Rootabaga Stories (1922) is a children's book of interrelated short stories by Carl Sandburg. The whimsical, sometimes melancholy stories, which often use nonsense language, [1] were originally created for his own daughters. Sandburg had three daughters, Margaret, Janet and Helga, whom he nicknamed "Spink", "Skabootch" and "Swipes", and those nicknames occur in some of his Rootabaga stories. [2]
The "Rootabaga" stories were born of Sandburg's desire for "American fairy tales" to match American childhood. He felt that the European stories involving royalty and knights were inappropriate, and so set his stories in a fictionalized American Midwest called "the Rootabaga country" with fairy-tale concepts such as corn fairies mixed with farms, trains, sidewalks, and skyscrapers. [3]
A large number of the stories are told by the Potato Face Blind Man, an old minstrel of the Village of Liver-and-Onions who hangs out in front of the local post office. His impossibly acquired firsthand knowledge of the stories adds to the book's narrative feel and fantastical nature. In the Preface of the little-known Potato Face, Sandburg wrote, "it is in Rootabaga Country, and in the biggest village of that country, the Potato Face Blind Man sits with his accordion on the corner nearest the post office. There he sits with his eyes never looking out and always searching in. And sometimes he finds in himself the whole human procession."
Sandburg went on about the storyteller, "In fact, he sometimes indicates that when he needs an animal or fool not yet seen or heard of, he can make it for himself and give it a character so it is real to him, and when he talks about it and tells its story, it is like telling about one of his own children. He seems to love some of the precious things that are cheap, such as stars, the wind, pleasant words, time to be lazy, and fools having personality and distinction. He knows, it seems, that young people are young no matter how many years they live; that there are children born old and brought up to be full of fear; that a young heart keeps young by a certain measure of fooling as the years go by; that men and women old in years sometimes keep a fresh child heart and, to the last, salute the dawn and the morning with a mixture of reverence and laughter."
Rootabaga Stories was followed by a sequel, Rootabaga Pigeons , published in 1923. A little known volume of Rootabaga stories called Potato Face was published in 1930 by Harcourt, Brace and Company. It was not illustrated. A collection of previously unpublished stories was published as More Rootabagas in 1993 with illustrations by Paul O. Zelinsky.
A vinyl LP of Carl Sandburg reading some of the stories, Rootabaga Stories as told by Carl Sandburg was released on Caedmon (TC 1089) in 1958; the cassette version is Caedmon CDL 51089. Contents:
There are two other recordings of Rootabaga stories by Sandburg, How to Tell Corn Fairies When You See 'Em and Others of His Rootabaga Stories (Caedmon TC 1159) and Rootabaga Stories Vol. 3 (Caedmon TC 1306).
Podcast The Folktale Project also tells renditions of Rootabaga tales.
Carl August Sandburg was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). He enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life". When he died in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."
A fairy tale is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic, enchantments, and mythical or fanciful beings. In most cultures, there is no clear line separating myth from folk or fairy tale; all these together form the literature of preliterate societies. Fairy tales may be distinguished from other folk narratives such as legends and explicit moral tales, including beast fables. Prevalent elements include dragons, dwarfs, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, griffins, merfolk, monsters, talking animals, trolls, unicorns, witches, wizards, magic, and enchantments.
"Cinderella", or "The Little Glass Slipper", is a folk tale with thousands of variants that are told throughout the world. The protagonist is a young girl living in forsaken circumstances that are suddenly changed to remarkable fortune, with her ascension to the throne via marriage. The story of Rhodopis, recounted by the Greek geographer Strabo sometime between 7 BC and 23 AD, about a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, is usually considered to be the earliest known variant of the Cinderella story.
The "Town Musicians of Bremen" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in Grimms' Fairy Tales in 1819.
Michael Hague is an American illustrator, primarily of children's fantasy books.
"The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was" or "The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear" is a German folktale collected by the Brothers Grimm in Grimm's Fairy Tales. The tale was also included by Andrew Lang in The Blue Fairy Book (1889).
Literary nonsense is a broad categorization of literature that balances elements that make sense with some that do not, with the effect of subverting language conventions or logical reasoning. Even though the most well-known form of literary nonsense is nonsense verse, the genre is present in many forms of literature.
The Canary Prince is an Italian fairy tale, the 18th tale in Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino. He took the tale from Turin, making various stylistic changes; he noted it developed a medieval motif, but such tales as Marie de France's Yonec produced a rather different effect, being tales of adultery. A variant on Rapunzel, Aarne–Thompson type 310, The Maiden in the Tower, it includes many motifs that differentiate it from that tale. Other fairy tales of this type include Anthousa, Xanthousa, Chrisomalousa, Petrosinella, Prunella, and Rapunzel.
"Trusty John", "Faithful John", "Faithful Johannes", or "John the True" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1819. Andrew Lang included it in The Blue Fairy Book.
"The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats" is a fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in Grimm's Fairy Tales. It is of Aarne-Thompson type 123 "The Wolf and the Kids".
Caedmon Audio and HarperCollins Audio are record label imprints of HarperCollins Publishers that specialize in audiobooks and other literary content. Formerly Caedmon Records, its marketing tag-line was Caedmon: a Third Dimension for the Printed Page. The name changed when the label switched to CD-only production.
Elizabeth Wright Enright Gillham was an American writer of children's books, an illustrator, writer of short stories for adults, literary critic and teacher of creative writing. Perhaps best known as the Newbery Medal-winning author of Thimble Summer (1938) and the Newbery runner-up Gone-Away Lake (1957), she also wrote the popular Melendy quartet. A Newbery Medal laureate and a multiple winner of the O. Henry Award, her short stories and articles for adults appeared in many popular magazines and have been reprinted in anthologies and textbooks.
Prunella is an Italian fairy tale, originally known as Prezzemolina. Andrew Lang included it in The Grey Fairy Book. It is Aarne-Thompson type 310, the Maiden in the Tower.
Ruslan and Ludmila is a poem by Alexander Pushkin, published in 1820. It is written as an epic fairy tale consisting of a dedication (посвящение), six "cantos", and an epilogue. It tells the story of the abduction of Ludmila, the daughter of Prince Vladimir of the Kievan Rus', by an evil wizard and the attempt by the brave knight Ruslan to find and rescue her.
African-American folktales are the storytelling and oral history of enslaved African Americans during the 1700s-1900s. Prevalent themes in African-American folktales include tricksters, life lessons, heartwarming tales, and slavery. African Americans created folktales that spoke about the hardships of slavery and told stories of folk spirits that could outwit their slaveholders and defeat their enemies. These folk stories gave hope to enslaved people that folk spirits would liberate them from slavery. One of these heroes that they looked up to was the charming High John the Conqueror, who was a cunning trickster against his slave masters. He often empowered newly freed slaves, saying that if they needed him, his spirit would be in a local root. Other common figures in African-American folktales include Anansi, Brer Rabbit, and Uncle Monday. Many folktales are unique to African-American culture, while others are influenced by African, European, and Native American tales.
Carl Sandburg Bibliography
Natalie Savage Carlson was an American writer of children's books. For her lifetime contribution as a children's writer, she was United States nominee for the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1966.
World Tales, subtitled "The Extraordinary Coincidence of Stories Told in All Times, in All Places" is a book of 65 folk tales collected by Idries Shah from around the world, mostly from literary sources. Some of the tales are very current, others are less well known.
The Golden Arm is a folktale, a story appearing in multiple cultures through oral tradition and folklore, most famously told by Mark Twain and also used by him to instruct others in how to tell a story. The tale begins with a death or a recently deceased victim who has an artificial limb, usually an arm, made of gold. The victim has their limb stolen after their death, most often by a loved one or trusted one in greed. Then the victim comes back from the grave looking to get their golden limb back and scares the robber into giving back their arm.
"Fog" is a poem written by Carl Sandburg. It first appeared in Sandburg's first mainstream collection of poems, Chicago Poems, published in 1916.
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