Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Week 4, Reading Diary: Turkish Fairy Tales

For week three, I decided to read Turkish Fairy Tales. The Turkish Fairy Tales that I read was from a selection of stories by Ignacz Kunos.

After reading the first half of the stories, I realized that Turkish fairy tales were both similar and different from the fairy tales that I grew up reading.

These stories were similar to the fairy tales I read as a child because they had magical creatures. Within these stories, I saw fairy’s, queens, talking animals, ghosts and handsome princes.

I thought they were different because they were somewhat violent and hard to understand.

I noticed that a lot of the stories included the number 40. I think this number is an important symbol in their culture.

I also noticed that almost every story had the theme of "death and life." The main character had to accomplish some difficult journey or task in order to save his or her life.

My favorite story from section 1 was called “Fear.” I enjoyed this story because it made “fear” seem like a human and/or object. In the story, a little boy had to accomplish many scary tasks in order to experience fear on his own.



The boy spent time with robbers, saw the dead come to life in a graveyard, witnessed ghosts and was on a boat while it started sinking. After all of these dangerous tasks, he still didn’t understand what fear was.

One night, he was eating dinner and a bird suddenly flew out of his soup. He immediately was frightened and “found fear.” Afterwards, he was reunited with his mother and they lived happily ever after.

I enjoyed these stories because they all had some sort of moral lesson embedded in them. It was interesting trying to picture myself reading these as a little girl. I am excited to read the second half of the stories tomorrow!

No comments:

Post a Comment