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readallthenewberys2012-09-15 02:22 pm
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2012-09-15 02:22 pm
Newbery Medal: Tales from Silver Lands (Charles Joseph Finger)
I'll post a review of "The Dark Frigate" later; I'm in a bit of a hurry right now.
****
1925 had two Newbery Honor Books: The Dream Coach by Anne Parrish and Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story by Annie Carroll Moore. Neither one is available to me. The next book on my reading list, therefore, is "Tales from Silver Lands" by Charles Joseph Finger. It's billed as a collection of folktales from the natives of the South American back-country, which Mr Finger apparently explored.
* Dedicated to Carl Sandburg and to the author's kids - not to any of the people he met on his travels. Interesting.
* Well, I don't think much of the introduction to this first story, "A Tale of Three Tails"; he starts by telling about visiting a village of native people, and they sing and play their guitars in the evening, and "as the people seemed to like their music, I brought out mine", which is apparently AN ACCORDION, and he sings badly but the natives politely pretend not to notice. WHAT AN OIK.
* Then an old native grandmother tells a story of two brothers who go to clear a place in the jungle to build themselves a home - of course they do it white-man-style, cutting down all the trees, not native-style slash-and-burn which leaves the trees standing and is ecologically much better for small plots (this I learned in archaeology class from a professor who specializes in Maya culture). So a wizard who doesn't want his forest all cut down - this is an Evil Wizard and I am against this book already - goes and talks the boys' father into ordering them to clear more and more land per day, because of reasons. :P He wants their father to cut their heads off "to teach them a lesson" and stop them clearing the land. But... oh, GOOD GRIEF. When *facepalm* - I can't even already. When the father finally sets them too much work to finish in a day, they go to the wise old iguana and he gives them a charm to sing, so that when the birds join in, all their tools go magically to work GLORIOUSLY CLEAR-CUTTING THE PLACE.
50% is 103 pages. It may be way too much to give this book.
* Um, and then the old wizard leads a gang of animals overnight to un-clear the place and put all the plants back where they were. This, I think, is the nugget of original story that may have been there, because the jungle will cover up any clearing you make in it practically overnight, and I'd not be at all surprised if the natives did feel like there was a wizard involved, and tell stories about their struggle to make enough room to feed their families. But the white-man-izing of the tale makes it awfully distasteful.
* Anyway, the actual point of the title is that the first three animals to help the wizard - a rat, a deer, and a rabbit - get their tails caught in traps the boys set and acquire the tails they have today, instead of the prettier ones they had before. And the evil wizard turns into an armadillo, and everyone lives happily ever after, the end. :P
* The next tale, "The Magic Dog", is of a Quetzalcoatl-type king who lived long ago in a magic time when everything was awesome. He came from the east, in a sea-shell instead of a ship, so he is billed as the Sea-shell King. But the wicked witch he drove out, who prowls the borders of his domain, has a native-style name, Tlapa. And the raggedy man who comes to marry the king's daughter, and proves himself awesome in all the contests he is set, is named Maconahola. The king's daughter, who has no name given, loves Maconahola; therefore the witch is super-jealous and sends a famine on the land, which the king "was persuaded to believe" is Maconahola's fault and drives the guy away to wander. Maconahola meets a sad dog and is nice to it. The dog fixes up his camp for him and helps him. Eventually it turns out that the dog is... actually the king's daughter! Who has been cursed by the witch to have a dog's shape for most of every day. But Maconahola catches her in her human form and burns the dog-skin, which breaks the spell, and they live happily ever after and shoot the witch. Again, a reasonably classic fairytale that could have been rather better told.
* Next is "The Calabash Man", another classically fairytale-motif story - a young man rescues a girl and wants to marry her, but her father is a wicked crocodile-man who wears a calabash mask shaped like a crocodile's face when human. The father sets the young man tasks which the beasts of the jungle (Finger keeps saying "forest") help him accomplish. An irrelevant side-task - a choice between pots lidded with gold, silver, and clay (clay is the right one, of course) - is apparently thrown in just so that the last line of the story can be about how the people of that land "know now that there are things more glorious than gold". And I really don't like the portrayal of the wicked father wildly dancing / jumping about with his mask; it reads to me as a distinctively "native" fashion of acting, in contrast to the noble young man who doesn't do anything distinctively native except work magic. (I mean... you know what I mean, right? :P I don't think Finger is handling diversity very well.)
* Augh, now we have another story with Finger himself as a character introducing how he came to be told it. He's travelling alone near Tierra del Fuego and finds a kid who was randomly left "somehow" on a tiny island, and survived there several months eating shellfish before Finger found him. They stay there together for three months, and the boy learns enough of Finger's language - I assume English, but Finger just says "he picked up words and the names of things very rapidly", as if there was only one language in the world and the boy didn't know it. :P Anyway, the boy learns enough of Finger's language to tell him a story about a sea hunter.
First, though, there's a quick digression about how clever the boy was in making things like arrowheads from broken bottle pieces, but completely incompetent at learning to deal with things like knotted ropes and belt-buckles. You have until the end of this story to convince me to keep reading, Mr Finger.
* Oh, and "Were I to write [this story] in his words it would go something like this: Many day, a far day, underwater man walk water. Eat man my father's father; men cry much hard. There would have to be indicated, too, much gesticulation and arm waving by way of illustration and emphasis. ...So here is the tale." After which Finger starts telling the story, in his own words, having satisfied the necessity of indicating that white people are better than brown people at telling stories. Or something. :P
* The story itself is of the ugly hairy undersea-living people who come up and eat men; of the hero who fights them (gorily and graphically) until he is dragged under; of how he comes up again and tells of his wanderings in the undersea world; and of how he encountered a lady, "fair of skin and her golden hair floated in the water like a cloud", who gave him a seashell horn that should loose the White Death i.e. the great coldness, and kill both the hero and all who hear him sound it. So he sends his people away to a warm land, and waits for the undersea people, and blows the horn. The Ice Age comes (Finger didn't say that, I did), and the undersea people turn into seals, and the hero stands "scornful of the death that clawed at him".
* Really, I have to wonder if J.R.R. Tolkien was familiar with this book, or if he was just a lot better at picking the same awesome fairytale-esque images and doing fun things with them - like, here, the image of a great hero (associated with a horn, yet) who saves his people by standing guard in the cold against the dark wild men, and who dies in the cold "but his knees were unbent". (That would be Helm Hammerhand of Helm's Deep, that I'm thinking of.) I wouldn't bring it up if this were the only instance, but the description of the magic dog turning into the princess also had me wondering if it had influenced the tale of Beren and Luthien. It's the style, more than anything, and some specific little details that are reminding me of Tolkien.
* I'll give him one more story, despite the gratuitous whitewashing of the lady with the conch shell. Mainly because I'm busy taking my nail polish off and it's less boring if I'm reading. ;-) But also because I'm curious to see if there are any more Tolkien-ish images / word choices.
* An evil witch who loves the cold lives in the mountains and steals little children by luring them away with a magic ball. Two children find the ball one day and run after it to the witch's cold domain. The witch makes them both go to sleep, then magically grows the girl's hair into the rock so that she can't move, and casts a magic invisible force-field around the boy so he can't help his younger sister. But the witch sings about how she fears fire, and the boy runs away - I guess the force-field was only between him and his sister - to fetch fire from a hermit. Instead of giving the fire directly to the boy, the hermit sends a bird with it. The first bird, the turkey, splashes the burning brand with water and puts it out; in return, it is punished to have water-like ripples on its feathers forever. The second bird, the goose, drops the burning brand in the snow, and is punished to have grey feathers like ashes. (Nobody asks the condor, who keeps flying around saying the girl is nearly dying of cold, to bring the fire to her. Dorks.) The third bird, the flamingo, flies so fast that the fire colors its feathers, but saves the girl and BAM! goes the power of the witch. And everyone lives happily ever after.
* I find I don't mind these stories as much when Finger isn't intruding himself into How I Got Them Because I Am Awesome. They remind me more of the other non-European fairytales I've read, and I had whole huge books of those as a kid - varying in quality. *g*
* This next tale is told entirely in dialogue, between a hummingbird and a flower, both of whom are flitter-headed dopes. The panther steps on a mouse's nest and kills her babies (he is sorry, and the flower thinks he ought to be forgiven, but the hummingbird shuts her up); the mother mouse blinds the panther's eyes with mud and gum in revenge; the panther asks for the hummingbird to unblind his eyes; the hummingbird demands a beautiful dress in return, and talks right over the panther to ask where the bright-colored jungle flowers get the color for their blossoms; the panther tells her, and then - for some reason - she doesn't fly right off to get it, but unblinds his eyes, and in return he helps her fetch colored clays and jewels for her "dress". There is also a completely random line, "That is different. No one wants a flower to be wise. To be beautiful is enough.", to which the flower simply replies "Oh!" and apologizes for interrupting. I DON'T LIKE YOU, CHARLES FINGER. I also don't like that the only "wise" person in this story is the - male - panther.
* The next tale is about a troll (called El Enano; I have no idea if he's related to Anansi) whom a woman takes home and feeds out of pity, and he grows and grows and eats all the food, and has to be tricked into eating red-hot coals so he will drink all the water and burst. Classic.
* I'm bored now. Flipping through the rest, there is a tale of "Hero Twins" who spend two chapters killing giants and witches by trickery and gathering a glorious army "The Four Hundred"; then another yarn with Finger involved, told him (it seems) by a native friend who went gold-digging with him and froze to death. The story is of a man who falls in love with a star, seeks her till she has pity on him, but loses her by disobeying her mysterious orders... classic stuff, but there's a line from an Old Wise Hermit, "If you desire the Silver One [the star] for her beauty alone and not that others may envy you in your possession", then the man might find her and win her. I'M DONE NOW. Jerk.
* Reading Charles Finger's Wiki bio, though, I'm struck by how many of the writers I've read here so far aren't American-born and/or don't set their stories in the USA. Finger and Lofting were both British-born, Van Loon Dutch-born, Padraic Colum Irish; Hawes and Bernard Gay Marshall, American-born, seem to prefer England and (in Hawes's case) the Spanish Main for their settings; William Bowen appears to have no biographical information anywhere. (Perhaps he disappeared from the timestream in shame, but couldn't erase The Old Tobacco Shop from the Newbery list. TOO BAD.)
Only Cornelia Meigs, so far, is both definitely American-born and set her Newbery Honor story completely in America.
****
1925 had two Newbery Honor Books: The Dream Coach by Anne Parrish and Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story by Annie Carroll Moore. Neither one is available to me. The next book on my reading list, therefore, is "Tales from Silver Lands" by Charles Joseph Finger. It's billed as a collection of folktales from the natives of the South American back-country, which Mr Finger apparently explored.
* Dedicated to Carl Sandburg and to the author's kids - not to any of the people he met on his travels. Interesting.
* Well, I don't think much of the introduction to this first story, "A Tale of Three Tails"; he starts by telling about visiting a village of native people, and they sing and play their guitars in the evening, and "as the people seemed to like their music, I brought out mine", which is apparently AN ACCORDION, and he sings badly but the natives politely pretend not to notice. WHAT AN OIK.
* Then an old native grandmother tells a story of two brothers who go to clear a place in the jungle to build themselves a home - of course they do it white-man-style, cutting down all the trees, not native-style slash-and-burn which leaves the trees standing and is ecologically much better for small plots (this I learned in archaeology class from a professor who specializes in Maya culture). So a wizard who doesn't want his forest all cut down - this is an Evil Wizard and I am against this book already - goes and talks the boys' father into ordering them to clear more and more land per day, because of reasons. :P He wants their father to cut their heads off "to teach them a lesson" and stop them clearing the land. But... oh, GOOD GRIEF. When *facepalm* - I can't even already. When the father finally sets them too much work to finish in a day, they go to the wise old iguana and he gives them a charm to sing, so that when the birds join in, all their tools go magically to work GLORIOUSLY CLEAR-CUTTING THE PLACE.
50% is 103 pages. It may be way too much to give this book.
* Um, and then the old wizard leads a gang of animals overnight to un-clear the place and put all the plants back where they were. This, I think, is the nugget of original story that may have been there, because the jungle will cover up any clearing you make in it practically overnight, and I'd not be at all surprised if the natives did feel like there was a wizard involved, and tell stories about their struggle to make enough room to feed their families. But the white-man-izing of the tale makes it awfully distasteful.
* Anyway, the actual point of the title is that the first three animals to help the wizard - a rat, a deer, and a rabbit - get their tails caught in traps the boys set and acquire the tails they have today, instead of the prettier ones they had before. And the evil wizard turns into an armadillo, and everyone lives happily ever after, the end. :P
* The next tale, "The Magic Dog", is of a Quetzalcoatl-type king who lived long ago in a magic time when everything was awesome. He came from the east, in a sea-shell instead of a ship, so he is billed as the Sea-shell King. But the wicked witch he drove out, who prowls the borders of his domain, has a native-style name, Tlapa. And the raggedy man who comes to marry the king's daughter, and proves himself awesome in all the contests he is set, is named Maconahola. The king's daughter, who has no name given, loves Maconahola; therefore the witch is super-jealous and sends a famine on the land, which the king "was persuaded to believe" is Maconahola's fault and drives the guy away to wander. Maconahola meets a sad dog and is nice to it. The dog fixes up his camp for him and helps him. Eventually it turns out that the dog is... actually the king's daughter! Who has been cursed by the witch to have a dog's shape for most of every day. But Maconahola catches her in her human form and burns the dog-skin, which breaks the spell, and they live happily ever after and shoot the witch. Again, a reasonably classic fairytale that could have been rather better told.
* Next is "The Calabash Man", another classically fairytale-motif story - a young man rescues a girl and wants to marry her, but her father is a wicked crocodile-man who wears a calabash mask shaped like a crocodile's face when human. The father sets the young man tasks which the beasts of the jungle (Finger keeps saying "forest") help him accomplish. An irrelevant side-task - a choice between pots lidded with gold, silver, and clay (clay is the right one, of course) - is apparently thrown in just so that the last line of the story can be about how the people of that land "know now that there are things more glorious than gold". And I really don't like the portrayal of the wicked father wildly dancing / jumping about with his mask; it reads to me as a distinctively "native" fashion of acting, in contrast to the noble young man who doesn't do anything distinctively native except work magic. (I mean... you know what I mean, right? :P I don't think Finger is handling diversity very well.)
* Augh, now we have another story with Finger himself as a character introducing how he came to be told it. He's travelling alone near Tierra del Fuego and finds a kid who was randomly left "somehow" on a tiny island, and survived there several months eating shellfish before Finger found him. They stay there together for three months, and the boy learns enough of Finger's language - I assume English, but Finger just says "he picked up words and the names of things very rapidly", as if there was only one language in the world and the boy didn't know it. :P Anyway, the boy learns enough of Finger's language to tell him a story about a sea hunter.
First, though, there's a quick digression about how clever the boy was in making things like arrowheads from broken bottle pieces, but completely incompetent at learning to deal with things like knotted ropes and belt-buckles. You have until the end of this story to convince me to keep reading, Mr Finger.
* Oh, and "Were I to write [this story] in his words it would go something like this: Many day, a far day, underwater man walk water. Eat man my father's father; men cry much hard. There would have to be indicated, too, much gesticulation and arm waving by way of illustration and emphasis. ...So here is the tale." After which Finger starts telling the story, in his own words, having satisfied the necessity of indicating that white people are better than brown people at telling stories. Or something. :P
* The story itself is of the ugly hairy undersea-living people who come up and eat men; of the hero who fights them (gorily and graphically) until he is dragged under; of how he comes up again and tells of his wanderings in the undersea world; and of how he encountered a lady, "fair of skin and her golden hair floated in the water like a cloud", who gave him a seashell horn that should loose the White Death i.e. the great coldness, and kill both the hero and all who hear him sound it. So he sends his people away to a warm land, and waits for the undersea people, and blows the horn. The Ice Age comes (Finger didn't say that, I did), and the undersea people turn into seals, and the hero stands "scornful of the death that clawed at him".
* Really, I have to wonder if J.R.R. Tolkien was familiar with this book, or if he was just a lot better at picking the same awesome fairytale-esque images and doing fun things with them - like, here, the image of a great hero (associated with a horn, yet) who saves his people by standing guard in the cold against the dark wild men, and who dies in the cold "but his knees were unbent". (That would be Helm Hammerhand of Helm's Deep, that I'm thinking of.) I wouldn't bring it up if this were the only instance, but the description of the magic dog turning into the princess also had me wondering if it had influenced the tale of Beren and Luthien. It's the style, more than anything, and some specific little details that are reminding me of Tolkien.
* I'll give him one more story, despite the gratuitous whitewashing of the lady with the conch shell. Mainly because I'm busy taking my nail polish off and it's less boring if I'm reading. ;-) But also because I'm curious to see if there are any more Tolkien-ish images / word choices.
* An evil witch who loves the cold lives in the mountains and steals little children by luring them away with a magic ball. Two children find the ball one day and run after it to the witch's cold domain. The witch makes them both go to sleep, then magically grows the girl's hair into the rock so that she can't move, and casts a magic invisible force-field around the boy so he can't help his younger sister. But the witch sings about how she fears fire, and the boy runs away - I guess the force-field was only between him and his sister - to fetch fire from a hermit. Instead of giving the fire directly to the boy, the hermit sends a bird with it. The first bird, the turkey, splashes the burning brand with water and puts it out; in return, it is punished to have water-like ripples on its feathers forever. The second bird, the goose, drops the burning brand in the snow, and is punished to have grey feathers like ashes. (Nobody asks the condor, who keeps flying around saying the girl is nearly dying of cold, to bring the fire to her. Dorks.) The third bird, the flamingo, flies so fast that the fire colors its feathers, but saves the girl and BAM! goes the power of the witch. And everyone lives happily ever after.
* I find I don't mind these stories as much when Finger isn't intruding himself into How I Got Them Because I Am Awesome. They remind me more of the other non-European fairytales I've read, and I had whole huge books of those as a kid - varying in quality. *g*
* This next tale is told entirely in dialogue, between a hummingbird and a flower, both of whom are flitter-headed dopes. The panther steps on a mouse's nest and kills her babies (he is sorry, and the flower thinks he ought to be forgiven, but the hummingbird shuts her up); the mother mouse blinds the panther's eyes with mud and gum in revenge; the panther asks for the hummingbird to unblind his eyes; the hummingbird demands a beautiful dress in return, and talks right over the panther to ask where the bright-colored jungle flowers get the color for their blossoms; the panther tells her, and then - for some reason - she doesn't fly right off to get it, but unblinds his eyes, and in return he helps her fetch colored clays and jewels for her "dress". There is also a completely random line, "That is different. No one wants a flower to be wise. To be beautiful is enough.", to which the flower simply replies "Oh!" and apologizes for interrupting. I DON'T LIKE YOU, CHARLES FINGER. I also don't like that the only "wise" person in this story is the - male - panther.
* The next tale is about a troll (called El Enano; I have no idea if he's related to Anansi) whom a woman takes home and feeds out of pity, and he grows and grows and eats all the food, and has to be tricked into eating red-hot coals so he will drink all the water and burst. Classic.
* I'm bored now. Flipping through the rest, there is a tale of "Hero Twins" who spend two chapters killing giants and witches by trickery and gathering a glorious army "The Four Hundred"; then another yarn with Finger involved, told him (it seems) by a native friend who went gold-digging with him and froze to death. The story is of a man who falls in love with a star, seeks her till she has pity on him, but loses her by disobeying her mysterious orders... classic stuff, but there's a line from an Old Wise Hermit, "If you desire the Silver One [the star] for her beauty alone and not that others may envy you in your possession", then the man might find her and win her. I'M DONE NOW. Jerk.
* Reading Charles Finger's Wiki bio, though, I'm struck by how many of the writers I've read here so far aren't American-born and/or don't set their stories in the USA. Finger and Lofting were both British-born, Van Loon Dutch-born, Padraic Colum Irish; Hawes and Bernard Gay Marshall, American-born, seem to prefer England and (in Hawes's case) the Spanish Main for their settings; William Bowen appears to have no biographical information anywhere. (Perhaps he disappeared from the timestream in shame, but couldn't erase The Old Tobacco Shop from the Newbery list. TOO BAD.)
Only Cornelia Meigs, so far, is both definitely American-born and set her Newbery Honor story completely in America.