A new shelf opens in the Gorjanci Mountains of Slovenia, with three Slovenian folk tales and legends of the Gorjanci, as collected and told by Janez Trdina. The lady of Mihovo Castle, seven years abed, shelters a poor leper beggar against her servants' will, and his gift — a wondrous Gorjanci root — sends her to the spring that gives her back her health, her strength and her youth. Foolish Mikec stacks a hay-mound to the top of the wonder-tree, wins the Gold-Feather Bird's feather, which grants three written petitions, and spends them on an emperor's daughter, on her dowry, and on sending her back. And the pedlar Pavle, who wagers on a Sunday morning that he can cross the unblessed Deaf Forest where no bell is ever heard, meets its phantom horrors face to face, until prayer brings back his shadow and the road to Novo Mesto.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
02:08 The Young Lady
08:06 The Gold-Feather Bird
18:59 The Deaf Forest
Source: Janez Trdina (1830–1905), Bajke in povesti o Gorjancih ("Tales and Stories of the Gorjanci Mountains"), first published in Ljubljanski zvon, 1882–88; book form in Zbrani spisi, Ljubljana, 1904 — public domain. Fresh in-house translation from the Slovenian, made for this programme. The three tales stand whole, as printed: in The Gold-Feather Bird, the opening tells in summary that earlier climbers for the feather slipped, fell and were killed — background mortality in two sentences, nothing enacted; in The Deaf Forest, admitted to this programme by name, the phantom apparition sequence — torn and bloody limbs and bones, a grinning dead head, an eye on a red strand, dissolving into a snail and dry knots — is carried entire as printed; no act of violence is done by anyone in the tale, and its closing prayer and moral stand. After the first tale and its music you will hear this episode's short spoken break, placed there by design.
Left out of this part, in book order and by name: The Flower Garden, The Enchanted Castle and Jutrovica stand benched under the shelf's sacred-texts park — Christ and the Holy Three Kings walk in them as characters — and were not used. Excluded whole under the shelf's register, and not read: The Giants, The Bird of Paradise, The Vila, The Werewolf, The Wild Man, The Water Man, The Dead Man's Shirt and Midsummer Night. This programme bills itself as Slovenian folk tales and legends of the Gorjanci Mountains, as collected and told by Janez Trdina — never as a complete Trdina and never as a survey of the whole country; the volume's religious tales stand benched whole, and the longer pieces of the 1906 volume stand unscreened on the bench.
Music: opening and closing theme, with short separators between the tales — Crimson Peak.
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