Essay: The Significance of Shape-Shifting Women in Turkish Fairy Tales

In this week's reading unit, Turkish Fairy Tales, I noticed the recurring motif of shape-shifting women (usually in the form of birds) who usually become the love interests of the main characters. This pattern is seen in The Wizard-Dervish, The Fish-Peri, and The Crow-Peri. Once I recognized the similarities, I couldn't help wondering what the reason was behind them. Why was it pleasing to spin tales about coming across a magical bird-woman creature and then marrying it?

I think the story that holds the answer to that question is The Imp of the Well. In this narrative, a man is burdened with a nagging, overbearing, obnoxious woman as his wife (the narrator describes her as cantankerous). She spends all the money he makes and if he keeps any back for himself, he gets berated for it. If he makes a negative comment about a dinner she has prepared for him (e.g. it is too salty), she makes it badly the next night but in the complete opposite way from the previous night (e.g. not enough salt), and when he complains about this too she goes back to making it badly the other way. With help from a magical imp (as well as letting the woman's faults get her trapped in a well), the woodcutter is able to marry the daughter of a Sultan and live out his life much happier than he was before.

The woman, the imp, and the woodcutter from The Imp of the Well
Forty-four Turkish Fairy Tales by Ignacz Kunos and illustrated by Willy Pogany (1913)

Just look at that illustration! This is how people literally picture marriage to a typical Turkish woman based on the detailed description of such a marriage in The Imp of the Well. The magical bird-women are always beautiful, usually intelligent, and help the man obtain his fortune, not spend all of it. In a way, I think shape-shifting bird-women are much like the charming princes from the fairy tales we grew up with. When our dating pool is not stocked with quality, we imagine some sort of magical intervention affording us the opportunity to obtain a better quality (and usually the best possible) mate. In our popular fairy tales, this usually means a woman finds her Prince Charming; in Turkish fairy tales, it can happen in the form of an animal that a man has recently come to possess actually being a beautiful shape-shifting woman.

Week 5 Storytelling: Motley

We were three baseball players, but none of us had a bat. So we went to the guitar store and bought three ukuleles, but only one had all its strings.

We came across a leafless tree with three birds in it who didn't have any wings. One of us grabbed the big one with his hook but we decided to walk to China for authentic Chinese food. We climbed a couple of hills and I fell down a really deep valley one time right into a river on stones.

We came to a village with no houses and all the people were zombies. The last living people took us to their house without a floor so we could eat. We asked for some stuff to cook with and they gave us spoons without handles and a pot with no sides. So we baked the bird we caught in the oven and I went to set the table with no top with the plates with no bottoms.

When we were done, we had to let everyone know. I said I was full, the pitcher said he was finished, and the catcher said he didn't want anymore. The pitcher had eaten all the feathers, the catcher all the gravy, and that made me mad so I left to go to a corn field.

I took my blade and cut down some ears of corn. Then a guy with a wagon went through the corn field and I asked him where my blade went. He told me he had been looking for his ten daughters he lost 20 years ago. "How am I supposed to find your blade?" he asked.

So I left again because I was mad and I found the tree with the birds in it again. Someone had killed another one, though, and left it in a box. When I went to look at it, I saw one hundred marauders on motorcycles coming for me so I ran for my life.

I ran to the other side of town and stopped in a church yard to catch my breath. But the motorcycle guys came bursting through the gate and chased me around. I was running as fast as I could but my legs wouldn't move fast at all. So I started climbing a wall to get on the roof, but one of the guys came after me with a metal pipe. My hand slipped trying to grab the roof and I screamed while I fell back to the ground, but before I could reach it-- I woke up.

Big bed, little kid (Wikimedia Commons)

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Author's Note: The source of this story is a tale called Kunterbunt from Forty-Four Turkish Fairy Tales by Ignacz Kunos (1913). The title is actually a German word meaning motley, which is why I chose this word for the title of my retelling. Yes, this is a very weird story and it doesn't make any sense until the end, hopefully. This was all just a dream. It's hard to summarize the original plot because it is very nonsensical. Basically, there are three brothers that go on a very strange adventure. They buy broken bows, kill an already dead duck in a stream without water,  and cook and eat with plates full of holes or without bottoms. Then the narrator leaves because one brother ate all the meat and the other all the bones, meets some guy looking for 12 lost camels for 40 years, sees a dead body in a basket, runs from 40 thieves, tries to hide but fails, and eventually falls while trying to climb to safety and wakes up, realizing it was all a dream. I wanted to retell this story because it was different from any other story I had read for this class and I thought it would be a challenge. How do you tell a story that's not supposed to make any sense? I tried to make things my own by changing characters and objects but without straying too far from the general idea of the original plot. I hope that the story makes sense once you get to the last sentence, like the original story where the realization that it was all a dream just made everything click.

Reading Diary B: Turkish Fairy Tales

Here are my favorite stories from the second half of the Turkish Fairy Tale unit:

The Imp of the Well: This was probably my favorite story of the unit because of how comical it was. The unpleasant, nagging wife is the biggest fiend in this tale, so much so that the mere idea of her being behind a nearby door is enough to scare away the other villain, the imp. She gets what she deserves for being so overbearing and rude to her husband in the beginning of the story, being left down a well without a second thought (this may sound harsh, but trust me, everyone is better off). The hardworking woodcutter is able to find a much more suitable bride and even protects another woman from unwanted intrusion by the imp that helped him (by scaring him off with a suggestion of his ex-wife being near).

The wife scares away husband and imp
Forty-four Turkish Fairy Tales by Ignacz Kunos and illustrated byWilly Pogany (1913)

The Soothesayer: This story reminded me a little bit of a story from the Indian Fairy Tales unit called Harisarman. Both of the main characters are men pretending to be something they're not and a confession from a thief allows them to continue the charade without losing their lives. However, Harisarman was a greedy, jealous man and I wasn't happy he succeeded in fooling everyone. The soothesayer was pressured into pretending to be something he wasn't because his wife was petty and jealous of the treatment a real soothesayer's wife received in the local bath house. He was originally a hardworking man at his own craft and was only trying to please his ungrateful wife.

The Wizard and his Pupil: I feel bad for the wizard in this story because he didn't bring the trouble he receives upon himself. He was the one who was approached by the boy and his mother to take the lad as his apprentice. He taught the boy everything he knew. Then, the ungrateful apprentice abandons the wizard to seek his own fortune. I don't think the wizard should have tried to kill the boy, but he certainly didn't deserve to die either. In the end, the boy gets magic, money, and lives happily with his mom, but the wizard who made it all possible died after being betrayed by him. That doesn't seem like a fair outcome to me at all.

Kunterbunt: This story was so weird! At first it made no sense whatsoever, and I seriously questioned the literary significance of the tale. However, making one simple fact known not only makes sense of the plot but proves how brilliant of a story it actually is: it was all a dream! Real dreams can be very strange at times and make little or no sense once you wake up and recall what happened. Knowing this piece of information, I realized that the whole confusing first scenes really do read just like a retelling of a strange dream someone had. I like stories that keep you guessing and reading so you can find out what in the world is going on until you come across the one missing piece to the puzzle that makes everything clear, so I really enjoyed this tale.

Reading Diary A: Turkish Fairy Tales

Here are my favorite stories from the first half of the Turkish Fairy Tales reading unit:

Fear: After I got into the story a little bit, I realized this was very similar to a story that I'd read before written by the brothers Grimm, something about a boy who goes searching to figure out what fear is. I don't remember the Grimm version very well, but this version of the tale is creepy yet funny. This guy really isn't afraid of anything at first. An arm grabs him in a graveyard asking for the food he's making and he's just like, "Get your hand away from my food." I would have freaked out! Then a creepy ghost girl stands on his shoulders to try to make some other creepy ghost kid stop crying and almost strangles him with her feet, but the hero just falls over and takes her bracelet that fell on the floor. Then he jumps into the sea and beats up a sea witch terrorizing a ship with no qualms. And what ends up scaring this guy? A bird flying out into his face! Seriously?!

The Wizard-Dervish: This story also reminded me of something I had previously read, a story from the Indian Fairy Tales unit I read last week called The Prince and the Fakir. Both stories involve a king making a deal with a man who can do magic so that he can have a son (or two). The magic man helps the king but says he'll be back to take the son when he is a certain age. The magic man makes good on his promise and the boy is taken away. However, I found The Wizard-Dervish to be funnier and more of a kids story. I can just imagine a group of kids giggling each time the dervish's daughter changes herself and the prince into different things, people, or animals and tricking her mom (a witch who wasn't asked her permission for the two to get married). I also noticed a similarity between the first two stories of the unit that would actually show up in all the readings: shape-shifting bird-ladies. In all the stories, there is at least one woman who shape-shifts from some kind of animal into a woman, and in the last 3 stories she ends up marrying the main character.

The Fish-Peri: This time the shape-shifting woman takes the form of a fish. She is caught by the hero, put in a well he made, and turns into a woman while he is gone fishing to take care of his house. He catches her in her human form and burns the fish skin she shed so she can't transform back. Though she says he shouldn't have done that, she doesn't seem upset at all. In fact, the careless boy does several things she tells him not to do, but each time there really aren't any consequences for his actions. In most fairy tales, the inability to follow instructions leads to the failure of a character's task or the breaking of some sort of spell or agreement, ending with the main character being sad. Overall, this story was a little odd or different, but in a good way. The main guy marries a fish lady, there are donkeys hatching from eggs, a talking baby slapping a king, and an Arab who lives in the ocean, seems like a genie, and provides the talking baby as well as other impossible, magical feats.

Baby slapping the padishah (great king) from
Forty-four Turkish Fairy Tales by Ignacz Kunos and illustrated byWilly Pogany (1913)

The Crow-Peri: This story and The Fish-Peri have a few similarities. The main characters are both males, have a shape-shifting guide that they end up marrying, and must complete impossible tasks (which they do successfully thanks to their guides). In this story, we have another shape-shifting bird-lady; what is it with Turkish fairy tales and shape-shifting bird-ladies? Also, what's with the 40 day time limit on impossible tasks? (The shah sets the same kind of time limit for some of the tasks in The Fish-Peri, too.) This one was probably my favorite story of all because more than one person gets a happy ending. The hero marries his bird-lady, the shah marries the peri queen, and the queen is reunited with her pet bird and ex-servant. Everybody wins, except for the greedy lala (court official). Just the way things should be!