Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Reading Notes: Tibetan Folk Tales Part A

Tibetan Folk Tales, by Albert Shelton. Link to reading here.

This unit is a lot like Aesop's Fables. There are a lot of individual stories that often have a moral or a general lesson in them. This certainly makes it harder to decide how to retell this story. The best approach must be to simply choose one of the individual stories and make it my own.

Many of the stories have either animal versus animal stories, man versus supernatural or man versus animal themes. There are many different kinds of animals, along with goddesses and devils thrown into the mix. These stories may give me a chance to practice my Facebook simulating skills. I could make different posts/profiles for the animals and have the counterparts within their individual stories comment things to show how the plot progressed. This could also be used with the men in the various stories and have the animals or other characters in their stories comment on their posts.

I think I like the stories with just animals more, just because I like Aesop's Fables so much. I love the kind of humor seen within these stories and the quirkiness that only animal characters can give. I'll probably focus more on those stories when thinking about my Story post. I especially enjoyed the first story with the tiger and the frog, with the frog outsmarting the tiger, and the story with the fox bringing about his own demise. These are classic animal fables, both with a moral at the end which is constructed by the plot.

While I did like the animal stories the best, I really enjoyed the story with the carpenter too. I thought this was a really good example of a folk tale/legend type of story. Most of these stories always include an aspect of trickery and, while usually they don't end up with someone dying because of the trick, this one's ending was particularly well done in my opinion.

(Tiger meets the "King of Frogs," web source: Flickr)

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