As for Daylight Saving Time, I don't know, but love that "Fall back" into sleeping later (going to bed later always just seems to happen no matter what). "Spring forward" for me is Bah Humbug! All this sent me hunting and then I found the 2016 posting of the Cherokee tale of "The Origin of Disease and Medicine" where bears and then other animals bring disease upon people for humans hunting and otherwise hurting them.
Bears may not be cuddly in real life, but they do make for some good stories. I decided to look at what stories were saved at the old Story-Lovers site on the Archive.org Wayback Machine's listing of website "snapshots." It wasn't as easy as in the past, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016 and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you. As it turned out, the coverage for bears didn't produce any stories I wanted.
One of the best known bear stories, which has been used to produce evidence of the Scandinavian influence (Vikings in Canada!) in North America with the Native Americans/First Nations, is the story of "Why the Bear Is Stumpy Tailed" or variations on its title. I love telling it and can't believe I never gave it here. Many of our North American nations, whether the Canadian First Nations or down below in the U.S., tell this story also found in Scandinavian folklore. There's no way I can say one is better than another, but, going back to that 1907 Firelight Stories book used earlier, I find the retelling by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey catches its humor succinctly in two pages.
Guess I need to change my description of how to fish for more stories on the old Story-Lovers website. It's a great resource and want people to continue using it. Thank you, Jackie Baldwin, for all your work for 12 years in keeping it going.
*******************
This
is part of a series of postings of stories under the category,
"Keeping the Public in Public Domain." The idea
behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the
authors and their immediate heirs were compensated. I feel
strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the
20th century. My
own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public
Domain I decided to share stories from them. I hope you enjoy
discovering new stories.
At
the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates
projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an
audience. Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing
of Public Domain stories will not occur that week. This is a return to
my regular posting of a research project here. (Don't worry, this
isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future
storytelling to an audience.) Response has convinced me that "Keeping
the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other
postings as often as I can manage it.
Other
Public Domain story resources I recommend-
- There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection. I have long recommended it and continue to do so. He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm
- You may have noticed I'm no
longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his
offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking
specific types of stories. There's another site, FairyTalez
claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales,
folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for
phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"
-
David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html
-
Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain
-
Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html
-
Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales
-
Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible
through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's
wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google
search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ . It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016 and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.
-
Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html
-
World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links. Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job. In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it. Possibly searches maintained it. Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine. It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!
Somebody
as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website
is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.
I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can
be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that
becomes the only way to find them.
You
can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun
discovering even more stories!
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