Olcott - Story of the Tiger and the Man - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

 

Monday is Global Tiger Day.  The World Wildlife Fund encourages us to "adopt a tiger." No, they don't want you to bring tigers into homes, they want you to Symbolically Adopt a Tiger, supporting their critical conservation work around the globe.

Looking for stories about tigers, a little over two years ago I posted a story by Flora Annie Steel in her Tales of the Punjab, "The Close Alliance." Since the tiger's range is Asia, it's not surprising there is a certain similarity to stories about them. People or animals try to outwit them.  At the same time the tiger is occasionally a trickster outwitted. Wiggin and Smith's The Talking Beasts has many fables like that. I was trying to find something different -- in Public Domain, of course. I was happiest with a Tibetan tale in Frances Jenkins Olcott's The Wonder Garden. Perhaps because Tibet is so isolated it is slightly (but only slightly) different.

I like the introduction with the elderly Father Tiger on his deathbed warning his three younger tigers against hunting or killing Man. The biggest threat to tigers is indeed due to people being unable to coexist with this beautiful but deadly predator. 

When I was a full-time librarian I used to tell classes even if their teachers didn't permit encyclopedia articles in their reports, they should still start there! Why? To get an overview of their topic. Today Wikipedia is the encyclopedia to check. The Tiger article is worthwhile, showing so much about tigers including that this endangered animal has lost two subspecies.  Panthera tigris sondaica has three types of cats: Javan Tiger "thought to have gone extinct by the 1980s.    ^[23]";  Bali Tiger^"The tiger went extinct in the 1940s.^[23]"; Sumatran Tiger which "is the only surviving tiger population in the Sunda Islands, where the Bali and Javan tigers are extinct.^[3]"

The Sumatran Tiger is considerably reduced. It and other tigers are best preserved by efforts to prevent hunting or poaching them, but habitat loss will continue to add to the difficulty of their co-existing with humans. This is why the World Wildlife Fund says 

Now for the story (found on The Internet Archive.)

Illustration by Milo Winter in The Wonder Garden

 

 

The man in the story may be forgiven for self-preservation, but the dwindling numbers of Tigers today requires us to think of his "beautiful stripes" and "long lashing tail" while keeping ourselves and livestock safe from his "great teeth and claws." The man is smarter in this story and it's up to us on this Global Tiger Day to save wildlife and wild places so this beautiful creature still exists.

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

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