Three tales from Joseph Jacobs' Indian Fairy Tales. In the first, Harisarman, a poor Brahman tired of being forgotten at his patron's table, pretends to magical knowledge — and luck, three times over, makes the pretence good. In the second, a merchant's son spends his whole fortune rescuing a dog, a cat and a snake, and is repaid with a charmed ring that summons a house and a princess — until an ogress steals the ring away, and the faithful animals must win it back. In the third, a talkative tortoise, carried through the sky by two wild ducks, cannot hold his tongue — and the future Buddha, adviser to a king who talks too much, draws the moral.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Stories:
00:46 Harisarman
09:53 The Charmed Ring
27:33 The Talkative Tortoise
A note on what is not read here. This part was originally mapped to a single tale, The Soothsayer's Son (Jacobs 10), which is excluded whole under the house law — violence is that tale's substance — and is named here, not silently dropped; the part therefore tells the next three tales in Jacobs' order, and the shelf renumbers from this part onward (eighty parts in all). The shelf as a whole makes no claim to completeness: the tales excluded whole and the items held for the owner's ruling by name are all listed in the shelf's exclusion register.
From Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs (1892), public domain; Project Gutenberg #7128 — the Panchatantra and Jataka tales Jacobs retold from the older collections, told here as Jacobs printed them. Narrated by Orson.
Music: "Bandoneo Street Romance" — instrumental opening and closing theme, with short instrumental separators between the stories.
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