Episode Details

Part 2 of Folk Tales of the Philippines opens with a king whose judgments are as absurd as they are famous, and then settles into the book's own family of five tellings of one beloved story: two poor companions — one who cannot see, one who cannot walk — who bluff giants, robbers, and a ghost out of a rich house with nothing but a rope, an axe, and a drum.

"The King's Decisions" brings three quarrels before the king: a starving man fed by the smell of a rich man's dinner is told to pay for it with the smell of money; a horse loses its tail in a helping pull; and a sleepless household meets a midnight fright. The king's answers settle all three, and satisfy nobody. Told by José M. Hilario, a Tagalog from Batangas, who heard it from his father. Between this tale and Part 1 stands "How Suan became Rich," held at this shelf's gate for a ruling and not read here.

Then the five tellings. In "The Four Blind Brothers," three brothers fall from the same broken coconut tree, and the fourth, sheltered by the spirits of the grove, wins a two-headed giant's house with the tail of a sting-ray shown for a hair. "Juan the Blind Man" counts seven friends down from the typhoon-broken stumps in song, then frightens a house full of outlaws with a rusted axe for a tooth. "Teofilo the Hunchback, and the Giant" is the slightest and slyest of the five: a rope for a hair, a duck for a louse, and a voice like burning coals. In "Juan and the Buringcantada," a lazy son and his mother answer a one-eyed giant's challenges from his own ceiling. And in "The Manglalabas," blind Bulag and hunchbacked Cuba spend a night in a haunted house and dig up the treasure the ghost itself was guarding.

A word on the hard beats, told plainly. The falls in the first two tellings are the tales' own grim joke, each over in a clause, exactly as the book counts them; no one is harmed by anyone's hand in any of the five, and every giant, robber, and ghost is frightened away unhurt. The healings that end two tellings are the storytellers' slapstick, instant and kind. In the first tale, the wife's loss stands in a single sober clause, and the horse's broken tail in another, both as the book tells them. No completeness is claimed for this stretch of the book.

The book's storytellers, kept with honour: José M. Hilario of Batangas ("The King's Decisions"); Eutiqiano Garcia, a Pampangan ("The Four Blind Brothers"); Pedro D. L. Sorreta of Virac, Catanduanes ("Juan the Blind Man"); Loreta Benavides ("Teofilo the Hunchback, and the Giant"); Pacifico Buenconsejo ("Juan and the Buringcantada"); Arsenio Bonifacio ("The Manglalabas").

Chapters: 00:11 — The King's Decisions 03:30 — The Four Blind Brothers 07:24 — Juan the Blind Man 13:25 — Teofilo the Hunchback, and the Giant 16:13 — Juan and the Buringcantada 20:14 — The Manglalabas

Source: Dean S. Fansler (ed.), Filipino Popular Tales, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, Vol. XII (1921) — the tales written down in English by the Filipino narrators credited above; public-domain 1921 edition (Project Gutenberg eBook #8299). The collectors' notes stand in the book, unread here. Our telling is a fresh in-house rendering of the 1921 text. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.

Thank you for listening — Part 3 of the Philippine 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.