TPO20 Lecture3-Literature(Folktales)
Narrator
Listen to part of a lecture in a literature class.
Professor
All right, so now we’ve talked about folk legends and seen that their... one of their key features is there’s usually some real history behind them. They are often about real people, so you can identify with the characters, and that’s what engages us in them. The particular stories might not be true and some of the characters or events might be made up. But there’s still a sense that the story could have been true since it is about a real person. That’s distinct contrast from the other main branch of popular storytelling, which is folk tales.
Folk tales are imaginative stories that... um... like folk legends, they have been passed down orally, from storyteller to storyteller for... since ancient times. But with folk tales you don’t ever really get the sense that the story might have been true. They are purely imaginative and so quite revealing, I think anyway, about the culture and the connection between folk tales and culture, which we’ll talk about.
But first let’s go over the various types of folk tale and focus specifically on Norwegian folk tales since they illustrate the variety pretty well. There are in general three main types of Norwegian folk tales.
One is animal stories, where animals are the main characters. They can be wild animals or domestic, and a lot of times they can talk and behave like humans, but at the same time, they retain their animal characteristics too. They tend to involve animals like bears, wolves and foxes.
The point of these stories, their, their internal objectives, so the speak, is usually to explain some feature of the animal, how it arose. So there’s one about a fox who fools a bear into going ice fishing with his tail. When the bear puts his tail into the water through a hole in the ice, to try and catch a fish, the ice freezes around it, and he ends up pulling his tail off. So that’s why bears to this day have such short tails.
The second category of Norwegian folk tale is the supernatural. Eh... stories about giants and dragons and trolls, and humans with supernatural powers or gifts, like invisibility cloaks. Or where people are turned into animals and back again into a person, those are called transformation stories.
There’s a well-known Norwegian supernatural folk tale, a transformation story called East of the Sun and West of the Moon, which we’ll read. It involves a prince who is a white bear by night and a human by day. And he lives in the castle that’s east of the Sun and west of the Moon, which the heroine in the story has to try to find. Besides being a good example of a transformation story, this one also has a lot of the common things that tend to show up in folk tales. You will find the standard opening, ‘once upon a time... ’. And it has stockcharacters like a prince, and a poor but beautiful peasant girl, she is the heroine I mentioned. And... um... it has a very conventional form. So no more than two characters are involved in any one scene. And it has a happy ending.
And it’s... the story is presented as though... well, even though a lot of the actions that occurred are pretty fantastic, so you’d never think of it as
realistic. The characters still act like... they resemble real people. They are not real or even based on historical figures. But you might have a supernatural story involving a king, and he’d act like you’d expect a Norwegian king to act.
OK. The third main kind of folk tale is the comical story. We’ll say more later about these, but for now, just be aware of the category and that they can contain supernatural aspects, but they are usually more playful and amusing overall than supernatural stories.
Now, as I said, traditionally, folk tales were just passed down orally. Each generation of storytellers had their own style of telling a story. But... um... in Norway, before the 19th century, folk tales were just for kids. They weren’t seen as worthy of analysis or academic attention. But this changed when the romantic movement spread throughout Europe in the mid-19th century.
Romantics looked at folk tales as sort of a reflection of the soul of the people. So there was something distinctly Norwegian in folk tales from Norway. And there was renewed pride in the literature and art forms of individual countries. As a result, the first collection of Norwegian folk tales is published in 1852. And there have been many new editions published since then. For the people of Norway, these stories are now an important part of what it means to be Norwegian.
TPO20 Lecture4-Biology(Snowshoe Hare)
Narrator
Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class.
Professor
Now, James, you said you had been to the State of Maine, right?
Student
Yeah, actually I lived in western Maine until I was about sixteen.
Professor
Great. So why don’t you tell everybody what is like there in the winter?
Student
The winter? Well, it’s cold. And there’s lots of snow, you wouldn’t believe how much snow we used to get.
Professor
Actually I would. I did field research up there a couple of winters. And it really is an incredible environment. And to survive in that sort of environment, animals have to adapt, to evolve in response to their surroundings. As you recall, an adaptation is any feature, um... physical or behavioral feature of a species that helps it survive and reproduce. And in adapting to extreme climates, like Maine in the winter time, animals can evolve in pretty interesting ways. Take, for example, the snowshoe hare.
Ok, the snowshoe hare, and of course, that’s H-A-R-E, like a rabbit. Although I probably should mention that technically a hare is not exactly the same as a rabbit, even though it is very similar.
The primary difference is that a rabbit’s young are born blind and without fur , while a hare’s babies are born with a full coat and able to see.
Now, the snowshoe hare, tell me, what sort of adaptations do you think it has developed that help it survive the Maine winters? I’ll give you a hint. Food isn’t an issue. The hare actually has abundant food in the small twigs it finds.
Student
Well, I don’t know. I mean, I know we used to try to look for these rabbits, eh... hares, when we went hiking in the winter , but it was often hard to find them in the snow.
Professor
Yes. That’s exactly right. The major concern of the snowshoe hare in the winter is predators. And now that includes humans. So one of its adaptations is basically camouflage. In other words, its coat, its fur , turns from brown in the summer to white in the winter , which makes it harder for the hare’s predators to see it against the white snow.
Student
Yeah, but I could swear I remembered seeing rabbits in the snow a couple of times, I means hares, that were brown.
Professor
Well, you may very well have. Timing is really important, but the snowshoe hare doesn’t always get it exactly right. Its chances for survival are best if it turns white about the time of the first snowfall. And it’s the amount of daylight that triggers the changing of the hare’s coat. As the days get shorter , that is, as the Sun is up for a shorter and shorter time each day, the snowshoe hare starts growing white fur and shedding its brown fur. The hare does a pretty good job with its timing, but sometimes when there’s a really early or late snow, it stands out. Plus, it takes about a month for the snowshoe hare’s coat to completely change color. So if there’s a particularly early snowfall, it’s very likely that the hare’s fur would not yet be totally white. And that would make this a particularly dangerous time for the hare.
OK. What else? Other adaptations? Susan?
Student
Well, it’s called the snowshoe hare, so are its feet somehow protect it from the cold?
Professor
Well, this animal’s name does have to do with an adaptation of its feet. Uh... though, not like it has warm furry boots or something to keep its feet from getting cold. You’ve probably never needed to wear snowshoes. But, well, snowshoes are not like thick furry shoes designed to keep the feet warm, they are actually quite thin, but very wide. What they do is spread out the weight of the foot coming down on the snow. See, the problem with walking on snow is that you sink in with every step. But with snowshoes, you don’t sink in, you walk on top of the snow. It makes walking through the Maine countryside in the winter much easier.
Anyway, the snowshoe hare has an adaptation that plays on the same idea. It has hind feet that act like snowshoes. I mean, it’s paws are wide and they allow the hare to hop and run just at the surface of deep snow. And this is a huge advantage for the snowshoe hare since by contrast, the feet of its predators usually sink right down into the snow.
Now, another advantage related to this is that unlike many animals in winter, snowshoe hares can stay lean and light weight. They accumulate essentially no body fat. Can anyone guess why this is so?
Student
They don’t eat very much?
Professor
Well, yes. But not because there isn’t enough food around. It’s because, like I said, food is almost always within reach, and they don’t have to store up a lot of food energy for the harsh winters.
