Best Stories in the World: The Uktena

In Cherokee myths, the sun is female, and she hates humanity because whenever people look up at her they scrunch up their faces against the bright light she shines. The moon, on the other hand, likes us.

Among the various beings populating the earth are the Little Men, who are the children of Kana'ti and Selu, who are the Lucky Hunter and Corn, respectively. Well, the Little Men are sort of their children, since one of them is definitely their son, but he doesn't have a name, and the other is really a wild boy (I'nage-utasun/hi: He-who-grew-up-wild) whom they seem to have kidnapped but might also just be their son whom they threw in the water and left there for a while until their other son started playing with him and then they brought back home; it's weird, especially since the boys eventually kill Selu because she's a witch, and in part this story explains why corn grows in only a few places and not everywhere, and also why there aren't as many wolves as there used to be, and the boys are also Thunder, and they're responsible for teaching people the right songs to sing for hunting deer...man, these stories are just great, aren't they?). The Little Men are also called the Thunder Boys, and they like to help people.

So the Sun wanted to kill all the people with her heat, out offrustration and jealousy, and the people asked the Little Men for help. They changed one of the men into a big snake, called Uktena, and sent him to kill the Sun. He failed because the sun was so bright, so they created a rattlesnake to do the job. Uktena was jealous and angry, so the people forced him to go away, though he left other snakes behind.

Uktena is said to be "as large around as a tree trunk, with horns on its head, and a bright, blazing crest like a diamond upon its forehead, and scales glittering like sparks of fire. It has rings or spots of color along its whole length, and can not be wounded except by shooting in the seventh spot from the head, because under this spot are its heart and its life." The diamond is known as ulûñsû’tĭ (which means transparent). It's an item of great power, but only one person has ever stolen it from the head of Uktena, since they're so dangerous. The jewel itself is dangerous, and has to be fed blood twice a year or it will kill the person who stole it and his family. However, it grants success in hunting, love, and other pursuits.

The only one to get one is called Âgăn-uni’tsĭ. He was a Shawano, who are all magicians. His name means The Ground-hog's Mother. He was about to be killed by his captors when they spared him because he promised to find the jewel. He had heard that the uktena would lie in wait in the haunted, dark passes of the Great Smoky Mountains. He went to one gap in the mountains, but found only a monster blacksnake. He went to another pass but found a moccasin snake. He went to a third pass he found a gigantic green snake, and he called all the Cherokee to see it, but they only ran away in fear. He kept going south, finding other monsters but not the one he sought until he arrived at Gahu/ti mountain, where the Uktena slept.

He laid a trap for the Uktena by digging a trench and surrounding it with a circle of burning pine cones. Then he shot the Uktena in its heart, under the seventh spot, and fled when it woke up. It chased him, though soon the wound overcame it. It died while spitting poison at him, but most of the poison was destroyed by the fire--all save a single drop, which struck him on the head. The blood that flowed from its wound, as poisonous as its venom, filled trench. In its death throes, the Uktena destroyed trees all along the mountain. The man called birds, which came to eat the monster's flesh and bones. 

Seven days later the magician and retrieved the gem from a tree branch, where a raven had dropped it after feasting. Returning to the village, the man became a great magician, though a tiny snake hung from the place where the venom had hit him. The Uktena's blood formed a lake, and there women dye the cane for their baskets.

I was reminded of this story by Daniel Bayliss and Fabian Rangel "Son of the Serpent," recently published as part of the Storyteller series of comics based on the old Jim Henson tv shows. It's a pretty good little comic, though it doesn't hew too closely to the Cherokee original recounted above. Bayliss says he combined several stories from different traditions.

I believe that I haven't done the Cherokee story justice here. It's a long tale, and in James Mooney's Myths of the Cherokee it demonstrates the way myths often build on each other over time. Mooney numbers the myths he has collected, and the Uktena and the Little Men figure in tales 3, 5, 50, 51, and 52. You can find these stories here. Mooney was told this story by a man named Swimmer, another man named John Ax. There are many sources for the different parts, though. Here's one that's more recent, by David Michael Wolfe, which brings into the story the Tlanuhwa, which Bayliss and Rangel make the thunderbird.

There's something of a coda to this story later in Mooney's book. In a section called "Historical Traditions" the first story is "First Contact with Whites," in which Mooney writes

At the creation an ulûñsû’tĭ was given to the white man, and a piece of silver to the Indian. But the white man despised the stone and threw it away, while the Indian did the same with the silver. In going about the white man afterward found the silver piece and put it (351) into his pocket and has prized it ever since. The Indian, in like manner, found the ulûñsû’tĭ where the white man had thrown it. He picked it up and has kept it since as his talisman, as money is the talismanic power of the white man. This story is quite general and is probably older than others of its class.

 So why is this one of the best stories in the world? I like the way it sprawls through creation, hitting highs of heroism, oddity, absurdity, and sanctity. These stories, the symbols and characters in them, are semantically rich as well as narratively compelling. They've got a little of everything.

 

Best Stories in the World: Pierre Menard

There's a guy, I think he's French but I won't hold it against him...his name's Pierre Menard, and he gets this idea to write the Quixote. The thing of it is, Cervantes already wrote it. Menard doesn't let that stop him, of course, or there would be no story.

And what a story it is. I think. Is it a story?

Menard is, apparently, deceased. He was a novelist and left behind a body of work appreciated by the narrator, who provides us with a list of those works publicly known (for example, a "handwritten list of lines of poetry that owe their excellence to punctuation" [which I absolutely love]). Of more interest to the narrator, however, is Menard's unpublished work; namely, Menard's Quixote.

Not Cervantes. That part's important. Menard didn't set out to recreate or copy Cervantes's work. He intended to write Don Quixote as himself. In other words, it's a story about context. The narrator isn't so much presented in the best light. He's kind of petty. Though, in the end, he declares that "Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique--the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution...This technique fills the calmest book with adventure. Attributing the Imitatio Christi to Louise Ferdinand Celine or James Joyce--is that not sufficient renovation of those faint spiritual admonitions?"

This summary really doesn't do it justice. 

Is "Pierre Menard" a story? There's no plot, per se. It's a sketch, fiction masquerading as non-fiction in the form of a description of a guy and his work, especially Menard's "Quixote," which Menard saw as not inevitable, like certain other works of Poe or Coleridge. Instead, it was contingent. Menard thinks of his recollection of Quixote not as a memory, but as "the equivalent of the vague foreshadowing of a yet unwritten book."

Here's what led up to this story: On Christmas Eve 1938, Borges was moving quickly up a flight of stairs. At this time his eyesight was already failing, and he hit his head on an open window, shattering the glass and gouging his head. The wound got infected, Borges was diagnosed with septicemia,  subsequently hospitalized, and spent a few weeks convalescing. During this time, he developed a fever and sort of hallucinated. He began to doubt his sanity. Up to this point, Borges had written poetry and reviews of books and movies, for the most part. He'd penned a few short stories, biographies, and a short review of a book that didn't exist ("The Approach to al-Mu'tasim"). He hadn't really become internationally famous yet, and his career wasn't certain.

After recovering from septicemia, Borges wanted to know if he could still sustain concentration enough to write, and during his convalescence, he figured he should write stories. He wanted to try something new and unfamiliar to him so that, should it fail, he could blame his failure on its novelty to him. "Pierre Menard" was his first attempt. It was followed by "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," which takes the form of an entry from an encyclopedia that doesn't exist.

So why is this one of the best stories in the world? You've got to read it to fully understand. 

Best Stories in the World: The Man Who Had No Story

I figure that the best way to honor my Irish ancestry is by writing about Irish folklore (especially folktales) until the 17th. So the story every day will come from my respectable trove of tomes devoted to Ireland.

Let's start with Sean O'Sullivan's Folktales of Ireland. It's part of Richard Dorson's series of Folktales of the World. Dorson, who wrote the foreword, tells us that "No nation of the world has gathered in its folktales with the fullness, the loving  care, and the dazzling rewards manifest in Ireland." 1.5 million pages of them in the archives of the Irish Folklore commission (and that's 1966 pages). By the way, O'Sullivan uses the spelling Sean O Suilleabhain inside the book; the Anglicized version on the cover and title page.

Here's one of the stories in that collection:

The Man Who Had No Story

Things start simply enough, with a man named Rory a-going to town the night before a big market day. He's on his way to sell the stockings knitted by his wife. Along the way he grows weary and, upon seeing a house up the road with the glow of a fire inside, he inquires at the door. He meets and old man who, strangely enough, knows his name: "You're welcome, Rory O'Donoghue."

When the old man offers a seat, the chair pulls itself out. The man sits as well, and offers Rory dinner. There's no one else in the house, so far as Rory can see, but the man does no work. Instead, the plates and forks and knives rise up of their own accord to begin the cooking. The meat and potatoes emerge, to be sliced by the knives and plopped into the pots. Buckets bring water, and soon the feast is ready. They eat their fill together, in silence. Then the same forks and knives and plates clear themselves away.

At that point, Rory hears the approach of footsteps, but it turns out to be nothing more than a pair of slippers striding toward him to provide comfort for his weary feet. Only then does the old man speak again:

"Do you know, Rory," how I spend my nights here? I spend one-third of each night eating and drinking, one-third telling stories or singing songs, and the last third sleeping. Sing a song for me now, Rory."

"I never sang a song in my life," said Rory.

"Tell a story, then."

"I never told a story of any kind."

So the old man kicks him to the curb. On his way out, the door strikes Rory on the back.
Rory has no choice but to go onward. He soon sees the glow of a campfire, where he finds a man roasting meat on a spit. The man welcomes him warmly enough. "Would you mind, Rory, taking hold of this spit and turning the meat over the fire? But don't let any burnt patch come on it."

Rory takes the spit as the man walks into the darkness, for what reason we're not told. Once he's gone, of course the piece of meat shouts at Rory, "Don't let my whiskers burn!"

Understandably upset, Rory throws the spit and takes off running. But the spit and the meat upon it overtake him, striking him "as hard as they could" on his back. Fleeing blindly, Rory lucks upon another house and bursts inside--only to find that it's the same house he had visited earlier and been fed by the old man. This time, the old man is already in bed, and not at all upset to be barged in upon by Rory. He welcomes Rory once more, but Rory refuses his hospitality on the grounds that the beating from the not-quite-cooked meat has left him covered in blood.

The old man asks Rory what happened, and Rory tells him--presumably the first story Rory has ever uttered in his life.

"Ah, Rory," said the old man. "If you had a story like that to tell me earlier, you wouldn't have been out until now." He let's Rory sleep in the house. When Rory woke up the next morning, "he found himself on the roadside, with his bag of stockings under his head, and not a trace of a house or dwelling anywhere around him."



Conchobhar Pheadair Ui Cheilleachair [how's that for a name?] of County Cork heard that story from his mother about 1863, then told it to the collector Proinsias O Ceallaigh [!] seventy years later.

So why's the one of the best stories in the world? I'm a big fan of absurdity like this. Random sentient meat on a stick, a bag of socks as a pillow...great stuff. There's also a lot to be said for the structure--a man who has no story experiencing something that he can transform into a story. But I've got to wonder, why doesn't the old man make sure Rory has something to contribute before feeding him?

Childe Roland

For reasons that I won't go into right now, I currently spend a lot of time thinking about Childe Roland and his sister burd Ellen, who gets lost in Elfland. I originally encountered Roland, in a vastly different American form, in Stephen King's Dark Tower novels. I soon learned of the Robert Browning poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" that had inspired King, and soon after that I found a copy of the French epic called the Song of Roland. It wasn't until much later--just about three years ago, I guess--that I found a folktale called Childe Roland in Katherine Briggs and Ruth Tongue's Folktales of England. I saw it again in Joseph Jacobs' English Folk and Fairy Tales, but I found another version in the second volume of Jacobs' collection. Jacobs got this version from an earlier book, Jamieson's Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, published in 1814, in which it's called "Rosmer Haf-Mand." You can read it with the verse here.

The story stars with some verse, which feels very Scottish in its orthography:

King Arthur's sons o' merry Carlisle
Were playing at the ba';
And there was their sister Burd Ellen,
I the mids amang them a'.

So the sons of King Arthur are kicking a ball around, with their sister burd Ellen watching (burd just means maiden). When Childe Rowland kicks the ball over the church (here spelled "kirk"), Ellen goes to get it. Problem is, she doesn't come back. The boys (there are 3 of them) look for her in vain, finally learning from Merlin (Myrddin Wyldt) that she's been carried away by fairies to the castle of the King of Elfland. Merlin warns them not to pursue her without the proper care and instructions; namely, they have to kill everyone they meet in Elfland and avoid drinking or eating anything while they are there. In true folktale form, the first two brothers (when I tell this story to my kids, I name them Alan and Cuthbert) fail to obey these rules are are trapped in Elfland. Rowland follows, this time obeying the rules. He gets directions to the castle from various herdsmen, all of whom he decapitates with his "good claymore that never struck in vain" (here it seems to be called Excalibur, but that might be an interpolation; in the version in Jacobs' volume 1, it's called a brand--an old word for sword that we got from French, and from which we get the verb brandish).

Rowland gets to the hill upon which the castle sits. To get inside, he has been told by a hen-wife who now lacks a head, he must go around the hill three times widdershins and repeat "Open, door! open, door! and let me come in." Widdershins means counter-clockwise, or the way opposite the path of the sun, and is the way to walk around a church if you want to get to Elfland or Faerie or whatever magical place suits your fancy.

So Rowland's inside, and he sees a magical castle that's described in some detail, which I won't go into here. He finds burd Ellen sitting on a velvet sofa. They talk of what has happened, but burd Ellen can't say much. When he confesses to great hunger, she keeps quiet but brings him food. Luckily, Rowland remembers Merlin's advice and doesn't eat it. Then comes the King, chanting,

"With fi, fi, fo, and fum!
I smell the blood of a Christian man!
Be he dead, be he living, wi' my brand
I'll clash his harns frae his harn-pan!

There follows a great battle between Rowland and the King. (Harns, by the way, are brains, so harn-pan is head; and there's brand again.) Rowland proves victorious, and convinces the King to free his brothers and his sister. They return home.

I've been more interested in this story since I came across another reference to it in King Lear not too long ago. In that play, the character Edgar is pretending to be mad, and so he deliberately confuses lines from different fairy tales--"Childe Rowland" and "Jack and the Beanstalk." It's interesting that, two hundred years later (or so) this Scottish version of Childe Rowland makes the same conflation, with the King of Elfland saying the lines of the Giant.

As for the curious word childe...the OED tells us that it's a reference to a highborn youth who is supposed to become a knight. Jacobs in the article linked to above tells us that it refers to an heir. In that sense of the word, he finds evidence that the story dates from an earlier age during which the youngest son was the primary heir to a family's estate. Make of that what you will.

So why is this one of the best stories in the world? I'm a bit biased, since I named one of my sons Roland (which means "famous" in French). 

Captured Fairies

A long time ago there were two deadbeats. These men were fond of playing dominoes and singing an odd little tune: "It's my delight, on a shiny night." They got their daily food by poaching rabbits. They did so by taking a ferret and sending it into a rabbit hole while they held a bag over the exit.

One night as they were out a-poaching, the bag was a bit more feisty than usual. As they sang their way through the woods back to their fire pit, the moon came out from behind a cloud. They grew silent, staring at the celestial orb, and suddenly there came a cry from somewhere in the woods: "Dick, wheer art ta?"

To their surprise, something in the bag replied: "In a sack, on a back, Riding up Hoghton Brow."

The man holding the bag dropped it, and the two ran off to hide the rest of the night--hungry and quaking with fear--in a tavern. They told their story to any and all who would give them the time of day, and word spread. From that day onward, the kids in the area became known to follow the deadbeats around town, whispering whenever an opportune moment presented itself, "Dick, wheer art ta?"


I came across this story in James Bowker's Goblin Tales of Lancashire, part of a series called The Illustrated Library of Fairy Tales of All Nations. It's hard to pin down a publication date for for this book, since there's no lawyer page at the front. The copy I got (when the IU Folklore department was selling off its library) is inscribed to somebody called "O Elton" in 1894. It's falling apart. Maybe it's "G Elton." Or "C Elton." It's hard to tell. People must have made letters differently in the nineteenth century.

The author included some comparative notes. For this story, called "The Captured Fairies," Bowker provides some information about the wild hunt, a Teutonic legend in which Odin or some elves or both crash through the world in pursuit of something or other. Apparently the hounds involved in the wild hunt can speak, and when a peasant caught one by accident, much the same thing happened. So there's that.

Because the tale comes from Lancashire, it's got that weird dialect writing. Some stories in the collection are unreadable because of that. Still, lots of good stuff there. It seems to be derived from oral tradition, but Bowker's heavily literized them; for example, here's how he describes their capture of the fairy: "They did not wait long in anxious expectation of an exodus before there was a frantic rush, and after hastily grasping the sacks tightly round the necks, and tempting their missionary from the hole, they crept through the hedgerow, and at a sharp pace started for home." Nothing wrong with that, of course,

So why is this one of the best stories in the world? I think I like it because it's such a silly little thing that actually echoes something profoundly terrifying. The Wild Hunt stems, probably, from terrific storms, during which people could hear howling and whatnot. There was a pretty good issue of Marvel's Thor comic that included a wild hunt, not with Odin. It's that element of disjunction, of the way the story has evolved that makes it great. It's sort of the opposite of the tale of Aurvandil/Earendil in that way.

The Best Stories in the World: Box of Daylight

Raven had been kicked out of his father's house up in heaven because he ate all the food. His father sent him through the hole in the sky to go down to earth, with some supplies such as salmon roe, berries, and a raven skin so he could fly.

The world is all dark, and Raven is sick of that. So flying along he finds the hole in the sky that leads back to the heavens. There, he takes off his raven skin and finds a spring outside the house of the chief of heaven. He transforms himself into a pine needle and floats on the water. The chief's daughter comes out to get water from the spring, and she inadvertently drinks the needle. Soon she gives birth to a baby boy, who is Raven. This made the daughter and chief very happy.

The boy grows and begins to cry, "Hama, hama!" He wouldn't stop crying, but nobody knew what he wanted. One of the wise men figures that the baby wants the box of daylight, called ma. The boy stops crying and plays with the ma, rolling it around the house. The chief soon forgets about this--until the boy runs away with it. He was pursued, but made it to the hole in the sky, put on his raven skin, and returned to the earth.

It was still dark. Raven flew up the Nass River. He finds some people, called Frogs, fishing with bag nets, and asks them to throw him one of the things they've caught. The people refuse four requests, so Raven threatens to break the ma. The people still refuse, naming Raven Txa'msem--the liar--, so Raven breaks the ma, bringing daylight to the world. This caused the north wind to blow, driving the Frogs down river where they stick to a rock and become stone.

This is a popular story in the Pacific Northwest. Here I've summarized a Tsimshian version (which can be read here in full I'm really not doing it justice), but the Tlingit version is perhaps more well known. There's a nice video with a dramatized retelling of the Tlingit version:

In many versions, the baby unleashes first the stars, then the moon, then finally the sun to light the world. In these versions, Raven starts out white. But when he is fleeing the house after releasing the light, he gets stuck in the smoke hole at the top and soot from the fire turns him black. The Tlingit version retold in Erdoes and Ortiz's American Indian Trickster Stories starts like this...

Raven was there first. He had been told to make the world by his father, but we do not know who his father was or how he looked. There was no light at that long-ago time, a time of beginning. Raven knew that far away in the North was a house in which someone kept light just for himself. Raven schemed, thinking of how best to steal the light to illuminate the world.

There's a pretty great picture book version by Maria Williams and  Felix Vigil.

Here's a couple of videos on vimeo that delve into the story (based on the video above), with one of its tellers named Walter Porter, part 1 and part 3. (part 2 is the story, which on vimeo is of better quality than the one embedded here) He gets into the variation (such as what kind of pine needle Raven becomes (spruce, hemlock, cedar, even a speck of dirt). He also talks about how the chief's daughter can't conceive a child, and is distraught. Part 2 is essential to understanding the story.

Important to the story, interestingly, is Raven's cry. He cries to get the sun, and he cries whenever he does something significant.

Believe it or not, there's also a rock song that retells this story. Also, this. I was surprised to see how many different versions there are on youtube.

So why is this one of the best stories in the world? For one thing, the numerous versions all work on their own, telling the story in ways that make sense but differ in aspects such as Raven's motive for stealing (sometimes curiosity, sometimes he wants to be able to hunt with light, sometimes he wants people to be able to see how beautiful he is). For another, lots of people love this story. You can get jewelry based on it. This story has and still does inspire wonderful art, too. I love it because it can be a creation story if you want it to be, or it can be just an odd little story. And for whatever reason, the transformation into a pine needle is satisfying.

by Tommy Joseph

The Best Stories in the World: Ylla

This is really just an excuse to include The Martian Chronicles, but that's more than one story. So..."Ylla." I've read this story a lot, maybe once every couple of years. I just keep coming back to it, to the despair and hope it captures. It's a reminder that someone's dream may be someone else's nightmare. Not kidding about the nightmare part--you ever see The Honeymoon?

See, there's this martian couple, and the wife keeps having this dream about a space ship landing, and the man who emerges. It begins like this:

They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs. K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfulls of magnetic dust, which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed, and no one drifted out their doors, you could see Mr. K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play ah harp. And front the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle.

From that you can probably tell whether or not you'll like Bradbury's stuff. He certainly doesn't hold anything back, in terms of his style. That one paragraph establishes tone, history, and setting while hinting at character.

Soon enough, we learn that Mrs. and Mr. K are not happy these days. Their problem seems to stem from Mrs. K--Ylla--who is restless, waiting for something that's just not happening. She's tired of their life, I guess, and Yll neglects her. So she dreams of a man, obviously from Earth (at six feet he's a giant to the Martians, and his blue eyes are an absurdity to them, who have eyes of gold). The couple discuss her dream, dismissing it and at the same time Ylla wonders if it could be true that someone from Earth will come. She begins singing strange songs, talking in her sleep, dreaming the man in the rocket. And Yll becomes desperate, trying to pay attention to her like he should have before. He's jealous.

On the day her dream has predicted that the man from earth will arrive, Ylla says she's going to visit a friend beyond the green valley--the location the rocket is supposed to land. Yll makes an excuse to keep her home, then goes out "hunting." Ylla, at home, becomes agitated, waiting for something to happen. She feels it: "There was a warmth as of great fire passing in the air. A whirling, rushing sound. A gleam in the sky, of metal."

She dismisses it as a trick of the imagination. Then...

"A shot sounded."

There's more, of course. But it's better to read it in full then to endure my butchering summary.

Yeah, Bradbury has written better stories, more iconic stories ("Sound of Thunder" anyone?), but it seems trite to include one of them. "Ylla" doesn't get as much attention, though you can read an excerpt at raybradbury.com. It's also been adapted to theater, television, and radio. Martian Chronicles is my favorite of his books. Lots of good stories there, many of which were published independently. "Ylla" was originally titled "I'll Not Ask for Wine" and published in Maclean's in 1950. That's from Wikipedia, so make of it what you will. Like I said, there's not much on the Internet about this one.

So what makes it one of the best in the world?In thirteen pages, Bradbury combines just enough world building with character work and a satisfying conclusion. Maybe "satisfying" is the wrong word. It's more like a punch in the gut.

The Best Stories in the World: Wolverine Creates the World

I love this story so much...

It starts before stuff, when pretty much everything in the world was under water. Wolverine survived by leaping from stone to stone. He worried that things would get worse, and that would be the end of his wandering. So he called all the water animals together, and asked them to dive down below to bring up some land.

Otter went first, but he couldn't find any soil. Then Beaver dove down, but he couldn't stay under water long enough to find anything. Then Wolverine told Muskrat to go, but Muskrat said he'd go only if Wolverine tied a strap to his leg. Wolverine complied. Muskrat was gone a long time, long enough that Wolverine pulled the strap back up only to find that it had come untied from Muskrat's leg.

And everybody thought that was the end of dry land. From this point on, I'm just going to quote the story directly:

But just when he had given up, Muskrat surfaced. His mouth was so full of ground that he couldn't talk. Nor could he breathe. Wolverine put his lips to Muskrat's ass and blew as hard as he could. Out came the ground from Muskrat's mouth, more and more ground, heaps and heaps of it, seemingly without end.

This ground is the very earth we walk today.

I first encountered this particular version of the earth-diver tale (which is how mythologists refer to it; it is the story organized around motif A812) in Brian Swann's Coming to Light, a collection and contextualization of native North American stories. It also appears in Wolverine Creates the World, by Lawrence Millman (which may or may not be about to be reprinted later this year as Wolverine the Trickster). It's a story told by the Innu people of the Labrador Peninsula in Canada. They call Wolverine Kwakwadjec, in case you were wondering. Millman--who's not an Innu--tells us that Wolverine stories are "much closer to dirty jokes" than the cycles of trickster myths common in other parts of native North America. Also unlike most myths, Wolverine stories lack ritual context and prohibitive storytelling conditions.

The earth-diver story is not confined to North America. The folklorist Alan Dundes wrote an interesting analysis of it in Freudian terms. It appeared originally in American Anthropologist, where it sparked some debate (there was a response to it in the next Volume of the journal, and then Dundes wrote a rejoinder), and shows up in the collection Sacred Narrative, which the author edited. Dundes sees the earth-diver as a story told by men to compensate for their lack of procreative power; they postulate a cloacal theory of birth and pregnancy envy. Which, you know, might be true in some sense.

So why is this one of the best stories in the world? Go back and reread the italicized part if you need to figure it out.

The Best Stories in the World: KFR

There's this married couple, see, and they're about to celebrate their first anniversary. But their lives are hectic, almost out of control as they try to work hard enough to save money for their first house. Both are full-timers, staying late. So they decide to give themselves a break on their anniversary. On their way home, they pick up a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The husband sets out a picnic blanket on the floor, dims the lights, and pours the wine. The wife gets the plates. They chat and flirt and though things are tough, they see a bright future ahead of them. They don't mind that they're eating cheap food. Until the wife takes her first bite of a drumstick. There's something wrong with it, she says. It tastes weird, and it feels weird. The husband turns the lights up, and they see the tail of a rat hanging down from the battered and fried drumstick.

Is there a better urban legend than the Kentucky Fried Rat? Maybe. I don't know. Who cares? The rat is glorious. So glorious that it persists--just last year a dude reported receiving a rat instead of a chicken from the fast food restaurant. He even supplied photographic evidence. What's even better: the KFC in question had the offending meat tested at "a lab," which determined that it was chicken after all.

The story comes in lots of forms. One with a particular meaning places all the blame on the wife, who promises to cook for the husband but runs out of time, prompting her to get fast food and disguise it with fancy plates and napkins.

I remember teaching folklore right around the time that KFC changed its name to the initials instead of Kentucky Fried Chicken. My students insisted that they did so because their meat had been altered genetically to the point that it couldn't legally be called chicken anymore. Which is awesomely hilarious. I mean, why would anybody think KFC operates its own chicken farms? And believing this urban legend requires a person to believe that science has advance to the point that people can genetically engineer life forms without feathers, beaks, and the like. Sure, scientists can produce embryos with snouts instead of beaks, or turn on the gene that produces teeth, but things haven't progressed that much.

So why is this the best story in the world? Well, all urban legends comment directly on some element of society, some way that we're making ourselves uncomfortable. This one's about food preparation, reminding us that we probably put too much faith in overworked, underpaid teenagers when it comes to giving us things to eat, that we put too much faith in gigantic corporations that probably don't have our best interests in mind when it comes to giving us things to eat. So the story implicates her in the tragedy for not doing her wifely duty. Misogynistic or not, the story is about our failure to engage with our own lives in the important realm of sustenance. I also love it because, like all urban legends, it makes us shudder.

This legend goes back a few decades. Jan Brunvand writes about it in The Vanishing Hitchhiker. Gary Alan Fine devoted an article to it for the Journal of the Folklore Institute.

"If Colonel Sanders was to be careful how he worded it, he could actually advertise an extra piece."

The Best Stories in the World: Ali of Persia

I'm calling it right now: "Ali of Persia" is the greatest story in the world...I write that with only a little irony.

In the story Shahrazad tells from nights 294 to 296 of the 1001 Nights, Haroun al-Raschid, protector of the faithful, is bored. He calls for a story, and this is what he gets:

This guy named Ali (he's from Persia, as you've probably figured, but he lives in Baghdad) goes to Cairo. When he arrives, this other guy comes up and grabs his satchel, claiming that he lost it yesterday. The two of them fight over it, and they're taken to the qadi (i.e., a judge). "Tell me what's in the bag," says the qadi, quite sensibly. "Whosoever gets it right is the rightful owner."

The thief goes first. He says (and it's worth quoting directly from Malcolm C. Lyons's translation): "In it there are two silver kohl sticks, together with kohl for my eyes, a hand towel in which placed two gilt cups and two candlesticks. There are two tents, two basins, a cooking pot, two clay jars, a ladle, a pack needle, two provision bags, a cat, two bitches, on large bowl and two large sacks, a gown, two furs, a cow with two calves, one goat, two sheep, a ewe with two lambs, two green pavilions, one male and two female camels, a buffalo, two bulls, a lioness and two lions, a she-bear, two foxes, a mattress, two couches, a palace, two halls, a colonnade, two chairs, a kitchen with two doors and a group of Kurds who will bear witness to the fact that this is my bag."

That having been said, and without batting an eye at the list, the qadir asks Ali what's in the bag. Ali says, "...one little ruined house and another one with no door, a dog kennel and a boys' school, with boys playing dice. It had tents and their ropes, the cities of Basra and Baghdad, the palace of Shaddad ibn 'Ad, a blacksmith's forge, a fishing net, sticks, tent pegs, girls, boys, and a thousand pimps who will testify that the bag is mine."

Then the first guy strengthens his case: "In it are fortresses and castles, cranes, beasts of prey, chess players and chessboards. there is a mare and two foals, a stallion and two horses, together with two long spears. It also has a lion, two hares, a city and two villages, a prostitute with two villainous pimps, a hermaphrodite, two good-for-nothings, one blind man and two who can see, a lame man and two who are paralyzed, a priest, two deacons, a patriarch and two monks, a qadi and two notaries, and these will bear witness that this is my bag."

The qadi gives Ali one last chance to prove it's his bag, and Ali says, "In this bag of mine is a coat of mail, a sword and stores of weapons. there are a thousand butting rams, a sheep-fold, a thousand barking dogs, orchards, vines, flowers, scented herbs, figs, apples, pictures and statues, bottles and drinking cups, beautiful slave girls, singing girls, wedding feasts with noise and tumult, wide open spaces, successful men, dawn raiders with swords, spears, bows and arrows, friends, dear ones companions, comrades, men imprisoned and awaiting punishment, drinking companions, mandolins, flutes, banners and flags, boys, girls, unveiled brides and singing slave girls. There are five girls from Abyssinia, three from India, four from al-Medina, twenty from Rum, fifty Turkish girls and seventy Persians, eighty Kurdish girls and ninety Georgians. The Tigris and the Euphrates are there, together with a fishing net, flint and steel for striking sparks, Iram of the Columns and a thousand good-for-nothings and pimps. there are exercise grounds, stables, mosques, baths, a builder, a carpenter, a plank of wood, a nail, a black slave with a fife, a captain and a groom, cities and towns, a hundred thousand dinars, Kufa and al-Anbar, twenty chests filled with materials, fifty storehouses for food, Gaza, Ascalon, the land from Damietta to Aswan, the palace of Chosroe Anushirwan, the kingdom of Solomon and the land from Wadi Nu'man to Khurasan, as well as Balkh and Isfahan and what lies between India and the land of the Blacks. It also contains--May God prolong the life of our master the qadi--gowns, turban cloth and a thousand sharp razors to shave off the qadi's beard, unless he fears my vengeance and rules that the bag is mine."

Acknowledging the oddity of what he has just heard, the qadi orders the bag opened. In it were a piece of bread, lemons, cheese, and olives.

The caliph Haroun al-Raschid hears this and laughs until he falls over.

This story is often referred to as "The Wonderful Bag," and believe it or not it has been illustrated as a children's book. Also, heaven help us, it was adapted for theater.

So why is this the greatest story in the world? Seriously? Didn't you just read it? What in the world is going on with this story, do you think? Why would someone invent it? There's probably some clue to be found in the escalation of items found in the bag. I don't know. Honestly, my favorite part is that Ali says the bag contains "wide open spaces."

The Best Stories in the World: "Bartelby," by Herman Melville

I love this story. It's a very simple thing: Bartleby prefers not doing over doing; chaos ensues.

Bartleby is a scrivener--a person who by hand makes copies of important legal documents, long before the digital age. Is this important? I don't know. Bartleby is described in several ways; first, as "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!" then as possessed of a "cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance." 

The action begins when Bartleby applies for a job working for the unnamed lawyer who narrates Melville's tale. He is a good scrivener for a successful lawyer, but when the time comes for the lawyer to request certain duties all scriveners perform (such as reading aloud a copy to check for mistakes) Bartleby merely states, "I would prefer not to." This then happens for every request made to Bartleby.

The narrator and his other employees are befuddled. Soon the narrator finds himself using the word prefer a little too frequently.  His frustration with Bartleby grows when he discovers the man pretty much living in the law office. He essentially fires Bartelby, offering compensation, but Bartleby prefers not to leave. Soon Bartleby stops working altogether, though he doesn't leave the office. The narrator can't deal with it anymore, so he up and moves. The new occupants find him complaining that Bartleby is still there. The narrator tries to reason with the man, but nothing works.

Bartleby's taken to prison, where he prefers not to do anything. Soon he is found lying in the yard. But the story doesn't end there. The narrator later hears that Bartleby worked in the dead letter office. He sees some meaning in this.

If you're looking to read more about Bartleby, Dan McCall's The Silence of Bartleby is probably the best place to start. A whole book about Bartleby, in which you'll find that Bartleby is everything and nothing, that every academic theory can be used successfully to illuminate the story, and that none of them encompass the respectable cadaver that is Bartleby the scrivener.

So why is this one of the best stories in the world? I had intended to make a joke about preferring not to tell you, but Bartleby is just so compellingly inscrutable. He reveals nothing. He gives no indication of why he does what he does--or doesn't do, as the case may be. Yet the hints are fascinating. Melville's style isn't always the most accessible, and Bartleby is a long story for so little to happen in it (though still not very long). But it's worth reading. And reading a whole book about just to show how much can be made of so little.

The Best Stories in the World: The Nose by Nikolai Gogol

So this guy, Kovalev, wakes up one morning to discover that his nose is missing. He sort of freaks out, because it's his nose and whatnot. He tries to go about finding his nose by going to the police, but on the way he sees his nose. I'll let Nikolai Gogol, by way of translator Andrew R. MacAndrew, describe the vision:

Suddenly he stopped dead near the entrance door of a house. An incredible sequence of events unrolled before his eyes. A carriage stopped at the house entrance. Its door opened. A uniformed gentleman appeared. Stooping, he jumped out of the carriage, ran up the steps and entered the house. A combination of horror and amazement swept over Kovalev when he recognized the stranger as his own nose.

So the nose dresses as some sort of state official and his going about town doing various things. Kovalev confronts the nose, but gets nowhere with that, what with the nose denying that it is his nose. ("Don't you realize that you are my nose?" The nose looked at the major and frowned slightly.) Kovalev then goes to the newspaper to try to put out a notice for help finding the nose, which has eluded him. That
doesn't go well for him, but we are treated to this paragraph:

The reception room in which all these people waited was quite small and the air was getting stuffy. But the smell didn't bother Collegiate Assessor Kovalev because he kept his face covered with a handkerchief and also because his nose happened to be God knew where.

Kovalev then goes to the police, with whom he has even more trouble. Kovalev has lots of anxiety about going through life without a nose. He becomes quite paranoid, assuming that the mother of a young lady Kovalev has been flirting with might have stolen it in the night. He sends her a vague but harshly worded letter, after which she replies in confusion that she would like for him to marry her daughter. Kovalev removes her from his suspect list.

It's not really a mystery. Readers are made aware from the very beginning that Kovalev's nose was in the possession of his barber, who found it in a breakfast roll that very morning, though the barber didn't remember cutting it off. He then threw it over a bridge into a river, though he was accosted by a policeman and accused of suspicious behavior. The point of the story isn't what happened to the nose, it's what happens to Kovalev because of the missing nose. And Kovalev becomes desperate and crazy.

Soon enough the policeman who confronted the barber arrives at Kovalev's house with the nose. Kovalev is grateful, but is now presented with a new problem. Not knowing how the nose was removed, he can't figure out how to get it back on his face. It won't simply stay there when he pushes it into the right place.

Meanwhile, rumors have spread around town, and people tell all sorts of tales about the nose going out for walks and the like. People crowd around places where the nose is said to be strolling, and they generally cause quite a nuisance. Then...

The world is full of absolute nonsense. Sometimes it is really unbelievable. Suddenly, the very nose that used to go around as a state councilor and caused such a stir all over the city turned up, as though nothing had happened, in its proper place, namely between the cheeks of Major Kovalev.

Kovalev is quite happy about this turn of events. He even lets that same barber shave him, though cautioning the barber not to pinch his nose while doing so. And that is the only observable change wrought by this story, which ends with the narrator musing about how strange it all ways, which leads to this conclusion:

But the strangest of all, the most incomprehensible thing, is that there are authors who can choose such subjects to write about. This, I confess, is completely inexplicable, it's like...no, no, I can't understand it at all. In the first place, there is absolutely no advantage in it for out mother country. Secondly...well, what advantage is there in it at all? I simply cannot understand what it is...
 However, when all is said and done, and although, of course, we conceive the possibility, one and the other, and maybe even...Well, but then what exists without inconsistencies? And still, if you give it a thought, there is something to it. Whatever you may say, such things do happen--seldom, but they do.

Now that's how you end a story.

So why is this one of the best stories in the world? Do I even have to answer that question? It's about a nose that dresses up like a state official and tries to take a train to Riga, for reasons never revealed. Isn't that enough?

No? Very well then. I love this story because I love absurdity. And no matter how serious you are of countenance, how grave you are in your daily doings, if you read this story you can't help but picture what a nose dressed up like a state official (a Russian state official, no less) would look like. The nose goes about its business without any comment by all but that police officer, who wouldn't have said a thing if he hadn't had his glasses on at the time. The nose speaks. It denies its identity as a nose. And, knowing apparently that the game is up, it tries to flee. This was written in 1836 or so.

This is the first story I've put into this series that exists in, really, only one form. Aside from translation, there are no particular variants of this story--a literary creation (though it seems to have been adapted for the stage). I've included no pictures this time, because for me much of the magic of the story lies in imagining what the nose would look like as it saunters about town.

Much of what I have used as criteria for greatness has had to do with malleability, with whether or not the core of the story could be held while the surface details can be put to use in new contexts and new tellings. With Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose," I hope that you see the same sort of malleability; the only difference being a malleability of interpretation rather than of retelling. What is the nose? It's a piece of a person, and can stand for any number of neuroses or worries or anxieties. It's phallic, if you want it to be. It's also the only part of a person's face that's visible to the person without a reflective surface. Thus it's as semantically rich as the reader wants it to be. It's something that we lose, some essential part of ourselves that, growing older--perhaps without accomplishing those things that we had hoped for during our youth (there's a lot in the story about Kovalev's worries in what I interpret as this sense)--we didn't even realize had been gone until it's too late. We might find it again, or not. Or finding it, it might not fit quite how we thought it would.