Episode Details

Part Two of Folk Tales of the Netherlands continues William Elliot Griffis's Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks of 1918 in our own telling, with the book's third and fourth tales, in his order.

"The Princess with Twenty Petticoats" is the little princess who gazed at her face in the pools, stamped her foot at the stone comb, and called her governess an aurochs. In keeping with this shelf's practice, the tale stands as Griffis told it: the governess's failed correctives stand in one reported sentence, the hunters' killing of the calf's mother in one reported clause, and the great oak and the old aurochs die as their thousand-year enchantment ends, foretold and mourned; no completeness is claimed beyond what is read here. Out of the fallen oak come a wooden petticoat and a comb of horn, and out of the blue flower that follows, the linen of Holland, and a fashion of twenty petticoats that endures.

"The Cat and the Cradle" is the Kinderdijk legend. It opens in the hard old days of the ancestors, when, as Griffis tells it, a house council decided whether a newborn child should be raised, and no child who had tasted food could be refused life. The pagan grandmother's cruel intent against the baby Honig-je is thwarted by the midwife's drop of honey and never becomes a deed; the tale stands at the book's own weight. Then comes the great flood, and Dub-belt-je, the cat who loved the child better than her own kittens, rides the cradle through the night and cries the village awake.

Chapters: 00:10 — The Princess with Twenty Petticoats 12:37 — The Cat and the Cradle

Source: William Elliot Griffis, Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1918), from the public-domain 1918 edition (Project Gutenberg eBook #7871). Griffis retold these tales in his own English; our telling is a fresh in-house rendering of his 1918 text. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.

Thank you for listening — Part 3 of the Dutch tales follows on this shelf. 🔊 The KacheliTV podcast carries a new world folk tale every day — follow the show so the next story finds you.