Folk-Lore and Legends: Oriental — Reading Companion

The Cobbler's Wife and the Astrologer's Robe

The first tale, 'The Cobbler Astrologer,' introduces a familiar folk motif: the discontented wife who pushes her husband into a dangerous scheme. Sittâra, the cobbler's wife, sees a lady 'dressed in a magnificent robe, covered with jewels, and surrounded by slaves' and learns she is the wife of the king's astrologer. This single image drives the plot. The story does not explain how astrology works or why the king values it; instead, it treats the astrologer's role as a social position to be envied. The cobbler Ahmed, described as 'an honest and industrious man,' is reluctant but too fond to quarrel. The tale thus sets up a tension between humble contentment and ambitious desire—a theme that recurs in other stories, such as 'The Man who never Laughed' and 'The Perfidious Vizier.' Notably, the excerpts do not reveal whether Ahmed succeeds or fails, leaving the moral ambiguous.

Mongolian Magic: The Sack of Goatskin and the Bird-Man

Two tales from the 'Relations of Ssidi Kur' sequence show a different register. In 'The Wonderful Man who overcame the Chan,' a son shakes a sack of goatskin to produce rain and a sea, extinguishing a fire and defeating the Chan's forces. The language is terse and formulaic: 'He shook the sack of goatskin, and there descended heavy rain.' This is not a polished Persian court story but a Mongolian folk narrative with repetitive structures and supernatural objects. 'The Bird-Man' follows a similar pattern: three sisters lose a calf, and the youngest agrees to marry a white bird who can find it. The bird later transforms into a man who rides a white horse at a festival. The wife's complaint—'my husband is numbered among wild creatures since he is nothing but a bird'—echoes the animal-bridegroom motif found worldwide. These tales rely on magical transformations and tests of loyalty, not on social climbing.

The Editor's Hand: Selection and Style

The prefatory note claims that 'the Oriental' presents stories 'in a more polished style than is usual in the Western countries.' Yet the excerpts show considerable variation. 'The Cobbler Astrologer' uses a novelistic style with character interiority ('she was ever forming foolish schemes of riches and grandeur'), while the Ssidi Kur tales are stark and repetitive, closer to oral tradition. The editor, Charles John Tibbitts, has clearly selected and possibly adapted these tales for a Victorian readership. The catalog subjects—'Tales -- Asia; Legends -- Asia; Folklore -- Asia'—suggest a comprehensive survey, but the actual contents lean heavily on Persian and Mongolian sources, with little representation of South or Southeast Asian traditions. The 'gorgeous extravagance of imagination' promised in the preface is more evident in the magical objects and transformations than in the settings, which are often generic.

Readers should approach this collection as a curated sampler rather than a scholarly anthology. The tales vary widely in tone and complexity, from the novelistic opening to the stark Mongolian sequences. Pay attention to the recurring patterns—threefold repetitions, magical objects, tests of character—and consider how the editor's choices shape the portrait of 'Oriental' folklore. The stories reward comparison with each other and with Western folk traditions, as the preface itself suggests. For a fuller understanding, seek out the original sources or compare with other 19th-century collections.

That rainy afternoon, the shape-shifting foxes and test-of-character trials in Tibbitts’s collection felt both distant and familiar—the way folklore always knows something we don’t. I set it down, and my hand drifted to a slimmer volume, Negro myths from the Georgia coast, told in the vernacular — A Reader’s Guide, whose brer rabbit stories carried the same slippery wit, only closer to home. The rain never stopped.