Five tales from Joseph Jacobs' Indian Fairy Tales. In the first, a poor Brahman's wife carries three pieces of advice to market, asking a lac of rupees for them — and a banished prince who pays the price finds that each one saves his life. In the second, a farmer's daily bowl of milk for a serpent is repaid in gold, until his son's greed ends the friendship for ever. In the third, two kings of equal rank and opposite temper meet in a cart-track too narrow for both, and the question is whose chariot gives way. In the fourth, ten plundered cloth merchants, ordered to dance for the robbers who stripped them, sing a song the robbers do not understand. In the fifth, a hawker's ass, turned loose to graze in a lion's skin, is undone by his own voice.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Stories:
00:46 A Lac of Rupees for a Piece of Advice
15:50 The Gold-Giving Serpent
19:27 A Lesson for Kings
26:00 Pride Goeth before a Fall
30:39 The Ass in the Lion's Skin
A note on what is not read here. Two tales that stand between these five in Jacobs' book are not read, under the shelf's standing rule that a tale-type is told once, in its strongest telling: The Son of Seven Queens (Jacobs 16) is a variant of a tale this shelf tells from Flora Annie Steel's collection, and Raja Rasalu (Jacobs 19) is Jacobs' own compressed digest of a legend this shelf tells in full from Steel. Both are named here and in the shelf's exclusion register, not silently dropped; the shelf as a whole makes no claim to completeness.
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 Scratch.
Music: "Imperial Violin Masquerade" — instrumental opening and closing theme, with short instrumental separators between the stories.
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