MIGHTY MIKKO - 29 Children's Fairy Tales from Finland E-Book

Anon E. Mouse

• Herausgeber: Abela Publishing
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Herein are 29 uniquely Finnish children’s stories and fairy tales retold by Parker Fillmore and illustrated by Jay van Everen. Stories like The True Bride, The Three Chests, Log, The Little Sister, The Forest Bride, The Enchanted Grouse, The Terrible Olli, The Devil’s Hide and, of course, The Mighty Mikko himself. In case you’re wondering, Mikko is a fox. These stories are dramatic and picturesque, and even though they have been translated into English, are told with a wealth of charming detail which is essentially Finnish. The Three Chests, so characteristic in feeling of a country famous for its lakes and marshes, is the variant of a German story which Grimm gives as Fitcher’s Bird. Of The Forest Bride, there are variants in the folklore of many lands. Even so these stories have all been indelibly stamped with the Finnish culture. In addition to the 13 Finnish Folk and Fairy Tales ther are a further 16 adventures of Mikko with his forest friends Osmo, the Bear and Pekka, the Wolf. The Mikko stories are akin to the North American stories of Coyote,  the Southern African stories of Jackal and the French tales of Reynard the Fox. These animal stories have been used to teach children morals and the stories of life. It would be untrue to pretend that these stories are not full of local color. So much so that we have taken the black and white illustrations from this book and created The Mighty Mikko Coloring Book. Now you can get your hands on the stories AND the children’s activity book so that small children, and big children can add their interpretation of the color the story has. The coloring book is on sale in most online bookstores under ISBN: 9788826482224. Just type this ISBN in the search line and click GO! NOTE: For English readers, liberty has been taken with the spelling of some Finnish words and names. For example: Syöjätär has been transliterated into Suyettar etc.  

Leseprobe

MIGHTY MIKKO

A Book of Finnish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales

Retold By

PARKER FILLMORE

With Illustrations and Decorations By

JAY VAN EVEREN

Originally Published By

Harcourt, Brace & Co. New York

MCMXXII

Resurrected by

Abela Publishing, London

MMXVII

Mighty Mikko

Typographical arrangement of this edition

© Abela Publishing 2017

This book may not be reproduced in its current format in any

manner in any media, or transmitted by any means whatsoever,

electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, or mechanical ( including

photocopy, file or video recording, internet web sites, blogs,

wikis, or any other information storage and retrieval system)

except as permitted by law without the prior written permission

of the publisher.

Abela Publishing

London

United Kingdom

2017

ISBN: 978-8-826484-78-5

email:

[email protected]

Webmail:

www.AbelaPublishing.com

Ilona came floating up through the waves.

Dedication

To my niecePhyllisThese stories of her mother’s native land

Acknowledgements

Abela Publishing

acknowledges the work that

Parker Fillmore

and

Jay Van Everen

did in retelling and illustrating

Mighty Mikko

In a time well before electronic media was in use.

NOTE

The spirit of nationalism that swept over the small peoples of Europe in the early nineteenth century touched faraway Finland and started the Finns on the quest of the Finnish. There as elsewhere scholars who were also patriots found that the native tongue, lost to the educated and the well-to-do, had been preserved in the songs and stories which were current among the peasants. Elias Lönnrot spent a long and busy life collecting those ancient runos from which he succeeded in building up a national epic, the Kalevala. This is Lönnrot’s great contribution to his own country and to the world. Beside the material for the Kalevala Lönnrot made important collections of lyrics, proverbs, and stories.

During his time and since other patriot scholars have made faithful records of the songs and tales which the old Finnish minstrels, the runolaulajat, chanted to the strains of the kantele. The mass of such material now gathered together in the archives of the Society of Finnish Literature at Helsingfors is imposing in bulk and of great importance to the student of comparative folklore.

My own excursions into the Finnish have been made possible through the kindness and endless patience of my friend, Lydia Tulonen (Mrs. Kurt J. Rahlson). With her as a native guide I have been wandering some time through the byways of Finnish folklore. The present volume is the traveler’s pack I have brought home with me filled with strange treasures which will, I hope, seem as lovely to others as they seemed to me when first I came upon them.

The stories as I offer them are not translations but my own versions. Literal translations from the Finnish would make small appeal to the general reader. To English ears the Finnish is stiff, bald, and monotonous. One has only to read or attempt to read Kirby’s excellent translation of the Kalevala to realize the truth of this statement. So I make no apology for retelling these tales in a manner more likely to prove entertaining to the English reader, whether child or adult.

In some form or other all the tales in this book may be found in the various folklore collections made by Eero Salmelainen, one of the patriotic young scholars who followed in Lönnrot’s footsteps. His books were sponsored by the Society of Finnish Literature and used in its campaign to bring back the Finnish language to the Finns at a time when Swedish was the official language of the country.

Full of local color as these stories are, it would be vain to pretend that they are not, for the most part, variants of stories told the world over. All that I can claim for them is that they are dramatic and picturesque, that they are told with a wealth of charming detail which is essentially Finnish, and that they are certainly new to the generality of English readers. The Three Chests, so characteristic in feeling of a country famous for its lakes and marshes, is the variant of a German story which Grimm gives as Fitcher’s Bird. Of The Forest Bride I have found variants in the folklore of many lands. There are several very beautiful ones in the Russian; in other books I myself have retold two, one current among the Czechs and one among the Serbians; Grimm has two different versions in The Three Feathers and The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Cat; and Madame d’Aulnoy has used the same story in her elaborate tale, The White Cat. There is a well-known Oriental version of Mighty Mikko in which the part of the fox is played by a jackal and I am sure that Mikko’s faithful retainer, though neither city-bred nor polished, is after all pretty closely related to that most debonnaire of Frenchmen, Puss in Boots. Perrault probably and Madame d’Aulnoy certainly are in turn indebted to Straparola. And so it goes.

The little cycle of animal stories included under Mikko the Fox will of course instantly invite comparison with the Beast Epic of Reynard the Fox. The two have many episodes in common and both have episodes to be found in Æsop and in those books of animal analogues, widely read in mediæval times, Physiologus and the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alfonsus. The Reynard as we have it is a finished satire on church and state and in its present form has been current in Europe since the twelfth century. It was thought at one time that the animal stories found in Finland were debased versions of the Reynard stories, but scholars are now of opinion that they antedate Reynard and are similar to the earlier simpler stories upon which the Reynard cycle was originally built. This makes the little Finnish tales of great interest to the student. Needless to say I do not present them for this reason but because they seem to me charming merely as fables. The animals here are not the clerics and the judges and the nobles that the Reynard animals are, but plain downright Finnish peasants, sometimes stupid, often dull, frequently amusing, and always very human.

I have taken one liberty with spelling. I have transliterated Syöjätär, the name of the dread Finnish witch, as Suyettar. I have been unwilling to translate by the insufficient word, bath-house or vapor bath, that very characteristic institution of Finnish family life, the sauna, but have retained the Finnish word, sauna, allowing the context in each case to indicate the meaning.

P. F.

New York

June 19, 1922

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Note

Contents

Full-page illustrations

The true bride

Mighty mikko

The three chests

Log

The little sister

The forest bride

The enchanted grouse

The terrible olli

The devil’s hide

The mysterious servant

Familiar faces

I mary, mary, so contrary!

Ii jane, jane, don’t complain!

Iii susan walker, what a talker!

Mikko, the fox

Adventure i the animals take a bite

Adventure ii the partners

Adventure iii the fox and the crow

Adventure iv the chief mourner

Adventure v mirri, the cat

Adventure vi the fox’s servant

Adventure vii the wolf sings

Adventure viii the clever goat

Adventure ix the harvest

Adventure x the porridge

Adventure xi nurse mikko

Adventure xii the bear says north

Adventure xiii osmo’s share

Adventure xiv the reward of kindness

Adventure xv the bear and the mouse

Adventure xvi the last of osmo

FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

Ilona came floating up through the waves

The old king snake has wound himself around Osmo’s arm

The King thought that if Mikko should see his daughter

She fitted the key in the lock

“This last and mightiest battle is for me!”

Suyettar bewitching Kerttu

She beckoned to Veikko

On it flew until it reached the broad Ocean

Olli and the Troll’s horse

From the bones of the cattle he laid three bridges

“She is under an evil enchantment and I am delivering her!”

When she got to the middle of the stream

They were so busy eating and drinking

They carried home the treasure on their backs

Osmo, the Bear, grunted out: “Huh! That’s easy! We’ll eat

the smallest of us next!”

“Wake up, Pekka! Wake up! There’s butter running out of

your nose!”

“I’ll teach that Crow to interfere with my affairs!” the Fox

muttered to himself as he trotted off

And Mikko, beginning with a little whimpering sound,

slowly rose to a high heartrending cry

He jerked quickly away and fled and the Bear was left

standing with his mouth wide open

A terrible creature landed on his nose and drove it full of

pins and needles

The Wolf went staggering around the room howling at the

top of his voice

In the confusion that followed the Wolves stampeded,

running helter-skelter in all directions

“Here are three of us and, see, here on the floor is our

harvest already divided into three heaps”

He dropped it in the water and of course it spread out far

and wide and the current carried it off

He ran after Mikko and was about to overtake him when

Mikko slipped into a crevice in the rocks. Only one paw

stuck out

Of course the instant he opened his mouth, the Grouse flew

away

“Why, do you know,” he said, “my turnips and my bread

don’t taste a bit like this!”

The first person they met was an old Horse. They put their

case to him

With that the Bear lifted his paw and the little Mouse

scampered off

So that was the End

THE TRUE BRIDE

The Story of Ilona and the King’s Son

There were once two orphans, a brother and a sister, who lived alone in the old farmhouse where their fathers before them had lived for many generations. The brother’s name was Osmo, the sister’s Ilona. Osmo was an industrious youth, but the farm was small and barren and he was hard put to it to make a livelihood.