Reading Notes: Turkish Fairy Tales, Part A

The story I read this week was called The Fish-Peri. This was an intriguing read because I have not read many stories with shape-shifters in them, so I was not fully expecting the twist in the story. The story opens up with a man going fishing. He ends up finding a fish that was so much better than the rest that he decided to keep this fish. I do not go fishing very often, so I have never quite thought myself that I would want to keep a fish that I had just caught from the open water. This was where the story got a bit odd to me. Since he did not have a tank, he put the fish in a well which seems a hard place to observe the nice fish. 

When the man leaves and comes back, he realizes that his house had been clean, but he did not know who would have cleaned his house since he lived alone. We as readers probably already assume that the fish is the one that cleaned the house, but how? This continues to happen for multiple days until finally the fisherman decides to pretend to leave but stays hidden by the house. He then sees the fish turn into a beautiful woman, and he grabs her fish skin and throws the skin into the fire where she is freed from turning into a fish. For some reason, the woman that was a fish agreed to become the fisherman's wife. This woman was quite a beauty to all men that saw her, so eventually the Padishah wanted her to be his.

The Padishah asked the fisherman to do several impossible tasks to keep the woman as his wife, and reasons unknown to myself, the woman helped the fisherman. There are many possibilities as to why she helped him, but if I were her, I would not want to help him. The fisherman had captured her, burned her fish skin, and then asked her to be his wife. All of these events combined would make me want to leave that man as soon as possible. Maybe she agreed to help him, so she would not be owned by the Padishah whom was a stranger to her.

Since the woman decided to help the fisherman, this led to many unbelievable things that happened. I am curious as to the magic she had possessed. She was able to transform, and she had a powerful friend that could be asked to complete each impossible tasks that the Padishah asked of the fisherman. These hints of magic are what I would want to incorporate into a story. I would want to try to explain the magic of each event a little bit more though, so the reader gets a better understanding of what truly is possible in that world.

Bibliography

The Fish-Peri, Forty-four Turkish Fairy Tales by Ignacz Kunos, with illustrations by Willy Pogany (1913).

Image Information: Fish, Pixabay