Part 7 of Folk Tales of the Philippines is two drolls and a wonder tale — three stories about getting by on wit: a boy who talks his way out of a rope, a couple who lie very still and prosper, and a youngest son whose brothers-in-law are the kings of the beasts.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
In "The Miraculous Cow," two boys steal a farmer's cow from behind his own cart: one leads the cow away while the other ties himself in its place, and talks his way free with the story of a mother's curse that turned him into a cow and has only just worn off. Told by Adela Hidalgo, a Tagalog from Manila. In "The Clever Husband and Wife," Pedro and Marta, the doctor's kept servants, run through their marriage gold and think of another way — each in turn reports the other dead and collects the burial money; and when the doctor and his sister come to see for themselves, they find the couple both lying stiff in the bed. Told by Elisa Cordero, a Tagalog from Pagsanjan, Laguna. In "Juan and his Adventures," Juan sets out to find the three sisters he never knew, taken by the enchanter snake of the felled tree; with a cap of invisibility, flying sandals, and a key that opens any door — and the friendship of the kings of the lions, the fishes, and the eagles, his brothers-in-law — he opens the giant's rock and carries the lost princess home. Told by José Ma. Katigbak, a Tagalog from Lipa, Batangas.
A word on the road here, told plainly. Between "The Clever Husband and Wife" and "Juan and his Adventures," the book prints its seventeenth tale, "The Three Brothers" — the great Forgotten Betrothed story — and it does not stand in this part: at its centre the princess's ring is recovered from the sea by a means this shelf does not read aloud, so the tale stands held whole, as it stands in the book, awaiting the collection's own ruling, and no completeness is claimed for this stretch of the book. In the tales that are read here, the deaths are pretences the stories themselves own, the snake's threat is words only and never carried out, and the giant of the last tale falls in a single sentence, when the little bird and the egg that hold his life are destroyed — kept at the book's own weight and in the book's own words, nothing enlarged, nothing dwelt on.
The book's storytellers, kept with honour: Adela Hidalgo ("The Miraculous Cow"); Elisa Cordero ("The Clever Husband and Wife"); José Ma. Katigbak ("Juan and his Adventures").
Chapters:
00:11 — The Miraculous Cow
02:20 — The Clever Husband and Wife
06:36 — Juan and his Adventures
Source: Dean S. Fansler (ed.), Filipino Popular Tales, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, Vol. XII (1921) — the tales written down in English by the Filipino narrators credited above; public-domain 1921 edition (Project Gutenberg eBook #8299). The collectors' notes stand in the book, unread here. Our telling is a fresh in-house rendering of the 1921 text. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.
Thank you for listening — Part 8 of the Philippine tales follows on this shelf.
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