Jordan - The Goat Who Couldn't Sneeze - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

 This coming week is normally a time for celebrating, both Star Wars (May the Fourth...be with you) and Cinco de Mayo.  There's not a lot I do involving storytelling around Star Wars with the possibility of group story creation.  Cinco de Mayo, on the other hand, has many opportunities for storytelling. If you look into the 7 things you may not know about Cinco de Mayo, however, it officially celebrates a somewhat obscure time in Mexico's long history.  It is not Mexican Independence Day, that is September 16 and started in 1810 when Mexico declared its independence from Spain.  (Beyond the earlier hotlink of 7 quick facts about Cinco de Mayo, you may be interested in the entire presentation on it from history.com.) It's interesting that Cinco de Mayo is hardly celebrated in Mexico, but is a big fiesta in the United States.

Why?

It's a great way to celebrate Mexican culture -- which on this blog has a focus on Mexican folklore -- and who doesn't enjoy a reason for some celebration?!?

Found on Facebook's Goat Life group

(by Captain Dan Bison) celebrating Cinco de Mayo

If you have the opportunity to tell a story, I found today's tale a lot of fun.  I've kept goats in my past and can just picture the title character in Philip D. Jordan's delightful look at a goat trying to be like other animals.  (I have another connection I'll give after the story.)  Dr. Jordan's tale comes from his book, The Burro Benedicto and other Folk Tales and Legends of Mexico which was published in 1960.  Those familiar with Public Domain may wonder why it is no longer under copyright.  Prior to the most recent U.S. Copyright law it was covered for 28 years and then was only covered further if renewed.  Jordan died in 1980 and his heirs, a wife and daughter, didn't renew his work.  That helps us with today's story for Keeping the Public in Public Domain.  Sadly only two libraries in Michigan still have this book.

The book is illustrated by Richard M. Powers.  The reason for his strange twisting path at the bottom of some of the pages will be revealed within the story.  

You might introduce it by asking, "Have you ever tried unsuccessfully to do something it seems everybody else can do?"  Then give an example from your own life.  For example I've never figured out how to whistle using fingers in my mouth.  Instead I can make a fairly quiet whistle my mother used to call a "penny whistle."  

Down in Mexico there once was a goat with an unusual problem.

Of course you can ask your audience to do a big pretend sneeze with you to end the tale.  The story has many opportunities for audience participation.  For example you can assign some of the animals to specific people or parts of the audience, possibly making a particular motion or sound for their animal.  Other ways you can personalize it is by sprinkling the story with as many Spanish words you feel comfortable adding without weighing the story down.

I mentioned earlier I have a further connection beyond my years with goats.  My late husband kept bees.  While I don't keep them, I always try to point out their importance to pollinating our agriculture.  (The continued use in the U.S. of neonicotinoid pesticides is endangering this useful insect.)  Fear of bees is a common phobia and all too often the reaction is actually to yellow jacket wasps, who also are yellow with black stripes.  I've covered this mix-up here many times and also on my website page about nature storytelling programs.  Bees die after stinging, so they only sting if threatened, while the more irritable yellow jacket can and will sting repeatedly.  I particularly love the Anishinaabe tale about how this came to be.  It's one of many stories here about  bees.

Found on Ancestry.com

Earlier I gave only the briefest of coverage about today's author, Philip Dillon Jordan, but want to say a bit more about him beyond that dry obituary link.  Internet searching produces many scholarly articles by him as he was a University of Minnesota professor and continued writing in retirement up through the year he died.  Many of his works relate to how he viewed history and its relationship to folklore.  He was especially fond of folk music.  I need to hunt up his work on a topic related to the important Civil War era Hutchinson Family Singers, which I've discussed here in relation to my Civil War programs.  Information about Dr. Jordan himself, however, so far has only produced genealogical facts and photos.  In The Burro Benedicto and other Folk Tales and Legends of Mexico he mentions the stories came from when he lived in Mexico and wasn't working.  He loved to talk with people there and hear their stories.  Academic that he was, he gave his sources from the people who told him their stories.  Today's story came from a couple who were even more impossible to find on the internet:

You don't have to be a missionary to enjoy today's story or the fun of celebrating Cinco de Mayo.  After all, it's a great way to have fun while celebrating a culture.  

Fiesta!  

********* 

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!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - 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 the late 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/ 
           - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.

     
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!

 

 

Olcott - Old-Man-Who-Made-the-Trees-to-Blossom - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

This past week was Earth Day and also here in the mitten-shaped state of Michigan we had some hard freezes after above normal temperatures for most of the month.  Spring, especially the month of April can be so fickle.  Here in southeastern Michigan I've enjoyed the many blooming trees I see on my hiking in our area.  This has me watching to be sure the freezing hasn't hurt the blooms.  Since spring blooming is normally in a chilly time, I'm hopeful they are hardy.  

This is especially true for our state because our cherries are a major part of both our agriculture and tourism.  Recently in 2012 those blossoms suffered record damage.  As the PBS News Hour noted it was A Sour Season for Michigan's Cherry Farmers and also included the blossoms on peaches and apples.  Prior to 2012 we had a slightly lesser, but similarly devastating, early warmth followed by cold in 2002.  The area affected was around Traverse City in the opposite northwestern corner of the state.  PBS's Science reporter, Saskia de Melker, noted that area 

is considered by many an ideal place for growing fruit.  Located on the 45th parallel, halfway between the equator and the North Pole, the surrounding Great Lakes and rolling hills help create a temperate climate.

Traverse City Festivals Events page

I also mentioned tourism and Traverse City has not just one, but two festivals related to all of this.  Blossom Day is scheduled for the third weekend in May followed by the Blessing of the Blossoms.  In July there's planned their eight-day National Cherry Festival, which is both one of their oldest festivals and one of the nation's largest.  That title is easily confused with the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C.

It's understandable that Traverse City separates its blossom celebration from the later big summer harvest festival.  Most people are familiar with Washington D.C.'s cherry trees.  They are part of a larger Wikipedia article on the Cherry Blossom, but this section on our capitol's trees is related to today's story:

Japan gave 3,020 cherry blossom trees as a gift to the United States in 1912 to celebrate the nations' growing friendship, replacing an earlier gift of 2,000 trees that had to be destroyed due to disease in 1910. These trees were planted in Sakura Park in Manhattan and lined the shore of the Tidal Basin and the roadway in East Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. The first two original trees were planted by first lady Helen Taft and Viscountess Chinda on the bank of the Tidal Basin. The gift was renewed with another 3,800 trees in 1965.^[105][106] In Washington, D.C. the cherry blossom trees continue to be a popular tourist attraction (and the subject of the annual National Cherry Blossom Festival) when they reach full bloom in early spring.

Their festival this year was March 20 to April 11 as their area is further south with an earlier spring.

Yachounomori Garden, Tatebayashi-shi(city) Gunma-ken(Prefecture), Japan

Mentioning the Japanese origin of those trees leads to today's story which anthologist Frances Jenkins Olcott just describes as a Japanese folktale with no mention of the source where she found it nor how she may have retold it.  Her Acknowledgements section simply says that Japanese tales (she mentions a few, but not this story) "are from Davis, Myths and Legends of Japan and Gordon Smith, Ancient Tales and Folk-Lore of Japan."  I don't have either, but would try to find them before telling this story.  At its end I want to give a storytelling note. 

 I might use a slightly different way to tell this story which has the Tale Type of "The Envious Neighbor."  It's a tale type often found in Asian folktales.

O.k. maybe Japanese folklore ends the story this way.  Maybe I'm also cynical about this "happily ever after" ending of the tale with kindness, not only on the part of the good old couple, since they have consistently been trusting, but also by their greedy old neighbors.  It seems the story should be stopped prior to the final paragraph.  Ask your audience what they think the ending should be.  At that point either congratulate them for sharing the view of the Japanese storytellers OR that their view differs from Japanese tradition.

There are more possibilities for using this to teach kindness, especially in view of recent news stories about Hate Crimes, including those directed at Asian Americans.  There's a reason stories throughout the ages have been used to teach values.

********************

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!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - 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 the late 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/ 
           - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.

     
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!

Hulbert - How Mr. Rabbit Cured the Princess - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Today's story is a perfect example of a technique for story creation.  Last week's story from Omjee the Wizard

was able to stand as a complete story, but it left the poor Sea King's daughter dying.  When a story ends with an issues unresolved -- yes, even the old "and they lived happily ever after" -- it's a perfect opportunity to create a whole new story. 

Last week I tossed around the idea of which came first the Korean tale or the better known Swahili or the Panchatantra versions commonly called something like "The Heart of a Monkey"?  The question remains, but last week's tale is certainly well-known.  Today it's told as a P'ansori, a Korean musical form with a drum accompanying the teller.  Britanica calls it folk opera and, since some can last 3 hours, I'd say Pansori is indeed operatic, but last week's story is one of five in its repertoire still told.  It's known as Sugungga and is lighter than all the others for its personification of animals, unlike the rest of the five.

Pansori performance at the Busan Cultural Center in Busan South Korea

 

Nowadays as "Sugungga" those variants are very similar to the other variants omitting the king's daughter, having the king seek a body part of a rabbit, who tricks him.  Recently Daniel San Souci created his own version, The Rabbit and the Dragon King, obviously influenced by the humor of the Pansori and attributing it to being "recorded as early as A.D. 642 during Korea's Shila Dynasty."  His version has the rabbit give the hypochondriacal king a persimmon.  The king is cured by what he believes is the rabbit's heart.  

After today's story there's an interesting botanical follow-up to today's story.  I don't know if Homer Hulbert heard this story as a Pansori, but, lacking a drum, let us look at "the rest of the story."  Again we have several of the same characters as last week, but a totally different rabbit and also borrow an element of yet another common tale type best known in the Grimm story of "The Fisherman and His Wife."

Hulbert, in his Preface says his book's stories "have been taken directly from the folk-lore of Korea."  His work with that literature was fairly extensive for a non-Korean in the late 19th century after roughly 20 years living there.  It makes me think some teller in the distant past had a request for that "rest of the story."  He does admit to combining "the flavor of the Korean story" while toning it down for children "without emasculating the essential meaning."

That change may be debated as harming the authentic folklore.  Certainly Hulbert created a frame story beyond the actual tales, such as his storyteller, the blind wizard, Omjee.  Stories not only travel, as mentioned last week, but they also change.  Storytellers don't always repeat a story perfectly, due to faulty memories or the need for story creation.  

Music and poetry have helped memorization over the centuries.  Korean medicine actually used the Pansori of "Sugungga" with a character known as Yaksungga reciting a rhyming song of Korean medicinal herbs and their properties as a mnemonic device.  It's said this helped people learn medical knowledge of the time.

In a further case of life imitating art, Scientists combine house plant with rabbit DNA, forming what its creator calls a "green liver" to remove cancer-causing indoor air pollution toxins.  Somewhere the creator of today's story is probably smiling.

************

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!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - 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 the late 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/ 
           - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.

     
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!

Hulbert - The Sea-King's Daughter - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Today's story may sound familiar to folklore fans.  I'll give its better known versions at the end.  See if you recognize it.  Stories travel.  Did this originate in Korea or travel there?  

Homer B. Hulbert's book, Omjee the Wizard is not well known nor even included in the earliest English standard folklore index nor its supplements, Index to Fairy Tales, Myths, and Legends by Mary Huse Eastman started in 1915 (with later editions eventually continued by Norma Olin Ireland and Joseph W. Sprug).  I bought the book because, as its subtitle notes, it's "Korean Folk Stories."  Having Korean daughters, I had to have it!  

Being published in 1925, I renewed my interest in it because books from that year have just entered the Public Domain.  Because its binding was a bit loose I went looking to find an online copy, but there is none as of this writing.  Since the name of Hulbert isn't Korean, I also went looking to see more about the book and its author.  Its Preface states the author's background as being "the result of twenty years of residence in Korea and some considerable examination of that literature, but especially of personal contact with the people in their ordinary life and avocations where folk-lore persists at its best."  I checked further, starting with Wikipedia, which certainly showed his own comment was a major understatement.  A more thorough explanation is found in the Korea.net article, "Loving Korea More Than Koreans."  Hulbert is shown as important to both its literature in the late 19th century and worked hard in the 20th century for Korean independence at personal cost.  He was invited back to Korea by its first President.  Hulbert died there a week after his return saying, "I would rather be buried in Korea than at Westminster Abbey."  His achievements might have earned him a burial that unusual.  It is repeated on his tombstone in the Yanghwajin Foreigners' Cemetery.

There is more to be said about today's story and its book, but for now let the story speak for itself.

Mr. Rabbit got on his back and they went down into the water. 

Intentionally I omitted this picture which faces the title page.  It's not shown again during the story, but comes from page 33 in the midst of the tale.  For those familiar with many folktales, the picture gives away its more commonly known version, "The Heart of a Monkey", which Wikipedia places as either a Swahili tale(which would place it in either East or Southern Africa) or part of the Panchatantra (which would place it in India "roughly 200 BCE – 300 CE, based on older oral tradition.")  So did it start in Korea or travel there?  It's impossible to say, but the story certainly traveled a lot! -- more than Mr. Rabbit on Dr. Tortoise.

Hildegard Lupprian was the book's illustrator.  Her name is attached to many children's books.  She was not even remotely Korean, but was assigned the book by the publisher, Milton Bradley Company, better known for its games and puzzles.

Next week I want to bring another story from the same book which does something very creative and not found in those other versions of the story.  It resolves the tale of "The Sea-King's Daughter" and what happens to her!  Admit it, don't you wonder?

******************  

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!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - 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 the late 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/ 
           - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.

     
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!