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A pourquoi story [a] (French pronunciation: ⓘ; "pourquoi" meaning "why" in French) is a fictional narrative that explains why something is the way it is, for example why snakes have no legs or why tigers have striped coats. Many legends, origin myths and folk tales are pourquoi stories.
He sees the giant children of the Sky God playing nearby and asks their help. They say they will help if Mwindo makes them a snack. He brings them twelve enormous bowls, cut from tree trunks, full of good things to eat. As the children finish their snack, they turn the bowls upside down and stack them, making a stairway into the clouds.
A less pejorative term is a pourquoi story, which has been used to describe usually more mythological or otherwise traditional examples of this genre, aimed at children. This phrase is a reference to Rudyard Kipling 's 1902 Just So Stories , containing fictional and deliberately fanciful tales for children, in which the stories pretend to ...
The tale is related to the cycle of the Calumniated Wife, and is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children". The Sotho tale has been related to a cycle of stories about jealous sisters (in this case, co-wives) that take their sister's children and replace them for animals to ...
A peasant begged some land from the king. When he and his daughter dug the field, they found a mortar made of gold. The daughter warned that if they gave it to the king for his kindness, he would ask for the pestle as well; the father gave it nonetheless, and the king asked for the pestle and put him in prison until he got it.
Accounts of the stories have pre-colonial origins, but the name of the hero was Hispanized during the Spanish colonization. The original name of the hero has been lost in time. All versions of the story agree that Bernardo Carpio had a strength that was similar to that of many strong men-heroes in Asian epics, such as Lam-ang.
According to researcher Galina Kabakova, the fate of the children at the end of the tale is important to determine the origin of that particular variant (based on a geographical method): in the main Lithuanian versions, mother and children are transformed into trees, a motif that occurs in versions collected from the Belarus's border between ...
How the Snake Lost Its Legs: Curious Tales from the Frontier of Evo-Devo is a 2014 book on evolutionary developmental biology by Lewis I. Held, Jr. The title pays homage to Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, [1] [a] but the "tales" are strictly scientific, explaining how a wide range of animal features evolved, in molecular detail.