1925: Tales from Silver Lands by Charles Finger

This is what Wikipedia has to say about this week's book:

"Tales from Silver Lands is a book by Charles Finger that won the Newbery Medal in 1925. The book is a collection of nineteen folktales of the native populations of Central and South America, including a 'just-so story' describing how rabbits and rats got their tails."

That's it. It has a little more to say about Charles Finger, but not much. He was born in England, traveled extensively, and finally settled in the Ozarks, Kansas. It's not much to go by. In fact, as one of my side projects for this week, I think I'll take it upon myself to add a little to the Wikipedia entry. It pains me to see such a delightful book given such little space on the vast planes of the internet - after all, internet realty is free.

But despite the general lack of information about this book, we can learn a lot of things from the book itself. The book was rife with evil witches, imprisoned maidens, and beasts transformed into humans and vice versa. The story mentioned in the Wikipedia stub, the 'just-so story' called "A Tale of Three Tales," is probably one of the least remarkable. If you want to read just one or two selections from the book, I might recommend "The Tale of the Lazy People." It's toward the end of the book, but I enjoyed it very much - possibly because I just spent a weekend with a friend who is taking a class on socialism and was alert to the evils of capitalism. I also enjoyed the story of the noble and gentle huanacos, who stand sentinel on the ridges of the mountains ("The Tale of the Gentle Folk").

I think I will mention only one topic in depth, and that was one I discovered with the interests of an eco-critic in mind. The stories in this book are very positive about nature; good characters are in touch with nature and can often speak the language of the beasts and plants. But there was one rather troubling aspect, and that was the recurring appearance of the "animal companion" - that is, an animal who is supposedly "friends" with a human and accompanies him or her on adventures. The animals in many of these stories help humans by building, carrying messages, and fighting on their behalf. In the first story, they even help the protagonists cut down the forest - the one in which the animals themselves (used to ) live! And we're told that after this little feet of irony "all things in the forest were glad."

This got me thinking about animal "friends" and how they always seem to get the short end of the stick. Think about it. How often do stories feature a human with an animal companion where the animal ends up sacrificing itself for its human friend? And when was the last time you read a story where a human sacrificed his or her life so that the animal companion could go on and have a happy ending? This is one of the reasons Old Yeller upset me when I was younger - poor Old Yeller defended his master to the death, and what did he get in return? He got rabies and a bullet to the head. Alas.

I was just rereading So You Want to be a Wizard in preparation for the next chapter in my book, and the same thought occurred to me then. Kit and Nita travel to an alternate Manhattan in which the dominant form of life is sentient automobiles. Kit helps one of these feral cars (the mouse removing the thorn from the lion's paw) and in return the car defends him - and loses its life in the process. The thing that seemed strange was how predictable I found this sequence of events. Why else would Kit befriend a wild creature but so that it would come to his aid later?

I have a feeling I'll be exploring this idea some more in the future, especially as the next couple of Newbery books feature a wild horse and a pigeon war hero as their protagonists. And at the same time, as I do research for my chapter on religion and eco-ethics (for which I reread Duane's Wizard novels, among others), I have been encountering questions of the power dynamic between humans and animals over and over again. For now I suppose I'll leave the issue open, and welcome anyone who has a response.