KacheliTV

KacheliTV — the world's stories, read aloud.

Looking for a story to fall asleep to, to ride with on a long drive, or to share at bedtime? Start here.

We read the folk tales and classics of every culture on Earth — complete and unabridged, never excerpts — in fresh English translations, performed by our cast of voices. The fairy tales of Ireland and Japan. The legends of India and Nigeria. Jamaica, the Netherlands, the Cherokee, the Norse — and the Russia of Pushkin and Krylov. The stories your grandmother knew, and stories from shores you've never heard — every culture in the spotlight, no one missed.

New tales arrive every week. Pick a shelf, press play, and let the world's grandmothers talk you to sleep.

Free always — here and on every podcast app. Prefer no commercials? Find us on Apple Podcasts.

From The Dog You Chose LLC, Gulfport, Florida. Public-domain sources, told with respect.

Find us:

YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/@KacheliTVFlorida

Telegram — https://t.me/kacheliTV

Website — https://dogyouchose.com

The Dog You Chose books — https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FYSTBLQ3

Our cast is a company of AI-generated voices, performing fresh in-house translations of public-domain works from every culture.

Play

Open in

489 episodes
Avg 29 min
English

Episodes 489

Newest Oldest Longest

All20 Unplayed20 In progress0 Played0

Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.

S37 · E1
October 17 · 15 min
Folk Tales of Venezuela — Part 1 (A Fortunate Monkey · Tobacco in Church · The Lake of Urao)
Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Folk Tales of Venezuela opens with three traditions and legends of Mérida and the Venezuelan Andes, gathered by Tulio Febres Cordero in his Tradiciones y leyendas (Mérida, 1911) — traditions he collected, as he writes, from old chronicles, documents, and the living voices of the people. They are read here in a fresh English translation made for this shelf. In A Fortunate Monkey, the whole bench of visiting bishops, with the dean and the chapter, hurries to a deathbed in the saintly Bishop Arias's house on the words "the cook is dying" — and finds that the dying one is the household's beloved pet monkey, who lived in the kitchen; the next day the university students paint his tomb with three mitres and an epitaph of their own. In Tobacco in Church, Dean Mendoza wages war on the canons' snuffboxes rattling through the Divine Office, and when a papal bull and the synodal constitutions have both failed, he lights a cigar in the choir himself: if it is allowed in powder, it must be allowed in smoke. One sentence of the tale recalls, as a historical reference only, a Muscovy statute of 1634 against snuff-takers; it is quoted, never enacted. In The Lake of Urao, a bard tells a traveller how the salt lake was formed from the tears of the petrified virgins of the Motatán, how it rose into the air like a cloud and travelled from resting place to resting place under the shelter of the Five White Eagles, and how an evil piache's secret held it fast at Lagunillas. The legend is presented complete, exactly as Febres Cordero wrote it in 1911. Chapters 0:20 A Fortunate Monkey 4:15 Tobacco in Church 8:41 The Lake of Urao From Tradiciones y leyendas (1911) by Tulio Febres Cordero — public domain. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript
S35 · E1
October 16 · 14 min
Folk Tales of Uruguay — Part 1 (Ñeambiú and Cuimbaé — The Origin of the Urutaú · The Paraguayan Woman and the Urutaú That Could Not Be Caught)
Folk Tales of Uruguay opens with two tales of the urutaú — the ghost-bird of the Río de la Plata — recorded in Uruguay by Daniel Granada in his Reseña histórico-descriptiva de antiguas y modernas supersticiones del Río de la Plata (Montevideo, 1896), and read here in a fresh English translation from Granada's Spanish. Granada lived for more than fifteen years in Salto, Uruguay, and wrote the book there. The urutaú's lore belongs to the Guaraní tradition of the whole Río de la Plata: Paraguayans, Misioneros, Correntinos, Entre-Ríanos, Orientales — that is, Uruguayans — and Brazilians all keep its Guaraní name, as Granada himself records; it is told here from one of its Uruguayan homes, not as Uruguay's alone. In Ñeambiú and Cuimbaé — The Origin of the Urutaú, the cacique's daughter and the Tupí prisoner who loves her are kept apart by her parents, and grief takes her voice and her feeling; neither her friends nor the diviner Aguará-Payé can call her back, until one word does — and the tale tells how the urutaú came to be, whose cry is a woman's lament ending in dying moans. In The Paraguayan Woman and the Urutaú That Could Not Be Caught, a mother and her little son set out for the stream bank twenty-one days running to snare the marvellous bird, and twenty-one times forget the one thing they went for, while the urutaú sits undisturbed on the same branch. Granada's book is a study of the folk beliefs of the Río de la Plata, and this shelf reads its tales only: the book's chapters on the lobizón, on la luz mala, on haunted places, on the salamanca, and on omens of death stand excluded by name in our shelf register and are not read here or anywhere on this shelf. One belief-line Granada quotes from Azara — that breaking the bird's wing and leg bones leaves it whole again by morning — is omitted from the reading, and a coarse word in a footnote about Don Quixote is never read. Chapters 0:32 Ñeambiú and Cuimbaé — The Origin of the Urutaú 11:36 The Paraguayan Woman and the Urutaú That Could Not Be Caught From Reseña histórico-descriptiva de antiguas y modernas supersticiones del Río de la Plata (1896) by Daniel Granada — public domain. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript
S17 · E9
October 16 · 8 min
Nasreddin Hodja — Part 9 of 20 (When I Was Alive)
Ten more anecdotes of the Hodja, from the courts of Timur and Bajazet to the neighbours of the old folk book. A blind poet, once the favourite of the viziers, answers the vizier who visits him with what his boy reads: curses against those who left his father unsupported. Promised anything he wants, Nasreddin asks ten gold pieces and builds a great gate in an open field — a monument the world will laugh at, while Tamerlan's victories draw tears; he saves Bajazet's officers with the offer of a two-man army, himself on the drum; and he corrects the Khan's arithmetic of generosity by one head — his own. Then the folk book takes over: a revenge demanded upon a camel, a whole day and night spent waiting on the evidence of a splashing fountain, a borrowed pan that first bears a young one and then dies, the sauce of the sauce of a hare served to the neighbours of the neighbours — and the Hodja himself, who saws off the branch he sits on, believes the stranger's prophecy, lies down dead, and from his own bier directs the bearers: when I was alive, I always went this way. From Der Hodscha Nasreddin by Albert Wesselski (1911), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud. Chapters: 0:00 Opening 0:05 What the Boy Reads 1:08 The Gate in the Open Field 2:03 You Take the Standard 2:54 One Head Too Few 3:26 Revenge on the Camel 4:27 I Must Finish First 4:58 Your Pan Has Died 5:52 When I Was Alive 7:18 The Sauce of the Sauce 8:18 Where Right Is in the Dark
- Transcript
S18 · E8
October 16 · 22 min
Northern Tales — Part 8 of 22 (Sea-Jumper · Reindeer-Born · Hare Story)
A young man driven from home crosses the breaking sea ice floe by floe, just as his father foretold, eats of birds that turn to rich sheep's meat upon the spit, hears the reindeer speak in the manner of men, and wins a wife who throws herself down and runs home as a she-wolf to fetch fire. A foundling born of a reindeer doe opens his mouth and swallows the herd whole, until his brother flees him in the night and finds a wife who beats the bushes with a pan-shovel for whipping her husband. And a Hare who visits the Man-Slayer out of curiosity talks his way off the cooking-line and out of the hatchet's reach, and hides under an Eagle-Woman's dish while his pursuer is carried up to the sky and dropped head-first into the earth. Chapters: 00:05 — Sea-Jumper 13:18 — Reindeer-Born 17:20 — Hare Story From Chukchee Mythology (1910) by Waldemar Bogoras — Part I of The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Vol. VIII (Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History). Public domain. These three tales open the book's Tales of Russianized Natives. Sea-Jumper was told by Theodosia, a Russianized Yukaghir woman, in the village of Two Brooks on the Large Anui, 1905; Reindeer-Born was told by Mary Alin, a Russianized Chuvantzy woman, at Markova on the Anadyr River, December 1905; and Hare Story was written down by the cossack Innocent Bereskin from the words of Mary Chahin, a Russianized Yukaghir woman, at Pokhotsk on the Lower Kolyma, 1895. Fresh English rendering by KacheliTV; Sea-Jumper is heard with its opening beating told in a single clause, Reindeer-Born with its hostess's former food left untold — her giving it up stands as the condition of her marriage — and the tale left unfinished as its teller left it, and Hare Story with the Hare's bag-of-meat trick left untold, per the shelf's screening ledger. Northern Tales gathers the Chukchi, Siberian Eskimo, Koryak, Yukaghir and Even tales from Bogoras's Jesup North Pacific Expedition volumes, in the books' own order. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript
S22 · E6
October 16 · 18 min
Folk Tales of France — Part 6 (The Women and the Devil · The Sorcerer · Jean-Jacques the Sailor)
Three more tales from the Diableries of Upper Brittany, in which the devil is outwitted, outworked, and outsailed. In The Women and the Devil, two short legends show why the women of Brittany are said to have more finesse than the men: a bride saves her bridegroom from his pact with a single hair of her head, and a farmer's wife rescues her husband from the servant he hired at the Saint-Pierre fair with a bottle of holy water. In The Sorcerer, a gentleman with a chest of books makes the mill of Launay grind with neither wind nor wave, and the book he carries — the Petit Albert — draws two further households into its magic: a rector's chambermaid is carried off in a breath of wind as she reads it, and a sick man's night watch is visited by gentlemen in red. In Jean-Jacques the Sailor, a captain ships a sailor who does the work of ten men by whistling, grows rich on three chests of gold-stones, and learns too late whom he has been sailing with. In The Sorcerer, the book tells in a single clause that the rector's chambermaid did not long survive her adventure; the clause is carried whole, exactly as the book gives it, and no completeness beyond the book's own telling is claimed for it. The Women and the Devil stands in the book without a named teller. The Sorcerer was told by Vincente Béquet, of Saint-Pôtan, in 1867, and its second anecdote by Angèle Quérinan, of Andouillé. Jean-Jacques the Sailor was told by Rose Renaud, of Saint-Cast, in 1879. Told in Upper Brittany, and collected by Paul Sébillot (1843–1918). Chapters: 00:09 The Women and the Devil 06:31 The Sorcerer 12:04 Jean-Jacques the Sailor From Paul Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne, Tome I (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering from the French. Folk Tales of France is KacheliTV's telling of Paul Sébillot's Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne — the great nineteenth-century collection of the tales of Upper Brittany. 🔊 Listen to the podcast: https://rss.com/podcasts/kachelitv/
- Transcript
S31 · E1
October 16 · 16 min
Folk Tales of Cabo Verde — Part 1 (The Tug-of-War · The Race · Are Monkeys People? · The Worn-Out Animals · Dividing the Cheese · Eggs or Beans)
Folk Tales of Cabo Verde opens with six tales from Elsie Clews Parsons' Folk-Lore from the Cape Verde Islands — the great collection she made from Cape Verdean storytellers in New England and published in 1923 — read in her own English, exactly as printed. The Tug-of-War. Little Rabbit ties one rope around Elephant's belly and the other end around Whale's tail, and sits back laughing while the two giants pull against each other — each certain the rabbit is dragging him. Afterwards Rabbit hides in a horse's skull, and Elephant has never come back to this day. The Race. Porpoise, the fastest fish in the sea, is beaten by two scallops and a relay; and Turtle outruns Goat-Gazelle over twenty miles, calling out at every five — which is why the turtle still comes ashore to lay her eggs, and watches for Goat-Gazelle when she does. Are Monkeys People? A monkey wife is sure that hands, feet and a face make her people. One trip to town, and the children's shouting, teach her otherwise; the cliffs are home after all. The Worn-Out Animals. A horse, a dog, a cat and a rooster, each turned out by his master for growing old, find a robbers' house in the night and frighten the robbers off — and the one robber who goes back tells the tallest tale of all about what met him inside. The scuffle is the book's own slapstick: scratches, a caught calf, a kick, and no worse. Dividing the Cheese. Two cats steal a cheese and take it to a monkey to divide fairly. He weighs, he nibbles the heavy side to even it, he weighs again — and the cats learn what his fairness costs. Eggs or Beans. Wolf leaves a dozen eggs unpaid, and twelve years later the bill has hatched into seven thousand chickens and twelve thousand dollars. In court, his friend Demon defends him with one question: if cooked eggs can hatch, why should cooked beans not sprout? The threats in the courtroom are the book's own dialogue, unacted, as printed in 1923. What stands around these six is not hidden. Much of Parsons' collection is the Wolf-and-Nephew trickster cycle, and a great many of those tales turn on killings, beatings and burnings; under this library's standing rule they are excluded, not softened, and the shelf makes no claim to the whole collection. Part 1 tells the tales that stand clean. Chapters 00:14 The Tug-of-War 03:04 The Race 05:13 Are Monkeys People? 07:28 The Worn-Out Animals 11:00 Dividing the Cheese 12:24 Eggs or Beans From Folk-Lore from the Cape Verde Islands (1923) by Elsie Clews Parsons — public domain. The tales were collected from Cape Verdean tellers in New England; the Creole texts printed beside the English are not read here. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud. 🔊 Listen to the podcast: https://rss.com/podcasts/kachelitv/
- Transcript
S33 · E1
October 16 · 16 min
Folk Tales of Micronesia — Part 1 (The Story of the Naming of Birds · The Flood Legend of Yap)
Folk Tales of Micronesia opens with two tales from the Caroline Islands, set down in English by F. W. Christian in The Caroline Islands (1899) — the first told on Pohnpei, the second told on Yap. Pohnpei and Yap are two of the four states of the Federated States of Micronesia, and these are their stories as Christian heard them in the islands in the 1890s, read here in his own words. In The Story of the Naming of Birds, Laponga, the terrible High Priest and wizard of Metalanim on Pohnpei, discovers that his forest children — the bird-people who once spoke and walked like men — have stolen the secret of his kava. His curse takes their human speech and shape forever, and the tale tells why the heron still croaks for a croak's worth of reason, why the dove wails for her lost children, why the little brown parrakeet falls giddy to the ground when a stone is thrown, and how the curse followed Laponga himself in the end. In The Flood Legend of Yap, told to Christian by Toluk, the old chief of Omin, the fairy's daughter who wed the mortal Maralok draws down her mother Loth's wrath, and the sea rises over nearly all Yap; the prudent couple who heed the warning survive on the hilltop, and Yalafath, the good spirit of the air, sends down the banana, the taro, and the yam, and calls the eight Kan into being — the generations of the children of Yap. The Flood Legend of Yap is an old sacred myth of the island, carried here as it was told and set down — its deaths are the universal deluge motif, told in single clauses, as the register in our shelf canon records. One item in the same book stands excluded by name in that register and is not read here or anywhere on this shelf: the traditional account of the fall of Nan Madol, a conquest narrative of invasion and slaughter. Chapters 0:15 The Story of the Naming of Birds 6:31 The Flood Legend of Yap From The Caroline Islands: Travel in the Sea of the Little Lands (1899) by F. W. Christian — public domain. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript
S30 · E1
October 16 · 16 min
Folk Tales of Taiwan — Part 1 (The Dragons of Woo-hoo-mun · The Twelve Earthen Jars · The Chief the Ancestors Named · Born from a Stone · The Tortoise from over the Sea)
Part one. The origin traditions of Formosa's peoples, as recorded by James W. Davidson in The Island of Formosa, Past and Present (1903) — the first account of the island's peoples placed before English readers, built from the investigations of the Japanese scholar Y. Ino. The Chinese legend of the dragons of Woo-hoo-mun, the Five-Tiger Gate, who sported in the ocean depths and heaved up Formosa's mountains; the Vonum bundle of green grass where the ancestors' spirits gather; the Tsou sacred tree and its orchid; the Tsalisen ancestors who came down from heaven with twelve earthen jars; the Parizarizao chief the ancestors named in a dream, after the great drought; the Ami ancestors born from a stone, and the Ami who came over the sea on the back of a large tortoise; and the storm-driven strangers of Botel Tobago, the island of splendid boats and great rats. One further tradition in Davidson's record, the Puyuma account of the stone-born ancestors and the battle with the suns, stands held in the shelf register and is not read here; the Botel Tobago first-parents tradition is likewise not read, and one clause of the Tsou orchid tradition is not read, per the register in the shelf canon. Chapters 0:04 The Dragons of Woo-hoo-mun 4:33 The Bundle of Green Grass 5:18 The Sacred Tree and the Orchid 6:16 The Twelve Earthen Jars 7:07 The Chief the Ancestors Named in a Dream 8:37 Born from a Stone 9:06 The Tortoise from over the Sea 11:58 The Strangers the Storm Brought From The Island of Formosa, Past and Present (1903) by James W. Davidson, public domain — the traditions of the island's peoples as he recorded them, in his own prose. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript
S29 · E1
October 16 · 18 min
Folk Tales of Honduras — Part 1 (A Tale of Three Tails)
Folk Tales of Honduras opens with the tale Charles J. Finger heard told in Honduras itself, at Pueblo de Chamelecón — a one-street town of straw-roofed houses on a little river, where he rode in on a donkey, watched the children swim, and spent the evening making music with the townsfolk. When the singing turned to the old song of the parrot and its refrain — "When the rat had a tail like a horse" — a very old woman, who wore a broken piece of carved jade showing a deer with a tail like a sheep dog's, told the tale that explains it, and Finger set it down just as she told it. It stands here complete, frame and all, in Finger's own English, exactly as he printed it in 1924. A Tale of Three Tails. In the days of Hunbatz, the wizard who lived in the dark of the great forest, the rat had a beautiful tail like a horse, the rabbit's tail was long and furry like a cat's, and the deer's was plumed like a dog's. Two brothers — the swiftest runners and the mightiest workers of their land — are sent to clear the vast forest in seven days. Hunbatz, fearing his hiding place will vanish, flies to their father with a lying report: "They sing and they play for half of the day," and the task is doubled, and doubled again, until no strength can meet it. Then the wise old iguana teaches the brothers a charm — rings of black, white, red and green painted round their tool handles, and a working song: "I must do what I can, is the thought of a man" — and the birds of the forest take up the chorus while the axes work by themselves. But Hunbatz and the animals undo the clearing by night, and the brothers set three traps and keep watch. What the traps caught, why the rat, the rabbit and the deer carry the tails they carry today, and how old Hunbatz himself became the armadillo — that is the old woman's tale. Tales from Silver Lands is, for the most part, a South American collection; this opening tale is its Honduran one — told in Honduras, and collected there by Charles J. Finger. No other claim is made for it, and none is needed. From Tales from Silver Lands (1924) by Charles J. Finger — public domain. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript
S19 · E14
October 16 · 26 min
Japanese Ghost Tales — Part 14 of 19 (The Story of Kogi the Priest · In a Cup of Tea · Common Sense)
Part fourteen of nineteen. Three more of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese ghost tales, in his own prose — The Story of Kogi the Priest closes A Japanese Miscellany's Strange Stories on this shelf, and In a Cup of Tea and Common Sense open Kottō (1902). In The Story of Kogi the Priest, the Miidera artist-priest who would paint fish only from life, and set them free, falls ill, seems to die, and wakes to tell how his soul swam Lake Biwa in the attire of the Golden Carp — and what he saw from inside the fisherman's basket. In a Cup of Tea, the attendant Sekinai swallows a stranger's face reflected in his tea, and is visited that night by its owner — a fragment Hearn leaves, as the old story-book left it, unfinished. In Common Sense, a learned priest is sure that Fugen Bosatsu rides nightly to his mountain temple — and the ignorant hunter who feeds him is just as sure that what all three of them can see cannot be the Buddha. All five of Hearn's own notes across the three pieces are spoken where he set them. Under the shelf's standard, one passage is carried without its depiction, per the exclusion register: the hunter's discovery in Common Sense is told without the blood-trail and the pierced body — the badger's death itself stands, as the book reports it. One further tale of Kottō's Old Stories stands held in the register, awaiting its ruling, and is not read here. Chapters 0:05 The Story of Kogi the Priest 13:03 In a Cup of Tea 19:47 Common Sense From A Japanese Miscellany (1901) and Kottō (1902) by Lafcadio Hearn, public domain — the ghost tales of Hearn's Japanese collections, told in his own order within each book, in Hearn's own prose, lightly modernized. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript
S22 · E8
October 16 · 18 min
Folk Tales of France — Part 8 (The Legend of Saint Mauron · The Death of the Rat · The Legend of Saint Lénard · Vadoyer · The Little Girl in a Well)
Folk Tales of France, Part Eight — five tales from the Contes divers, last division of Sébillot's first Breton volume, in a fresh translation; what the gate and the scan kept back is declared below. The Legend of Saint Mauron. A shepherd lad who will not miss mass walks the bounds of the moor with his spade, and a thorn hedge rises behind him — the Arm of Saint Mauron at Livré. The birds shut themselves in his barn while he hears mass; long after his death, a thief who comes by night for the grain in his chapel finds the saint keeps his word, and keeps him too, until the farmer prays him loose. The Death of the Rat. The rat climbs for the salt, slips, and falls into the boiling buckwheat porridge, dead before his wife sits to eat — and the house takes up the news: the table sings, the bench dances, the cupboard jumps, the door leaves its hinges, the plough ploughs, the girl breaks her pitcher, the fountain overflows, the geese fly away. The death is the tale's reported premise, in its refrain; no hand is laid on him. The Legend of Saint Lénard. A mischief-maker, converted by a sermon about an apple sweet within and ugly without, goes to help a carter he once tormented — and is killed by him, in a single clause. The peasants canonize him themselves, and his tomb outdraws the licensed shrines: a road-mender who doubts him is struck lame, and healed on his vow. The killing stands at source weight, one clause, as the book tells it. Vadoyer. A grain of wheat, a hen, a cow, a daughter: Vadoyer's goods keep dying in others' keeping, and each time the law is threatened and the next thing taken in payment. The hen is kicked dead by the cow, the cow struck dead by the milkmaid's stool in a temper — each in a single clause, as the book has them — and for the cow Vadoyer takes the girl herself, in a sack on his back. Her godmother, and a big dog, have the last word. The Little Girl in a Well. Oudelette lives in a well, prays every day, and wishes — a house, a cow, a dress the colour of her cow, a husband. Pride in the dress undoes her: too pleased to say her prayer, she wakes where she began, all vanished like a dream. The tellers, as Sébillot prints them: Saint Mauron by Jean Bouchery, of Dourdain, who learned it at Livré from his father; The Death of the Rat by Jean-Marie Hervé, of Pluduno, 1879; Saint Lénard without a teller's name; Vadoyer by Marie X, of Évran, 1878; The Little Girl in a Well by Virginie Hervé, of Évran, 1880. What stands around these five is not hidden. Saint Pierre en voyage is held for the owner's ruling: its enriched hostess beats the sleeping travellers with a stick, three times over — the beatings are the tale's hinge. The Wolf and the Fox is held likewise (a red-hot iron to the wolf's tail; a strangling), and so is The Blackbird and the Fox (a strangling by arrangement). Three tales stand stopped at the gate: The Red Shoes (a mother cuts her little son in two and cooks him; his bones, made a dove, kill his parents); Élisabotte (the Devil eats her at midnight); The Crêpe Thief (a cut-off hand; a cut throat). Three more wait on the book itself: The Cat and The Little White Ewe, whose second pages are illegible in the only surviving scan, and The Three Fiddlers in Paradise, whose first page is too faint to certify. Chapters 00:09 The Legend of Saint Mauron 03:27 The Death of the Rat 07:06 The Legend of Saint Lénard 10:21 Vadoyer 14:56 The Little Girl in a Well From Paul Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne, Tome I (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering from the French. Folk Tales of France is one shelf of the KacheliTV world folk tale library — new parts told from the public-domain collections of the world's peoples, in our own translations. 🔊 Listen to the podcast: https://rss.com/podcasts/kachelitv/
- Transcript
S24 · E6
October 16 · 17 min
Folk Tales of the Netherlands — Part 6 (The Woman with Three Hundred and Sixty-Six Children)
Part Six of Folk Tales of the Netherlands continues William Elliot Griffis's Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks of 1918 in our own telling, with the book's tenth tale, in his order. (Parts One to Five carried tales one to nine; the Dutch tales are read here part by part — this is not the whole book. The tenth tale stands alone in this part, and Part Seven opens with the book's eleventh tale.) The Woman with Three Hundred and Sixty-Six Children — the famous legend of The Hague. A childless Countess, rich and ill-tempered, turns a beggar widow from her garden unfed and will not believe the twins on the poor woman's back are hers; the mother's answering wish, that the Countess may have as many children as there are days in the year, comes true beyond all reckoning: in leap year, three hundred and sixty-six babies, none bigger than a mouse, are born in the great house, are carried to the Groote Kerk on trays and in mince-pie dishes, and are baptized by the good Bishop Guy, every boy named Jan and every girl Lisbet — and that evening, as Griffis tells it, every one of the wee creatures dies, and is remembered for hundreds of years by a monument in the church. In keeping with this shelf's practice, the tale stands as Griffis told it: the hunting and hawking of the old Vijver country and the widow's husband, killed in the war, stand in his summary narration and single reported clauses, the Countess's seized stick and her servants driving the beggar out at the same summary weight, no blow struck and no injury told, and the babies' death in the tale's closing single clause, no hand against them and no suffering told; no completeness is claimed beyond what is read here. Chapters: 00:11 — The Woman with Three Hundred and Sixty-Six Children Source: William Elliot Griffis, Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1918), from the public-domain 1918 edition (Project Gutenberg eBook #7871). Griffis retold these tales in his own English; our telling is a fresh in-house rendering of his 1918 text. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration. Thank you for listening — Part 7 of the Dutch tales follows on this shelf. 🔊 The KacheliTV podcast carries a new world folk tale every day — follow the show so the next story finds you.
- Transcript
S23 · E6
October 16 · 10 min
Folk Tales of the Philippines — Part 6 (The King and the Dervish · The Mysterious Book)
Part 6 of Folk Tales of the Philippines is a pair of magic-duel tales about one power in two forms: the power to leave your own body, or to change it at will — and what becomes of the men who try to steal another's place with it. In the first, the thief is a wandering holy man; in the second, a great magician; and in both, the stolen shape is the thief's undoing. In "The King and the Dervish," a dervish who can step out of his body and into a dead creature's teaches the charms to the young king, then enters the king's empty body, takes the throne, and orders the deer that carries the king's soul hunted out and killed. The king slips from the deer into a dead nightingale, sings his way into the queen's keeping, passes into a palace dog, and wins his own body back at the cage door — but the queen learns too late whom she had been comforted by, and dies of grief. Told by José M. Hilario of Batangas, who heard the story from his father, a Tagalog. In "The Mysterious Book," Juan, a poor son too fond of idleness until hunger drives him to service, becomes the trusted servant of the magician Don Luzano — and one morning opens the small triangular book hidden inside the seventh box. The chase that follows runs through steed and mule, bird and hawk, little fish and great fish, and ends in a princess's golden basin, where the fish becomes a ring upon her finger, and the ring a scatter of mungo seeds upon the floor. Told by Leopoldo Uichanco, a Tagalog from Calamba, La Laguna. A word on the road here, told plainly. Each of these duels ends as the old tellings end them: the dervish is killed in the nightingale's shape, in a single sentence, and Don Luzano is killed in his crow shape at the chase's end, in a single sentence — both kept at the book's own weight and in the book's own words, nothing enlarged, nothing dwelt on. All the rest is pursuit and escape, shape upon shape: no blow is struck in either chase, the queen's death is of grief, told in a breath, and no one else is harmed in the tales read here. No completeness is claimed for this stretch of the book. The book's storytellers, kept with honour: José M. Hilario ("The King and the Dervish"); Leopoldo Uichanco ("The Mysterious Book"). Chapters: 00:10 — The King and the Dervish 02:53 — The Mysterious Book Source: Dean S. Fansler (ed.), Filipino Popular Tales, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, Vol. XII (1921) — the tales written down in English by the Filipino narrators credited above; public-domain 1921 edition (Project Gutenberg eBook #8299). The collectors' notes stand in the book, unread here. Our telling is a fresh in-house rendering of the 1921 text. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration. Thank you for listening — Part 7 of the Philippine tales follows on this shelf. 🔊 The KacheliTV podcast carries a new world folk tale every day — follow the show so the next story finds you.
- Transcript
S21 · E12
October 16 · 22 min
The Gatiloke — Part 12 of 23 (The Deer, the Crow and the Tortoise · The King of the Doves and His Retinue · The Mouse and the Mother Cat · The Man with a Perfect Wife and the Man with an Ill-Omened Wife · The Two Goats Who Fought over the Path)
The Gatiloke stays in the book's fifth part. A deer caught in a hunter's snare is freed by his friends' night-long labour, and repays it by carrying the tortoise out of the hunter's hands. A king of doves who cannot hold his flock from the baited net will not abandon them to it, and their rising together tears the net away. The mice agree on the perfect plan against the cat, and no one dares to bell her. A borrowed fortune-gong is wasted on a wife's heedless cry — the book's own ribald joke, told as the book tells it — and the three strikings strike out. And two goats meet on a bridge, where neither will yield the path. Chapters: 00:04 — The Deer, the Crow and the Tortoise Who Were Friends 06:06 — The King of the Doves and His Retinue 14:01 — The Mouse and the Mother Cat 16:24 — The Man with a Perfect Wife and the Man with an Ill-Omened Wife, Who Were Friends 21:21 — The Two Goats Who Fought over the Path From the Gatiloke by Suttantaprija Ind (1859–1924), Cambodia's treasury of Khmer folk tales, first published in parts in Phnom Penh in 1914–1921 — public domain, and told here in a fresh in-house English rendering made from the Khmer text, in the book's own order. One question-chapter near the collection's opening is held back under house rule — its matter is murder itself, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the collection's written register, in its place. One further tale of the book's second part — the tale of Bhikkhu Sok, the Pnong teacher — is likewise held back under house rule: its matter is a whole lineage put to death, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the treatise — the tale of the Singha-To who wanted the chief's daughter — is likewise held back under house rule: its close is a beating given to a creature first stripped of its defences, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the treatise — the tale of the crocodile and the cart-driver — is likewise held back under house rule: its close is a killing done with an axe, at a judge's word, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the treatise — the tale of the hunter and the parrot — is likewise held back under house rule: its close is a killing by a serpent's bite, planned and done in the tale's open scene, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the book's fourth part — the fable of the old woman whom desire unmade — is likewise held back under house rule: its matter is a mother's desire set against her own son, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the book's fifth part — the tale of the abbot and his two students — is likewise held back under house rule: its close is a killing in the tale's open scene, a wild buffalo's goring of the teacher in the forest, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the book's fifth part — the tale of the deer, the crow and the jackal — is likewise held back under house rule: its close is a killing with a weapon in the tale's open scene, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the book's fifth part — the tale of the jackal and the elephant — is likewise held back under house rule: its close is a killing plotted and done in the tale's open scene, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript
S20 · E12
October 16 · 26 min
Hungarian Folk Tales — Part 12 (Peter and Paul of the Waters)
An old king dreams that his daughter pours two pitchers of water upon the ground, and the water rises and floods the whole world — and the wise men read it as two valiant sons who will conquer the earth. To cheat the dream he walls her into a little iron house on the highest mountain, with neither door nor window in it. But a spring bursts up out of the iron floor, and in the morning two golden-haired boys are playing round her, named for that water and for the day they came: Vízi Péter and Vízi Pál, Peter and Paul of the Waters. At seven years old they lean their shoulders to the wall and push it out, part beneath the wishing tree of the world with their knives stuck in its trunk — white water if the other lives, red blood if he is dead — and Péter, sparing the wolf, the tiger and the lion on his road, comes with their three cubs into a city hung all in mourning black. At the city's well he fights the twelve-headed dragon, leaps into its twelfth mouth, and pierces the black dove that is its soul; then, sleeping with his head in the rescued princess's lap, he loses that head to the red prince, who marries her in his place. But the beasts weld his head back on — backwards first, to the lion's slap and the wolf's shame — and the twelve golden apples and the dragon's twenty-four golden teeth prove him before the king, and the impostor falls. Against his wife's warning he rides out to the witch's farm, is hurled by the queen of the whirlwinds through the very land of hell and out again, and at the fire that feeds itself he throws his bacon at the toad-roasting witch — and wakes in pieces in her tub. It is left to Pál, who reads his brother's death in red blood at the wishing tree, to walk the same road and stand at the same fire. The tale is told whole, as Benedek wrote it, and every hard passage stands at the source's own weight: the dragon fought in the open, its soul a black dove in its belly, pierced; the hero's head struck off in his sleep in a single sentence, and welded on again whole by his faithful beasts; the impostor prince felled with a single cut; the hero cut to pieces in the witch's tub, and raised whole again by the witch herself. The dragon's yearly tribute of a maiden is the city's own telling, never enacted on the page — the princess is brought to the well and rescued before any harm. From Benedek Elek, Magyar mese- és mondavilág (Athenaeum, 1894–96), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript
S27 · E2
October 16 · 14 min
Folk Tales of Denmark — Part 2 (The Little Wild Duck)
Part Two takes Folk Tales of Denmark to Jutland, to the tales Evald Tang Kristensen gathered from the mouths of the Jutland folk in the nineteenth century, in fresh translations made here from the Danish. (The Danish tales are read here part by part, tale by tale — this is not the whole of either collector's great gathering, and no completeness is claimed beyond what is read here.) The Little Wild Duck (in Danish, Den lille Vildand) — a stepmother who wishes her stepdaughter out of life thrusts her down the well, meaning her death; and the girl finds under the well a rusty door to folk who are baking, and who reward her kindness to their sick child with three wishes: light from her loosened hair, gold rings from her lips, and — if ever she comes into distress at sea — that she cannot drown, but must sail upon the water like a little wild duck. The stepmother's envy sends her own daughter down for wishes of her own, and that daughter comes up with darkness at her hair-loosening, grey toads at her spitting, and a fox's tail growing in her forehead — and is Foxtail from that day. Then the girl's brother fetches her in fine clothes to the king's court; and at sea, hard of hearing from her stepmother's beatings, she takes her stepmother's lying words for her brother's commands, gives up her dress and her finery, lays her head in her stepmother's lap, and is shoved out into the sea. The tale's attempts stand here exactly at the telling's own brief weight — single clauses of the tale, with no harm befalling her in any of them — and the third wish carries her safe behind the ship as the little wild duck, to warm herself three evenings at the king's kitchen fire and send her brother, lying guiltless in the serpents' den, a switch to drive the serpents from him. One thing is not read here: the tale's closing retribution, the spiked tub in which the stepmother and Foxtail are punished, is left out whole, as this shelf left the Red Knight's spiked barrel out of Part 1, and the story goes on without it. Nothing else has been softened or added. Chapters: 00:12 — The Little Wild Duck Source: Evald Tang Kristensen, Æventyr fra Jylland (Fairy Tales from Jutland, 1881), the tale volume of his Jyske Folkeminder (Jutland Folk Memories), no. 16, "Den lille Vildand". The English here is our own translation from the Danish, made for this shelf. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration. Thank you for listening — Part 3 of the Danish tales follows on this shelf. 🔊 The KacheliTV podcast carries a new world folk tale every day — follow the show so the next story finds you.
- Transcript
S26 · E2
October 16 · 9 min
Tales of Ancient Egypt — Part 2 (The Doomed Prince)
Part 2 of the Egyptian tales is a single story, and one of the most famous the papyri have kept: "The Doomed Prince," from the second series of Petrie's Egyptian Tales. A king's long-awaited son is born under a decree of the Hathors: his death is to be by the crocodile, or by the serpent, or by the dog. Raised in a house upon the desert to keep him from his fates, the boy wins a dog for his companion; and grown, he will not be kept — he goes out to meet his life, wins a chief's daughter by climbing to her window seventy cubits from the ground, and tells her his three dooms. His wife keeps watch over his sleep, and one of the three fates comes for him in the night and is given into his hand. The second meets him at the river — and there the tale stops. The papyrus that carries this story breaks off in the middle of the crocodile's speech, and its ending was already lost when the papyrus came down to us; the tale is read here exactly as far as it survives, and no ending is invented for it. One beat is carried exactly at the weight the papyrus gives it: the serpent that comes to bite the sleeping prince is struck down by his wife's hand, in the single clause the tale gives it, as the register of this shelf prescribes. The rest stands as the papyrus tells it — the threats spoken in the story are spoken, and pass unenacted, and nothing has been softened or added. Source: W. M. Flinders Petrie (ed. and trans.), Egyptian Tales, Translated from the Papyri, Second Series (London: Methuen, 1895), from the public-domain 1895 edition (Project Gutenberg eBook #7413). Petrie translated these tales from the ancient papyri; our telling is a fresh in-house rendering of his 1895 text. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration. Thank you for listening — Part 3 of the Egyptian tales follows on this shelf. 🔊 The KacheliTV podcast carries a new world folk tale every day — follow the show so the next story finds you.
- Transcript
S16 · E20
October 16 · 27 min
Fairy Tales of Japan — Part 20 of 24 (Little Silver's Dream of the Shoji · The Tengus, or the Elves with Long Noses · Jiraiya, or the Magic Frog)
Three more tales from old Japan continue the shelf's second book — William Elliot Griffis's Japanese Fairy World. First, Little Silver's Dream of the Shoji: Ko Gin San, who did not care to dream of wonder-creatures, draws a tapir on her pillow-case — the beast who eats bad dreams — and dreams all the same: of the white water-ghosts who beg bottomless dippers from the sailors to swamp the junk, and of the island of the Shoji, the scarlet-haired wine-elves, building the storehouse where their King keeps the treasures of life, and health, and happiness, and property, which men throw away, or exchange for the saké he gives them. Then, The Tengus: Griffis's lore of the long-nosed elves of the mountains — the Dai Tengu with his fan of seven feathers, the crow-tengu who bears the axe of authority, the boy Yoshitsuné taught at the feet of the King of the Tengus on Kurama mountain, and the nose-fencing, nose tight-ropes and nose-balances that make a King of Noses. Last, Jiraiya, or the Magic Frog: Young Thunder, the castle-lord's son turned robber-chief, taught the magic of the frog by the mountain spirit Senso Dojin and charged to take from the wicked rich and help the needy; his marriage to Tsunadé, mistress of the snail's magic; the serpent-man Dragon-coil's venom poured on the sleeping couple, who lay near the point of death; and the boy Rikimatsu's flight on tengu wings to India for the one elixir that could cure them. A note on the second and third tales. In The Tengus, one sentence of the old lore — the punishment the tengus visit on a boy caught lying — is not read here; the rest of the sketch stands whole. In Jiraiya, the clan wars are not narrated: the tale's battle passages — the toll of the conflicts between the two armies, and the closing battle in which Dragon-coil falls and the princess is freed — are left unread, as this series' standing treatment prescribes for this tale. The frog-magic, the serpent's venom, and the flight for the cure stand complete in Griffis's own words, and no completeness is claimed for the war. Chapters: 00:05 Little Silver's Dream of the Shoji 07:52 The Tengus, or the Elves with Long Noses 15:16 Jiraiya, or the Magic Frog From Japanese Fairy World by William Elliot Griffis (1880), public domain; told in fresh in-house renderings. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript
S16 · E19
October 16 · 21 min
Fairy Tales of Japan — Part 19 of 24 (The Seven Patrons of Happiness · Daikoku and the Oni · Benkei and the Bell)
Three more tales from old Japan continue the shelf's second book — William Elliot Griffis's Japanese Fairy World. First, the Seven Patrons of Happiness: the jolly company every Japanese child knows — Fukuroku Jin of the towering forehead, patron of long life; fat Daikoku on his rice bags, whose mallet makes men rich by their labour; Ebisu with his great red tai; round Hotei, father of contentment; grave Toshitoku, who rewards diligent boys; Bishamon in golden armour; and Benten, queen of the sea — and how, once a year, they tie the red and white threads of fate and arrange the marriages of the year to come. Then Daikoku and the Oni: how the Buddhist idols, vexed that the people still loved the little god of wealth, sent Shino, chief of the oni, to destroy him — and how Daikoku's chief rat drove the assassin off with a sprig of holly, which is why holly stands at the door-posts on New Year's Eve. Last, Benkei and the Bell: the great bronze bell of Miidera, once bright as a mirror, whose face a Kyoto beauty dared to touch; how the mighty monk Benkei carried it off to Hiyeisan balanced against a paper lantern, and how, struck hard or gently, by whomsoever, it would answer with one plaint alone — I want to go back to Miidera. Chapters: 00:05 The Seven Patrons of Happiness 09:30 Daikoku and the Oni 13:20 Benkei and the Bell From Japanese Fairy World by William Elliot Griffis (1880), public domain; told in fresh in-house renderings. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript
S16 · E18
October 16 · 21 min
Fairy Tales of Japan — Part 18 of 24 (The Fire-Fly's Lovers · The Wonderful Tea-Kettle · The Fox and the Badger)
Three tales from old Japan continue the shelf's second book — William Elliot Griffis's Japanese Fairy World. First, the Fire-Fly's Lovers: Hotaru-hime, the fire-fly princess in her lotus palace on the Fukui castle moat, whose light shone like a lamp within a globe of coral, and who would wed only the suitor who brought her fire — what befell the crowd of gallants who flew out into the night to fetch it, and the fire-fly prince whose own light answered hers. Then, the Wonderful Tea-Kettle: the old priest of Morinji temple, whose kettle sprouted a badger's head, whiskers, tail and legs, was sold to a tinker for a few iron cash, and as Bunbuku Chagama — the tea-kettle accomplished in literature and the military art — danced the tight-rope, made its master's fortune, and came home to the temple a treasured relic at last. And last, the Fox and the Badger: an old grey badger and a vixen with one cub, the last of their kind in a hunted district of Shikoku, who keep themselves alive by a trick — each in turn feigning dead, and sold in the town by the other in human shape. The trick holds once. Run a second time with the fox as the goods, the badger's greed betrays it — and what follows, the cub's long wait and the revenge he contrives at the Big Bridge, is carried here exactly as Griffis wrote it. A note on the third tale: The Fox and the Badger was first held in this series — its betrayal and its revenge are the tale entire, and this series does not soften what it reads. On October 15, 2026 it was ruled in by name for this shelf, and it is read here whole, exactly as Griffis wrote it; nothing has been cut, and nothing added. Chapters: 00:05 The Fire-Fly's Lovers 11:29 The Wonderful Tea-Kettle 17:44 The Fox and the Badger From Japanese Fairy World by William Elliot Griffis (1880), public domain; told in fresh in-house renderings. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
- Transcript

Showing 421–440 of 489 episodes