Perseverance Wins - Anonymous - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Today may be April Fools' Day, but it's no joke that unfortunately the court case of Hachette v. Internet Archive about online access to digital books went in favor of the four major publishers suing the Internet Archive.  This is only the beginning of the battle.  Appeals were to be expected no matter who won as the principle of borrowing through libraries is involved.  As the Internet Archive blog article, "The Fight Continues" stated:

This decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.

For a non-library look at the case, Time Magazine's online article is worth seeing for an overview of the case from beyond the views of either parties.  It does a fair assessment of the principles involved. 

Personally I consider it dangerous that digital e-books are not owned by libraries in the same way a physical book is owned.  

I found, yes, at Internet Archive, a story showing not only the importance of books and reading, but also the importance of libraries which obviously were unavailable at the time of the story.  It's in a 1914 book with the dull sounding title of A Course in Citizenship edited by Ella Lyman Cabot.  In the footnotes we are told the story, "Perseverance Wins" is abridged  from Fanny E. Coe's 1908 textbook, A School Reader, Fourth Grade.  I wasn't able to track down that book online, but know I have some of her readers downstairs in my basket of books for my "One-Room School Teacher" program.

One other quick bit of information about the story, there are two parts to it.  The second part takes place many years after the first.  It begins with the words "Last year I went to Europe" and is a necessary conclusion to this story told by "Judge Preston."

 

Even though libraries are the major buyers of books, publishers have long worked against library lending.  The current case involving digital rights will have far reaching consequences.  The four publishers' legal departments have no problem affording the fight on this case all the way up to the Supreme Court.  The Internet Archive is a non-profit with limited resources (best put to their continuing work instead of legal bills). On their home page at https://archive.org/ they point out:

The Internet Archive is a crucial resource, but fewer than 1 in 1000 of our patrons donate; we're powered by contributions averaging $25.51. If you find our library useful, please pitch in.

I do support them financially and hope you do, too.  This valuable resource also hosts The Wayback Machine, which archives websites.  The Wayback Machine includes this blog, my own website, https://www.lois-sez.com/, and a great many more.  I always follow a "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" segment with a list of further online storytelling resources.  One of those, Jackie Baldwin's site, Story-Lovers.com, was a cumulative site crammed with story suggestions from storytellers on the email list, Storytell.  That email list is now hosted by the National Storytelling Network and their archive picks up shortly before Jackie's site ended.  She also edited her listing of resources, so it is not the same as prowling the listserv's archive.  Jackie has gone to storytelling in the Great Beyond, but the Wayback Machine gives the last chance to view her wonderful resource on December 22, 2016 (search it internally, not via an external search engine like Google).  

I similarly have been able to view sites no longer online through the Wayback Machine.  I would dread the loss of this way to access online resources.  Books and letters on paper have their own danger of disappearing, but online digital preservation is also critical, whether saving old books or websites.  Just as Public Domain preserves our culture, the Internet Archive is preserving it digitally . . . the ramifications of Hachette v. Internet Archive are not an April Fools' Joke the future can afford.

****************  

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 December 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

Woodson - How the Dog Became the Friend of Man - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

This week I said a final goodbye to the best dog ever!

He had been a family member since the autumn of 2011.  For now I can only say I'm sure our pets must go to heaven or it wouldn't be heavenly there without them!

Do I have stories about him?  You bet I do, but for now I'm not ready to share them.  I also am not ready again to become a "fur-ever" home, but plan to foster senior malamutes.  If I can't resist going further, it will become obvious, but for now this wonderful dog is truly the best dog I've ever had the blessing to know.

I wanted to find a story to memorialize him and thought instantly of Simon Otto's "Dog Legend" in his book, We Walk in Peace.  I tried unsuccessfully to find it again in other Anishinaabe anthologies from the Public Domain.  Simon didn't choose stories to share that are well-known.  He did choose to share them with me.  Since he,too, has gone on the Long Walk (probably with a dog or dogs by his side) I have tried unsuccessfully to contact his heirs (his wife, Mary?) for permission to reprint his works.  Perhaps this is a call to try further.  All of his books are now out-of-print, but can probably be found by searching.  I have them all, complete with his encouragement to share them.  If you go looking, all his books are stories of the Anishinaabek except for Aube Na Bing; A Pictorial History of Michigan Indians and even there he slips in three legends.  "Aube na bing" means "looking back" and I look back on the ways he helped me and others appreciate this part of our state's too often missed culture, a culture that reached across the border to nearby members of Canada's First Nations.  I also remember he was criticized for sharing some stories considered "sacred."  Eventually that criticism died down, possibly recognizing the value of his sharing, but I never notice his name in the listing of important Ojibway.  I did, however, discover an excellent article in the "Petoskey News-Review" where he had a column for several years called "Talking Leaves."  The pair of interviews it contains show much about this storyteller who ended his stories with the message of "Walk in Peace."

Since I was unable to find a way to include the Anishinaabe legend of how the dog came to live with people, I wound up further away with Carter Woodson's African Myths and Proverbs.  Doctor Carter Godwin Woodson, deserves recognition for his own cultural work.  Woodson became the second African American, after W. E. B. Du Bois, to obtain a PhD degree from Harvard University. Woodson is the only person whose parents were enslaved in the United States to obtain a PhD in history.  An American historian, author, journalist, he was one of the first scholars to study the history of the African diaspora, including African-American history.  In 1926, Woodson pioneered the celebration of "Negro History Week, which of course is now Black History Month.  He split his attention between the U.S. and its African origins.  Here is his story of "How the Dog Became the Friend of Man", but there is no identification of its source beyond saying in the anthology's subtitle "Folk Tales from Various Parts of Africa."  

***

No doubt the story was repeated again and again throughout earliest history all over the world.  Dogs truly are "Man's best friend."

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

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

Aung - How Friendship Began Among the Birds - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

This summer many libraries will use the Collaborative Summer Library Program theme of "All Together Now."  When thinking about programs, one librarian's response gave me an idea on how to fit it into storytelling.  She asked, "What do we do after Friendship Bracelets?!?"  Another librarian in a small city said they were going to focus on the world, including international stories.  

This is when I came up with Friendship Stew

It is indeed "free from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, gender identity" as the CSLP theme proposes and will have a stewpot filled with the names of stories about friendship from all over the world.  Additionally all attendees will have their name in a saucepan to be able to draw out the next story name.  The topic of friendship must cover both the good and the bad examples -- what child hasn't had a problem with someone they thought was a friend?  As much as possible, those stories will also include audience participation.  

Me playing dulcimer in my One-Room School program

In between stories, that saucepan of attendees will again be involved.  Many songs let a child choose an action everybody does.  For example the old favorite of "If you're happy and you know it" can become "If you're friendly and you know it", letting the chosen child name the group's next action.  I plan to use my Mountain Dulcimer, one of many folk instruments I enjoy playing and deserves to be better known.  (I always find great interest in this instrument that has three names: Mountain Dulcimer; Appalachian Mountain Dulcimer; and Lap Dulcimer -- as it's played sitting down and totally unlike the Hammered Dulcimer.  I don't want to get Hammered!)

There are stories from every continent and major ethnic group in that stewpot.  Here's a short tale from Burmese Folk Tales by Maung Htin Aung that can be found at the Internet Archive.  (After the story I want to say more about the Internet Archive.)  Burma is now called Myanmar, but the language is still called Burmese.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering millions of free books, movies, & audio files, plus billions of saved web pages in the Wayback Machine.  Along with Project Gutenberg, and Wikipedia, I annually donate and suggest you do, too.  These three resources are so important to this blog and to me as a reader.  I hope you donate, too, and want you to be aware of how they are fighting for the right of libraries to continue lending, including digitally.  Four major publishers are suing the Internet Archive trying to shut down the digital lending program.  Digital books are not owned by the libraries, although the cost is substantial, and don't stay available indefinitely, unlike a printed book.  There is much information available on the lawsuit which is now beginning oral arguments on March 20.  This is a brief overview of the situation. 

I also hope you go to their Battle for Libraries website and sign their petition.

These digital resources are volunteer-driven and deserve our Friendship!

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

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

"The Banshee" - Lady Wilde - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

This past week was the full moon, and that moon is once again stirring up wild weather.  Next week is all the celebrating -- some beginning this weekend -- for Friday's St. Patrick's Day.  On March 7, the day of that full moon, various folklore contributors to Twitter celebrated the "Ghoul Moon."  Finding information beyond Twitter on contributors can feel like traveling down a rabbit hole.  Signe Maene is one of two co-founders of Salt&Mirrors&Cats along with "Superstition Sam."  Looking at the Ghoul Moon, they posted a quote from Lady Wilde's book, Ancient Legends of Ireland.   The quote was from the introduction to three short stories about "the Banshee."  They introduced it with this illustration by Saeed Ramez.  

THE BANSHEE.

The Banshee means, especially, the woman of the fairy race, from van, “the Woman—the Beautiful;” the same word from which comes Venus. Shiloh-Van was one of the names of Buddha—“the son of the woman;” and some writers aver that in the Irish—Sullivan (Sulli-van), may be found this ancient name of Buddha.

As the Leanan-Sidhe was the acknowledged spirit of life, giving inspiration to the poet and the musician, so the Ban-Sidhe was the spirit of death, the most weird and awful of all the fairy powers.

But only certain families of historic lineage, or persons gifted with music and song, are attended by this spirit; for music and poetry are fairy gifts, and the possessors of them show kinship to the spirit race—therefore they are watched over by the spirit of life, which is prophecy and inspiration; and by the spirit of doom, which is the revealer of the secrets of death.

Sometimes the Banshee assumes the form of some sweet singing virgin of the family who died young, and has been given the mission by the invisible powers to become the harbinger of coming doom to her mortal kindred. Or she may be seen at night as a shrouded woman, crouched beneath the trees, lamenting with veiled face; or flying past in the moonlight, crying bitterly: and the cry of this spirit is mournful beyond all other sounds on earth, and betokens certain death to some member of the family whenever it is heard in the silence of the night.

---

The Banshee even follows the old race across the ocean and to distant lands; for space and time offer no hindrance to the mystic power which is selected and appointed to bear the prophecy of death to a family. Of this a well-authenticated instance happened a few years ago, and many now living can attest the truth of the narrative.

A branch of the ancient race of the O’Gradys had settled in Canada, far removed, apparently, from all the associations, traditions, and mysterious influences of the old land of their forefathers.

But one night a strange and mournful lamentation was heard outside the house. No word was uttered, only a bitter cry, as of one in deepest agony and sorrow, floated through the air.

Inquiry was made, but no one had been seen near the house at the time, though several persons distinctly heard the weird, unearthly cry, and a terror fell upon the household, as if some supernatural influence had overshadowed them.

Next day it so happened that the gentleman and his eldest son went out boating. As they did not return, however, at the usual time for dinner, some alarm was excited, and messengers were sent down to the shore to look for them. But no tidings came until, precisely at the exact hour of the night when the spirit-cry had been heard the previous evening, a crowd of men were seen approaching the house, bearing with them the dead bodies of the father and the son, who had both been drowned by the accidental upsetting of the boat, within sight of land, but not near enough for any help to reach them in time.

Thus the Ban-Sidhe had fulfilled her mission of doom, after which she disappeared, and the cry of the spirit of death was heard no more.

---

At times the spirit-voice is heard in low and soft lamenting, as if close to the window.

Not long ago an ancient lady of noble lineage was lying near the death-hour in her stately castle. One evening, after twilight, she suddenly unclosed her eyes and pointed to the window, with a happy smile on her face. All present looked in the direction, but nothing was visible. They heard, however, the sweetest music, low, soft, and spiritual, floating round the house, and at times apparently close to the window of the sick room.

Many of the attendants thought it was a trick, and went out to search the grounds; but nothing human was seen. Still the wild plaintive singing went on, wandering through the trees like the night wind—a low, beautiful music that never ceased all through the night.

Next morning the noble lady lay dead; then the music ceased, and the lamentation from that hour was heard no more.

---

There was a gentleman also in the same country who had a beautiful daughter, strong and healthy, and a splendid horsewoman. She always followed the hounds, and her appearance at137 the hunt attracted unbounded admiration, as no one rode so well or looked so beautiful.

One evening there was a ball after the hunt, and the young girl moved through the dance with the grace of a fairy queen.

But that same night a voice came close to the father’s window, as if the face were laid close to the glass, and he heard a mournful lamentation and a cry; and the words rang out on the air—

“In three weeks death; in three weeks the grave—dead—dead—dead!”

Three times the voice came, and three times he heard the words; but though it was bright moonlight, and he looked from the window over all the park, no form was to be seen.

Next day, his daughter showed symptoms of fever, and exactly in three weeks, as the Ban-Sidhe had prophesied, the beautiful girl lay dead.

The night before her death soft music was heard outside the house, though no word was spoken by the spirit-voice, and the family said the form of a woman crouched beneath a tree, with a mantle covering her head, was distinctly visible. But on approaching, the phantom disappeared, though the soft, low music of the lamentation continued till dawn.

Then the angel of death entered the house with soundless feet, and he breathed upon the beautiful face of the young girl, and she rested in the sleep of the dead, beneath the dark shadows of his wings.

Thus the prophecy of the Banshee came true, according to the time foretold by the spirit-voice.

---

***

Did you notice that even "across the Pond" here in North America we are not safe from the Banshee?  

I promised to say a bit more about "Lady Wilde" -- Jane Francesca Agnes Wilde, who wrote under the pen name of Speranza.  Beyond her very thorough book on Irish folklore, she was a  poet and supporter of the Irish nationalist movement, along with being an early advocate for women's rights, especially their better education.  As if all that wasn't enough, she was Oscar Wilde's mother.  It is said that when she died, since her dying request to visit Oscar in prison was refused, her spirit appeared to him in prison.  A fitting end to these stories about the Banshee.  (Do read the Wikipedia article as even her burial and memorial involves a bit more fighting.)

As for her book, it contains all manner of legends,  human, fairy, animal, saints (eight on St. Patrick), and way more than fits this brief glimpse.

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

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

Good and Bad Weather - Riggs - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

As a northern peninsula, Michigan manages to have many weeks where there can be two seasons in it and even a day with two seasons.  The weather has been so awful in the rest of the country, that we've grown accustomed to this winter seeming balmy and almost over.  Yeahrightsure.  As I started to write this, the weather began with another "wintry mix", but fortunately not another ice storm.  The two storms this past week and a half coated everything with ice that was beautiful, but caused too many to lose power.  On Wednesday after that wintry mix we got to 50 degrees (don't ask me the celsius, please!) before plunging back on Friday into winter for accumulating snow.  Then came a major snow storm to our "bunny slope " of a hill that even our snow plow can't handle, preventing a storytelling trip to Jackson.  I've been on the other end of telling an audience a performer had to cancel.  I wouldn't do it if there was any way to prevent it.  UPDATE: Early morning call said they closed, too.

Other than coping with ice, this winter hasn't been too bad, but the Michigan March forecast has been for "normal" temperatures with "above normal" precipitation (a.k.a. winter's not finished with us yet even if I do see some crazy Michiganders in shorts!)

All this sent me looking for stories about the fickleness of weather.  The most northern state of Alaska has one I like.  Doctor Daniel Neuman was an amateur collector of both Alaskan artifacts and Native stories, making him a founding father of the Alaska State Museum.  His own story, complete with his father moving the family from Russia before the Revolution, is interesting enough, but he also came at a time when ethnography was catching the world's attention.  Those stories might have sat in a dusty collection except for Renée Coudert Riggs, who rewrote the stories for children.  While there may be some simplification, it does lend itself to storytelling.  In her introduction to Animal Stories from Eskimo Land (with the subtitle crediting Dr. Neuman) she explains:

It was Dr. Neuman who painstakingly made the splendid and unequaled collection of Eskimo antiquities and modern implements now on exhibit in the territorial museum at Juneau. The acquiring of this collection for the Territory was one of my husband’s last official acts as governor.

Every story in the anthology except this one has at least an introductory illustration by  George W. Hood and sometimes a second within the story.  Perhaps because this tale is so brief the illustration may have been omitted, but there are three in the book I think fit the problem facing the two boys.

Nowadays the use of the term Eskimo is controversial as it refers to both the Inuit and Yupik peoples and many consider it "of a disputed etymology, to be unacceptable and even pejorative."  Unfortunately the anthology doesn't mention either Inuit or Yupik, but the story would certainly fit both . . . as well as the rest of us in a time of changeable weather.  The Wikipedia article linked at the start of this paragraph goes on to say "Eskimo continues to be used within a historical, linguistic, archaeological, and cultural context."

So whether you are talking about the weather historically, linguistically, archaeologically, or culturally, this story uses Eskimo as stories, like the weather, blow from one place to another. 

GOOD AND BAD WEATHER

Long ago, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, two Eskimo boys were walking from their own home to a far-away village. While they were going along, a terrible storm overtook them and they had to hold each other by the hand to keep from falling. Pretty soon the wind rose so high, and the snow fell so fast, they felt they could go no farther. In despair, they clung to each other, blinded by the snow, when a tremendous gust of wind suddenly caught them, and blew them against the side of a little snow house. How glad they were to find shelter!

Inside the house was an old woman, living all alone. She was very kind and invited them to sit down and rest; then she gave them something to eat, and told them that she was going out.

“Do not look after me to see what I am doing,” said she, “or you will be sorry.”

She put on her parka and mukluks, and took her stone skin scraper in her hand and went out the door.

The Eskimo women have a scraper which they use to scrape the flesh, or meat, from the skin of the animals they prepare for clothing. This scraper is somewhat the shape of a carpenter’s plane. The blade is made of a sharp piece of stone. That was the kind of thing the old woman took out with her.

The boys were devoured with curiosity, and after she had gone the oldest one said, “Let us go out and look at her.” But the younger boy whispered, “No, no.” He was afraid; but his brother was determined to see what that old woman was doing out there with her knife, so he persuaded the little one to creep softly to the door with him, and peek out.

Where do you think the old woman was? And what do you think she was doing? Way up in the sky she sat, scraping away at the clouds. She had already scraped off half the clouds, and where she had scraped, the sky was as blue, as blue as could be, but the other half was still covered with thick black clouds.

When she saw the two boys peeping at her, she let go of the sky and fell down. As she came into the house, the boys were sitting on the floor, just as she had left them, hoping she had not really seen them looking at her.

“You rascals! You bad boys!” she cried. “You did just what I told you not to do. If you had not looked out at me, and made me fall off, I would have cleaned all the clouds away, and we should never have had any more storms. But alas! I cannot go up there again, and now we shall have both clear and cloudy weather.”

Ever since then it has been sometimes clear and sometimes stormy, because the old woman had only had time to clean off one-half of the sky.

***

I guess, like the old woman left it, we still must scrape away the snow and ice a bit longer.  Darn those boys!

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

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