Episode Details

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Part 6 of Folk Tales of the Philippines is a pair of magic-duel tales about one power in two forms: the power to leave your own body, or to change it at will — and what becomes of the men who try to steal another's place with it. In the first, the thief is a wandering holy man; in the second, a great magician; and in both, the stolen shape is the thief's undoing.

In "The King and the Dervish," a dervish who can step out of his body and into a dead creature's teaches the charms to the young king, then enters the king's empty body, takes the throne, and orders the deer that carries the king's soul hunted out and killed. The king slips from the deer into a dead nightingale, sings his way into the queen's keeping, passes into a palace dog, and wins his own body back at the cage door — but the queen learns too late whom she had been comforted by, and dies of grief. Told by José M. Hilario of Batangas, who heard the story from his father, a Tagalog. In "The Mysterious Book," Juan, a poor son too fond of idleness until hunger drives him to service, becomes the trusted servant of the magician Don Luzano — and one morning opens the small triangular book hidden inside the seventh box. The chase that follows runs through steed and mule, bird and hawk, little fish and great fish, and ends in a princess's golden basin, where the fish becomes a ring upon her finger, and the ring a scatter of mungo seeds upon the floor. Told by Leopoldo Uichanco, a Tagalog from Calamba, La Laguna.

A word on the road here, told plainly. Each of these duels ends as the old tellings end them: the dervish is killed in the nightingale's shape, in a single sentence, and Don Luzano is killed in his crow shape at the chase's end, in a single sentence — both kept at the book's own weight and in the book's own words, nothing enlarged, nothing dwelt on. All the rest is pursuit and escape, shape upon shape: no blow is struck in either chase, the queen's death is of grief, told in a breath, and no one else is harmed in the tales read here. No completeness is claimed for this stretch of the book.

The book's storytellers, kept with honour: José M. Hilario ("The King and the Dervish"); Leopoldo Uichanco ("The Mysterious Book").

Chapters:

00:10 — The King and the Dervish

02:53 — The Mysterious Book

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 7 of the Philippine tales follows on this shelf.

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