Magical Creatures & Transformations

This chapter focuses on transformation, showing the ‘true self’, as well as beings with fantastic abilities. Here too, we can meet the ‘iron-nosed’ woman, who is actually the witch, as well as the deservedly popular character of Hungarian folktales, the táltos horse, or dragons, which here appear as helpers. Two tales, ‘The Girl with the Golden Hair’ and ‘The Little Magic Pony’, are partially the same tale type. This does not mean that they are ‘copies’, in fact, I think that these two stories are one of the greatest assets of the chapter, as they can encourage the reader to make comparisons! If you are interested in the world of variations, or, as a storyteller or just someone curious, you would like to see several versions of interesting episodes or dialogues within a particular type of story, I definitely recommend these two tales.

There are two other special tales in this chapter. One of them is the wonderful and moving religious tale called ‘The Baa-Lambs’, which many twenty-first-century Hungarian storytellers like to tell around Advent or any other quiet, thoughtful time. The tale ‘The Crow’s Nest’ is also about a special transformation, where the bones of a child – who was sent to death by his mother and then eaten by his father – turn into a bird. The wonderful motif of transformation and the return from the afterlife appears here, with a poetic insert added to the tale. This is one of our beautiful examples of tales that have songs in them.