk-white snake under the lime-tree stone begs for her deliverance on Midsummer Eve. And in The Spirits of the Northern Lights, a coachman hides on the runners of his master's sledge and rides to the sky-wedding of the northern spirits — and tells no one until he is old and grey. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Subterranean Earth, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:39 The Milky Way
7:24 The Lucky Egg
25:55 The Spirits of the Northern Lights
Twelve more tales of the book are not read on this shelf, each excluded by name after a full reading: The Grateful Prince · Slyboots · The Gold-Spinners · The Wood of Tontla · The Orphan Boy and the Hell-Hounds · Bluebeard (The Wife-Murderer) · The Dragon-Slayer (The Lucky Rouble) · The Two Brothers and the Frost · The Soldier and the Devil · The Twelve Daughters · The Faithless Fisherman · The Compassionate Woodcutter. Also excluded are the book's first part — Kirby's digest of the Kalevipoeg epic — and its war ballad The Herald of War; many further tales and notices stand on the bench for later parts of this shelf. No claim of completeness for the book is made.
From The Hero of Esthonia by W. F. Kirby (1895), public domain — The Milky Way and The Spirits of the Northern Lights after Jannsen, The Lucky Egg after Kreutzwald, complete and in book order, in Kirby's English renderings. Narrated by Silas. Theme: Subterranean Earth.
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