Three tales from Joseph Jacobs' Indian Fairy Tales. In the first and longest, a prince whose stray arrow grazes a merchant's wife is banished from his father's kingdom, and sets out into exile with the vizier's son, who will not leave him; together they escape a robbers' tower, follow the reflection in a lotus lake to the Ivory City, and win the fairy princess Gulizar — surviving her poisoned pilaw, and clearing her name by a stratagem of a pearl necklace and a graveyard fakir. In the second, a rich old man, abused by the sons he has already enriched, is rescued by a friend's trick: four bags of stones and gravel, passed off as a repaid debt, make the sons attentive again until the day of his death — when the bags are opened. In the third, a Jataka, the Bodhisatta lives as a pigeon in a rich man's kitchen, and watches a greedy crow, who would not be warned, steal the cook's dainty dish and come to grief for it.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Stories:
00:45 The Ivory City and its Fairy Princess
30:22 How the Wicked Sons were Duped
32:42 The Pigeon and the Crow
A note on what is not read here. One tale that stands between these in Jacobs' book is not read, under the shelf's standing rule that a tale-type is told once, in its strongest telling: Sun, Moon, and Wind go out to Dinner (Jacobs 27) is a variant of a tale this shelf tells from Mary Frere's collection. It is named here and in the shelf's records, not silently dropped; the shelf as a whole makes no claim to completeness.
A note on The Ivory City and its Fairy Princess. The stray arrow that opens the tale does not kill: it grazes the merchant's wife, who faints, and recovers — the tale itself is clear on the point, and the shelf's register records the census summary's "accidental killing" as a false alarm inside the tale. The death sentences spoken in its courts are threats that are never carried out. The tale is read here exactly as Jacobs printed it.
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: "Lightning Crash" — instrumental opening and closing theme, with short instrumental separators between the stories.
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