Italian Popular Tales — Part 4: Godmother Fox · A Feast Day · The Three Brothers · The Cook · The Thoughtless Abbot
Part Four of the Italy shelf: Italian popular tales, from Italian Popular Tales (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1885) by Thomas Frederick Crane (1844–1927), Professor of the Romance Languages in Cornell University, who collected these stories from the great Italian collections of his day — above all the Sicilian tales of Giuseppe Pitrè of Palermo, to whom the book is dedicated — and translated them into English himself. Billed by collector and book, as the tales Crane gathered; not a survey of all Italian tradition, and no completeness is claimed. The tales were screened in the order they stand in Crane's book under this shelf's standing rule, and a great many were set aside — every one stands named, with its reason, in the shelf register.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Godmother Fox — a little fox's well-furnished house is carried away by Godmother Goat, and every animal in turn tries to win it back, until the smallest of them all, the mouse, speaks up. A Feast Day — a boatman's wife leaves the fowl boiling and goes to hear a mass; the cat and the dog eat it all, and then stick fast, one to another, under the kitchen beams — and so does everyone who tries to pull them free. The Three Brothers — a nonsense tale in which two brothers have no clothes and one has no shirt, the guns are broken or have no barrel, the hare was never caught, and the pot has no bottom. The Cook — a lord who eats and drinks without thinking is set three impossible questions by the king, and his cook answers them all with the skin of an ass and a cart-load of rope. The Thoughtless Abbot — a rich abbot who never had a thought must count all the stars in heaven in three days and three nights, and his old servant counts the hairs on an ox-hide instead.
Chapters:
0:35 Introduction
2:47 Godmother Fox
5:30 A Feast Day
11:50 The Three Brothers
15:13 The Cook
17:31 The Thoughtless Abbot
Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Popular Tales (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1885) — public domain.
Narrated by Felix. Music: opening and closing theme, "Urgent Rhythms," also heard as a short separator between the stories — the tales themselves are read dry.
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Italian folk tales · Italy fairy tales · Thomas Frederick Crane · Italian Popular Tales · Giuseppe Pitrè · Godmother Fox · A Feast Day · The Thoughtless Abbot · free audiobook
