Episode Details

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Part Seven 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 eleventh tale, in his order. (Parts One to Six carried tales one to ten; the Dutch tales are read here part by part — this is not the whole book. The eleventh tale stands alone in this part, and Part Eight opens with the book's twelfth tale.)

The Oni on His Travels — Griffis's bridge tale between Japan and Holland. The onis are Japan's mischievous little imps, fond of saké and soy, of crockery shops and practical jokes, and not dangerous. When the great Tycoon sends a shipload of Japanese curiosities as a present to the Prince of the Dutch, one young oni stows away in the drawer of a lady's lacquer cabinet, comes out among the cheeses and pickled herrings of the palace at The Hague to the uproar of the servants — who cannot agree whether it was a monkey, a ram, or a pug dog, or what language it spoke — puts on a pair of wooden shoes to hide its tracks, rides a cow home to the stable, ruins the farm wife's best lace cap with a spilled bottle of soy, climbs the chimney, and is at last found dead in the cellar, done in, as Griffis tells it, by fright and the strange strong smells of Holland; and a Delft baker takes the body as the model for the clay gargoyles on the churches of the Netherlands. In keeping with this shelf's practice, the tale stands as Griffis told it: the museum leg of the opening stands in his reported folk-telling, the butler's carving knife, the men's clubs and the farmer's gun stand as threat and readiness with no blow struck and no shot fired, the farm wife's broom whack as one comic blow from which the oni escapes unhurt, and the oni's death in the tale's closing summary, no hand against him and no suffering told; no completeness is claimed beyond what is read here.

Chapters:

00:10 — The Oni on His Travels

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 8 of the Dutch tales follows on this shelf.

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