Reading Notes: Tibetan Folk Tales, Reading B

 

("The Three Hunters" by Mildred Bryant via UN-Textbook)

The story that I chose to focus my reading notes on for this post is “The Three Hunters” by A.L. Shelton (1925). I chose this story because I honestly enjoyed the ending as I believe that the characters got what they deserved. The basic plot of this story is that there are three brothers who each have a wife and they all share a sister. The three brothers treat the sister very well and two of the wives feel as if they like the sister more than them, causing them to feel great jealousy. The two wives plan to kill the sister and they eventually kill her when the three brothers went out to go hunting. The third wife took no part in this and when the brothers came home, the wife of the youngest brother ended up telling the brothers what had occurred. The three brothers become furious and end up killing the two wives. This story along with many other stories use magical elements with the magical element in this story being the soul of the sister. While the brothers were hunting, they found a bird singing that supposedly sounded like their sister. Then they asked the bird to jump on their hand if the bird was their sister and once the bird jumped on their hands, that’s how the brothers knew that their sister had died. The characters in this story do not have any names and there are actually few characters of nature such as animals compared to the other stories in this section.