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come-to-the-day · 5 years ago

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Fat Folklore and Bloated Tales: Baba Yaga, Little Otik and Broad and his brothers (Fat Fairytales 2)

Usually, when one talk about fairy tales, if you are a Westerner you immediately think of either the Grimm Brother’s tales, from the Germanic world, or those of Perrault and other French writers. However, there exists another group of very popular and world-known fairy tales: the Slavic or Russian fairytales.

In which you can find Baba-Yaga.

Baba-Yaga is not only a witch, she is THE witch. You see, Russian fairy tales have this particularity to, instead of using unnamed archetypal characters like in the European fairy tales (prince charming, the princess in distress, the witch in the woods), use a “rotating cast” of recurring characters with names, personalities and attributes, that are the embodiment of the archetypes of fairy tales. To be clear, Baba-Yaga is the witch of all the Russian fairy tales, and the classic female antagonist, the child-eater hag by default. She is so popular and appears in so many fairy tales that sometimes it is told there is an entire species of Baba-Yagas.

Anyway… To return to our subject, Baba-Yaga likes to devour children and young people, as all fairy tales witches do, and her tales often resolve around food (for example, in one, to escape Baba-Yaga’s guardian animals, the hero has to feed them because the witch has an habit of starving her dogs and cats).

One tale is of particular interest: the tale of the “log child”.

I am calling this tale the one of the “log child” because the real name of the character is… quite tricky to find. I read the tale in the French translation, where the name is said to be “Tishka” or “Tiska”, sometimes literally translated as “Sawn-Wood”. However, after many research, it seems that in Russian his original name is “Tereshichka”. And sometimes, the tale isn’t even named by its hero, but by the villain, and it becomes “the tale of Baba-Yaga”. All of that to say I don’t know with exactitude the name of this tale.

The story follows the adventures of a miraculous child born when a fisherman and his wife treated a wooden log as their son, because they couldn’t have any, and one night the log was turned into a young boy. One day, as the boy went fishing on a lake, Baba Yaga took an interest in him and decided to eat him. After several attempts, she managed to capture him and get him back to her house (a house that has the particularity to move on chicken legs). There, she hands the boy to her daughter and orders her to roast him while she goes out to fetch herbs and mushrooms to make a sauce (in other versions, she says she goes out to steal a treasure, or she doesn’t give any explanation as to why she leaves). The daughter tries to put the Log Boy in the oven alive, but he tricks her into taking his place: the daughter is burned to death, the Log Boy escapes and when Baba Yaga returns she devours her own daughter, not realizing it isn’t the Log Boy’s corpse.

If I mention this tale, it is because of how Tishka tricks Baba Yaga’s daughter into taking his place on the peel (the shovel to put him in the oven, you know, like used by bakers and pizza-makers). In some versions, he wiggles and moves so much she can’t put him in, while others say he keeps placing his legs in weird positions to block the shovel. But in the version I first read, as a child, Tishka tricks the daughter by making himself “too big” for the oven. You heard that right. In the story I read, illustrations accompanied the text and showed that Tishka made himself big by bloating his belly with air, like when you push your belly as much as you can. However the text itself doesn’t precise exactly how Tishka makes himself “big” so anything is possible (food, liquid, things put under the clothes).

Now, there are two other tales I want to talk to you about, tales I discovered through the work of Artur Scheiner, a Bohemian illustrator who did many beautiful pictures for a fairy tale book – think of him as similar to Arthur Rackham. One day he illustrated the book of Karel Jaromir Erben, a Czech fairy tale collector, named Sto Prostonarodnich Pohadek a Povesti Slovanskych. And these two stories come from it:

The first one is a Czech fairy tale. “The Wooden Baby” or “Otesanek” (it got a film adaptation if you are interested). This story speaks of a poor couple living in the woods and wishing for a baby. When the father, while in the woods, founds a stump that vaguely looks like a baby, he carves it into the shape of a child, and offers it to his wife – and immediately the baby becomes alive and says that he is hungry. The mother feeds it with all she can, but the baby is never sated – he eats and eats and eats, so much that he finally ends up devouring her. Then the baby devours the dad, and goes out in the world, devouring all sorts of people and animals. He meets his end however when he devours a cabbage patch and the old lady to which it belonged got angry and sliced him open with her hoe (never touch old ladies’ cabbages. Never).

What is interesting here is that the Wooden Baby keeps growing and getting bigger with each thing he ingurgitates. At one point a little girl mentions that he “must have eaten a lot of things” to have “such a big belly”. And in the end, he is nearly the size of a giant – and when the Wooden Baby’s belly is split open, everything it contains gets out, alive and undigested. And the couple goes home, wishing to never have children again.

The other fairy tale is “Long, Broad and Sharpsight”, a Bohemian fairy tale.

In this story a prince goes to save a princess from an evil sorcerer, and on the road meets three companions who each have their own specific abilities (and refer to themselves as comrades or brothers). A tall, thin man named Long who can extend himself as will. A man with bandaged eyes named Sharpsight who has a sight so powerful if he takes off his bandage everything will break and burn under it. And finally, Broad, a fat short man who can widen himself as will.

Here are the most interesting extracts from the tale:

He was a short, thick-set fellow, with a paunch like a sixty-four-gallon cask.

“Who are you?” demanded the prince, “and what can you do?”

“My name, sir, is Broad; I can widen myself.”

“Give me a specimen.”

“Ride quick, sir, quick, back into the forest!” cried Broad, as he began to blow himself out.

The prince didn’t understand why he was to ride away; but seeing that Long made all haste to get into the forest, he spurred his horse and rode full gallop after him. It was high time that he did ride away, or else Broad would have squashed him, horse and all, as his paunch rapidly grew in all directions; it filled everything everywhere, just as if a mountain had rolled up. Broad then ceased to blow himself out, and took himself in again, raising such a wind that the trees in the forest bowed and bent, and became what he was at first. “You have played me a nice trick,” said the prince, “but I shan’t find such a fellow every day; come with me.”

…

He sat down by her, and determined not to sleep all night long lest she should vanish from him, and, to make surer, Long extended himself like a strap, and wound himself round the whole room along the wall; Broad posted himself in the doorway, swelled himself up, and stopped it up so tight that not even a mouse could have slipped through; while Sharpsight placed himself against a pillar in the midst of the room on the look-out. But after a time they all began to nod, fell asleep, and slept the whole night, just as if the wizard had thrown them into the water.

…

“Oh, sir,” says he, “she is a long way off, a long way off! Three hundred miles off is a black sea, and in the midst of the sea a shell on the bottom, and in the shell is a gold ring, and she’s the ring. But never mind! We shall obtain her, but to-day Long must take Broad with him as well; we shall want him.” Long took Sharpsight on one shoulder, and Broad on the other, and went thirty miles at a step. When they came to the black sea, Sharpsight showed him where he must reach into the water for the shell. Long extended his hand as far as he could, but could not reach the bottom.

“Wait, comrades! Wait only a little and I’ll help you,” said Broad, and swelled himself out as far as his paunch would stretch; he then lay down on the shore and drank. In a very short time the water fell so low that Long easily reached the bottom and took the shell out of the sea. Out of it he extracted the ring, took his comrades on his shoulders and hastened back. But on the way he found it a little difficult to run with Broad, who had half a sea of water inside him, so he cast him from his shoulder on to the ground in a wide valley. Thump he went like a sack let fall from a tower, and in a moment the whole valley was under water like a vast lake. Broad himself barely crawled out of it.

…

After the wedding Long, Broad, and Sharpsight announced to the young king that they were going again into the world to look for work. The young king tried to persuade them to stay with him. “I will give you everything you want, as long as you live,” said he; “you needn’t work at all.” But they didn’t like such an idle life, took leave of him, went away, and have been ever since knocking about somewhere or other in the world.

So, who knows? Maybe these three gentlemen met and helped other heroes and fellows. That would be a nice idea to play with OC or to make a fiction. What happened to these three after the tale...

#fat folklore and bloated tales #fairy tales #witch #fattening up #gluttony #devouring #expansion #baba yaga #long broad and sharpsight #otesanek #bloating #liquid inflation #cannibalism #man eating #anthropophagia #monsters

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