V is for Villain turned into a puli dog (WTF Hungary - Weird Things in Hungarian Folktales)

Welcome to this year's A to Z Challenge titled WTF Hungary - Weird Things in Hungarian Folktales! You can find all other participating blogs on the A to Z Challenge main blog.

This tale, titled The Puli Dog, was collected in 1956 from Kis Miklós in Tyukod.

Our Lord Jesus and Saint Peter are traveling the world, and they are welcomed into a rich man's house for the night. In exchange for the hospitality, they decide in the morning to give the man a son, a boy whose every wish will come true. They are overheard by a servant, János. When the baby is born, János steals it, and frames the mother by sprinkling chicken blood on her bed.

The rich man thinks she ate her own baby, and orders her to be buried alive.

Meanwhile, János flees abroad with the baby. The moment the boy is old enough to speak, János tells him what to wish for - a palace, riches, etc., - and they soon grow rich. János marries a princess. One day, she asks him what the source of his wealth is, and János tells the whole story. The boy overhears it, and grows angry. He turns János into a puli dog, and sets out to find his parents.

On the way home, every time he stops for the night, he orders food for himself, and burning embers for the puli. Everyone says "I have never seen such a pretty dog fed on embers before!" to which he always responds "Have you ever seen a woman buried alive?" Eventually, someone says yes, and the boy finds his father. Going to the cemetery, he wishes his mother to revive. The truth comes out, the family is reunited. János is turned back into a man, and is sent home to his princess. A surprisingly light ending to a surprisingly dark tale.

This story was also turned into a children's cartoon, you can watch it here.

The secret identity of the Princess with the Pea (Folklore Thursday)

Well, the Princess, specifically. If you want to know the secret identity of the pea, you'll be disappointed. It's a pea.

This is me, showing my work.

Full disclosure: I have never really liked Andersen's literary fairy tales, and doing some research on this one didn't really change my opinion of him. I wasn't even going to go into it, but I found some bread crumbs researching another folktale, and followed it all the way to some literature that talked about the possible folktale-origins of The Princess and the Pea. Sure, I knew that over-sensitivity is an existing motif (I have a tale of three over-sensitive men in my folktale collection), but I was intrigued when I found out that the "original" version was actually numbered ATU 545A - the female-hero variant of Puss in Boots.

See, Andersen claimed that he heard the story as a child. Researchers have already pointed out that there is no Danish version of such a folktale - but it is very popular in the Swedish tradition, which, when it comes to how stories travel... is close enough. I kept running into the same claim: There is a Swedish folktale, titled The Princess that Lay on Seven Peas, which includes a girl, a cat, and some pea-related shenanigans. Sadly, I could not locate the actual story anywhere, because nobody cited it.

So I eventually figured out that the claim came from Georg Christensen, who published an article on the origins of Andersen stories in Danske Studier in 1906. Since my Danish is nonexistent, I painstakingly fed the article into Google Translate, until I managed to find the citations he DID put in there. Which led me to a Swedish folktale collection, where I finally located the story. It is actually titled The Palace that Stood on Golden Pillars.
Close enough, huh.

So, now I had a text, in Swedish. Obviously, I would have to find someone to actually translate it, but as far as getting an idea of the tale went, I once again turned to Google Translate. Apart from some delightful results such as "The cat noticed, and put the mathematics on his mother-in-law", I could figure out what the story really was about.

Now.

ATU 545A is also known as The Cat Palace - and, as I have mentioned before, it is basically a genderbent version of Puss in Boots. A poor girl loses her parents, and inherits a cat (her brother gets the cow, obviously). She sets out, and the cat helps her pass as a lost and robbed princess, so that she gets invited to stay with a royal family. However, the mother-in-law is suspicious of her behavior (she's a peasant girl, after all), and decides to put her to the test. She puts things in her bed to see if she really is a refined lady, but the cat sees her, warns the girl, and helps her fake her way through the pea thing (and the bean thing, and the straw thing, and various other food items the queen puts under the sheets).
Eventually, the queen changes tactics: She sends a gorgeous silken dress for the girl to wear, and invites her for a walk. The girl keeps dragging the dress in the mud - but when questioned, she claims that she doesn't feel sorry for it, because she has much better dresses back at home, in Kattenborg. The queen has no more arguments left.

The rest of the story is pretty much the same as Puss in Boots: Time comes to visit the princess' imaginary castle, and the cat runs ahead to arrange it all, kill a giant, get a palace, etc.

Conclusion No. 1: If Andersen really heard this tale as a child, he managed to grasp the least exciting part of it. 
Go figure.

We have a girl, and a helpful, smart (occasionally sassy) animal helper. Most often a cat, BUT the tale also exists in variants where the helper is a dog, which makes it especially dear to my dog-person heart. Also, the girl is not actually as sensitive as Andersen suggests - she is simply faking it, in order to pass as "proper" royalty, and go through the mother-in-law's ridiculous tests (gotta give it to the woman, though, her suspicions were right). She blunders sometimes - says things she shouldn't say, or drags her expensive dress in the mud. And yet, the prince falls in love with her.
This is not a tale about a princess who can't sleep on a pea. This is a tale about a girl who is faking it until she makes it.

...

Oh yeah, about the title.

Conclusion No. 2: The Princess in this story is actually the Marquise de Carabas. 

There.

W111.2.5. Boy to see whether there is fire in the house: feels cat to see if she is warm (WTF - Weird Things in Folktales)

Welcome to my A to Z Challenge blog series titled WTF - Weird Things in Folktales! Find the introduction post (explaining the theme) here. Find all other participating blogs in the comments of each day's post on the main blog! You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

W is for Traits of Character, both favorable and unfavorable. Folktales are full of nice and less nice characters, and their personalities are represented through various actions - some more peculiar than others. Tales depicting extraordinary laziness (W111) are especially entertaining. Observe:

W111.2.5. Boy to see whether there is fire in the house: feels cat to see if she is warm 

This story, commonly known and shared around Europe in the Middle Ages, features an extraordinarily lazy servant. When his lord tells him to get up and see if it rained, the servant calls in the dog instead, to see if it is wet. When asked whether there is enough fire in the house, the servant, instead of checking the fireplace, calls in the cat and pets it, to see if it is warm. When his lord asks why the door has been open all night, the servant answers: "I knew you would ask me to open it in the morning, so I left it open the night before to save myself the trouble."

Let's face it, we all know that person (like someone who asks the phone if it's raining instead of looking out the window). Also, most of us have been that person, from time to time. I know from experience that you sometimes only notice it's raining when the dog comes in soaking wet...

(Read the French version of the story here, the German version of the story here, and the Yiddish version of the story here.)

Runner-ups
W11.9. Prince donates all including a tooth
W11.16. Generous king gives away his only eye
W28.4. Saint threatens to take place of homicide in hell unless soul is released.
W111.1.1.1. Man is burned to death because he is too lazy to put out spark
W111.5.13. Man weeds garden from cushioned rocking chair, using fire tongs to reach weeds
W116.7. Use of strange language to show one’s high education
W128.3. Dissatisfied rivers complain against sea
W152.3. Stingy dead woman raises her head to correct account of laundress, who is overcharging her daughter
W152.7. Spider in stingy woman‘s house grows thin
W152.12.2. Stingy farmer encourages help by promise of hot lunch. The servant discovers that the hot lunch is a mustard sandwich.
W152.14.2. Man saves sausage skins, sends them back for refilling
W212.1. Eager warriors go through tent wall

B182.1.1. Magic dog vomits any liquor required of him (WTF - Weird Things in Folktales)

Welcome to my A to Z Challenge blog series titled WTF - Weird Things in Folktales! Find the introduction post (explaining the theme) here. Find all other participating blogs in the comments of each day's post on the main blog! You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

The B list of the Motif Index is the realm of Animals, both mundane and magical. Some are fairly common ("B11 - Dragon"), while other are a little... out there. Case in point, straight from Ireland:

B182.1.1. Magic dog vomits any liquor required of him

This lovely moment comes from the Acallam na Senórach, a 12th century Irish collection of legends and tales. It starts with three mysterious men and their female hound who join Fionn Mac Cumaill's band of warriors - but they insist that they will sleep apart from the rest of them, and no one is allowed to spy on them at night. To ensure privacy, a great wall of fire springs up around them every evening.

Well, the two sons of the King of Ulster, standing guard one night, decide that they want to see what is going on inside the circle of flames. Crossing the fire with their weapons inconspicuously hidden behind their backs, they come across an... um, unexpected scene: One of the warriors is holding the hound (now no larger than a lap dog), while another is holding a silver cup at the dog's mouth. They take turns asking for different kinds of drinks, which the little dog dutifully vomits up into the cup.

Talk about a "This is not what it looks like!" situation...

The moment they notice they are being spied on, the dog lifts her tail, and lets out a "magical wind of druidry" that knocks the weapons out of the two princes' hands. Then the pup goes on to breathe fire, and burn both of them to ashes. And that's the end of the story.

Barf, barf.

Read the original text here.
(Who wouldn't want a useful pup like that?)

NOTE: I'm angry at Stith Thomspon again. Obviously, the correct name of this motif is "Magic dog vomits any liquor required of HER."

Runner-ups
B16.1.1.1. Monster cat born of a pig
B16.1.1.2. Cat leaps through man like arrow of fire and burns him to ashes
B16.5.3. Devastating shell-fish
B19.4.1. Burrowing swine heat ground
B81.8. Mermaid cannot pass through ice
B95. Vegetable lamb
B109.2. Centipede plays at night with pearl
B182.1.2. Magic hostile bitches issue from elf-mound
B191.5. Hedgehog builds castle
B214.1.11. Singing hippopotamus
B286.1. Wedding of garlic and onion
B297.1.2. Toad and chameleon play drum and xylophone
B712. Barnacle goose. Goose born from barnacles
B731.14. Hyena with three hundred sixty-five different colors
B765.24.1. Dragon fly acts as doctor to injured snakes
B788. Bats keep fireflies to light their houses

P is for Puli dogs

So, I took a look at my blog statistics and it looks like the search term that brings in the most people is puli dog (go figure, I don't even remember when I wrote about them). So, because they are one of my favorite topics within the broad realm of "Hungarian curiosities", here is a post about puli dogs.

(Picture on the left features a puli mid-jump. The lolling pink tongue signifies the front end.)

Puli is a Hungarian breed; they are basically mid-sized hyperactive bundles of barks and hair that look like the result of an affair between a mop and a rastafarian. They are highly intelligent, bred for herding sheep and barking at things in a very loud high pitched voice.

Puli have recently gained world-wide fame because Mark Zuckerberg (yeah, the Facebook guy) owns one. His name is Beast, and he is a white puli with his very own Facebook page and 7000+ followers. He looks very fluffy on his pictures; as rastafarians no doubt already know, the awesome dreadlocks actually need a lot of work.

I had pulies before it was cool. My grandparents used to breed them so when I was growing up there was always one white mother dog and litters of tiny dogs around. My grandparents still own one, her name is Morzsa and she is a rare brown colored puli (puli dogs usually come in black or white).

There is a Hungarian folk legend that says that when Jesus walked the earth, the only person who gave him water to drink was a shepherd. His sheep were scattered all over the place but he still took the time to go to the well and bring some water, even though he did not know who the weary traveler really was. In return for his kindness, Jesus picked up a bone, tossed it into the air, and turned it into a puli dog that started barking as soon as it landed, and ran to herd the sheep.

If you have ever been on a family hiking trip with a sheepdog involved, you know exactly what I am talking about.