Week 13 Reading Diary: Czech Folktales, Part 2

(Mortar and pestle, via Flickr)

Once again, so many cool stories in this unit! The narrator in these is really droll at times--like in one of the stories he tells us that the protagonist's name is Francis, but that it doesn't really matter if we know that or not--which might also be a cool angle to take for a Storytelling. I haven't really tried to do third person narration at all this semester except for one story, so I might want to try to do that this time around. There aren't that many weeks left, after all!

The Soldier and the Devil: this story was hilarious. The fact that the Soldier put the Devil and then Death in his knapsack, but had to let them go because he was causing too much trouble, was just too much for me, as is the part where he throws his cloak in the gates of Heaven when St. Peter refuses him entry, and sits down on the cloak and says it's his real-estate now...I could just imagine how everybody who dealt with the Soldier was probably simultaneously amazed and irritated by him. This might actually be a good story to do from another person's point of view--or maybe Death/The Devil's point of view, since they're actually both characters in this story?

A Clever Lass: I think it will come as no surprise to anyone at this point when I say that I'm a huge fan of stories with girls who are Tricksters, especially since there are so few of them. This was probably my favorite story in the unit, if only because of the King's fussiness and the Queen's awesomeness and the fact that he basically teases her with impossible tasks all the time and she bests all of them with her intelligence. This story might actually be a cool one to write a sequel to--because I bet the King isn't going to stop being a pill, even though at the end of this story he finally admits that the Queen can advise anyone she wants. In fact, it would probably be really interesting to see what their children got up to...I bet there were some hair-raising situations there...

Source: The Key of Gold by Josef Baudis (1922). Untextbook.