Turandot's Sisters (RLE Folklore) by Christine Goldberg

Author:Christine Goldberg [Goldberg, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138845640
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

I. Cosmic Riddles

The three Turandot riddles have cosmic answers, as do riddles and wisdom questions in several tales from old literary sources.

Ia. The Year Riddle

Scholars have not yet completely clarified the relations of the comparisons of the year and the world to a tree. They may be dealing with two different ideas that have influenced each other or with two ideas that have sprung from the same root. … Although many scholars have investigated the year riddle, no one has yet written a definitive account of its origins, connections, and disseminations (ER 1037–1038).

So wrote Archer Taylor. Ancient oriental literary versions, independent as well as in narratives, are crucial to this problem. The oldest such image is Vedic, from perhaps 1200 B.C.: “Twelve felloes on a single wheel, and three naves, who can understand it?” (Rig-Veda 1: 164, cf. 1: 11, 14) A similar image appears in the Mahabharata when Ashtavakra shows his wisdom to the king: “the ever-turning wheel” is the answer, with no overt mention of the year or the cosmos. In the Achikar manuscripts the image is of a temple, in the Arabic, “What do you know of a builder, who built a palace out of 8760 stones and planted twelve trees in it, each of which has 30 branches and each branch has black and white grapes?” In the Syriac version, “There is a great temple and on one pillar of it are twelve cities, each city covered with thirty beams, and on each beam two women run.” In the Sháhnáma the riddle is simplified: “I saw twelve trees each with thirty branches.” It is followed by another question about two steeds, bright and dark—Day and night (see Chapter 2 for references).

In the oldest example of AT 851, Lit 1, riddle number ten describes a tree with twelve branches each with thirty leaves, black and white. This is the only riddle from that long list that found its way into the Turandot tales, AT 851A, where a simpler version is used. In the original Turandot, Lit 3, the “tree with leaves white on one side and black on the other” suggests that in addition to Turandot’s cruel side there is another good one, and contrasts her cruelty with her great beauty. All of these year-riddles in older tales are of Aarne’s “Asiatic” type, with branches and leaves rather than eggs and nests (1918, 74–178; see also Wünsche).

In modern tales, the year riddle is found in AT 851A:

Tale 1. A tree itself half joyful and half dismal [summer and winter] with leaves bright on one side and dark on the other.

Tale 2. A tree with half black, half white leaves.

It appears in AT 851o 3: “Who is the architect of the building of 366 stones, twelve trees with thirty branches, each with two clusters white and black?—God.” In AT 851C RS 8, an unsuccessful suitor offers a riddle in which a man is said to have twelve sons and thirty grandchildren.

This riddle is also used in many of the miscellaneous modern complex tales.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.