Week 12 Essay

This weeks readings were all incredibly enjoyable. I had the most difficult time deciding which story to do for a storytelling. This week I read the Jataka Tales (Babbitt) and enjoyed every bit of it! What I liked about the stories was that they were all so pleasantly enjoyable, yet incredibly short. I definitely could see these stories being told to children at bed time or at a campfire or sleep over. They had such amazing morals to them as well.

I found the trickster stories to be more fun and less about values and morals. What caught my attention though, was that the trickster was always a wolf. I was not sure why this was or if it had something to do with the Indian culture, but it was definitely something worth noting.

As I said before I had a very difficult time deciding what story to write about. Two that captured my attention were the story of Beauty and Brownie and How the Turtle Saved His Own Life. I found them both to be of good moral standing and great learning tools, especially Beauty and Brownie! It is so useful to see things compared in that way.

Many of the stories I read were very familiar. I am pretty sure I have read the story The Turtle Who Couldn’t Stop Talking about five times now. The one that I was not expecting to find familiar was The Princes and theWater-Sprite. The story reminded me so much of the Mahabharata when the Pandava brothers were out searching for a deer and they came across a lake where each brother ignored the deity of the river and drank the water anyway. It was not until Yudhistira answered the deity’s questions correctly that the brothers were able to go free.

Oral Storytelling (Source)