Week 5 Essay: Recurirng Motifs Turkish Fairy Tales

The two stories that shared a common motif were The Fish-Peri and The Crow-Peri. As you can already tell, both stories involve some sort of Turkish peri - meaning fairy. In both narratives, a beautiful animal is captured by some human who is ignorant of the animals true form. In the Fish-Peri, the animal is a lovely fish that the young man can neither eat nor sell because of the joy he finds in gazing upon this beautiful fish. The fish helped the young man during the day by transforming into a maiden and cleaning his house while he was out. In The Crow-Peri, the crow is caught in a trap by a boy. The crow tells the boy that if he releases it, it will help the boy catch an even better bird. The fish and the crow continue to help the young man and the boy through their various tasks throughout the stories by having the males make very strange requests. I'm not sure how the authors decided that things like "forty wagons of wine" or a "bolster" would transform into ivory or feasts, but in the stories that is what happened! Another thing that the two stories had in common was that they both ended with a happily ever after via the marriage of the youth to the fish-peri and the boy to the crow-peri. A final and more broad motif that I have noticed throughout a majority of the Turkish fairy tales is the very common time frame of forty days and forty nights. Either the subject is given only forty days to complete some task or the subject celebrates for forty days and nice - how nice would that be? I'm not positive on the origin of this idea, but I think that it would be an interesting thing for Professor Gibbs to add to the introductory notes of the unit. Overall, I thought that this unit was one of the more enjoyable and easy flowing units I have read thus far.

(Yellow-edged Lyretail: My idea of the fish-peri: Image by: Derek Keats)