Reading Notes: The Gold-Giving Serpent #2
Story source: Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1912).
I noticed that in a lot of these Indian folk stories, there is a Brahman in it. After noticing how often they were incorporated into the stories, I googled it and found out that a Brahman is a member of the highest Hindu caste, that of the priesthood.
In this story, there was a farmer who was also a Brahman. One day, he was laying under the shadow of a big tree when a snake slithered up to him. He thought to himself that maybe his farming wasn't doing well because he had never paid respects to the snake, so he decided to do so.
He poured milk into a bowl and went to the top of the hill, set it on the ground, and said a prayer to the heavens - to the guardians of the field he farmed on. The next day, when he came back, the milk was gone and a dinar (a piece of gold) was in its place. From now on, he was going to have his son take milk in a bowl to the same place in hopes that there would be gold in its place the next morning again and again.
When it happened again, the son thought to himself, I should just kill the serpent and take all of the gold for myself. The next day when they dropped off the milk for it, the son tried to hit it on the head but missed. Realizing what he were trying to do, the serpent sunk it's fangs into the farmer's son and killed him.
When the farmer found out his son had died, he was devastated, but took a bowl a milk to the top of the hill to praise the snake. The snake did not understand why the farmer was trying to make amends, and told him that what has happened couldn't be forgotten and that they could never be friends. But still, he gave the Brahman a pearl and told him to never come back.
I thought this story was interesting for multiple reasons. It didn't have a happy ending, which I wasn't really a fan of, and I didn't like how it didn't explain why the snake still gave the farmer a pearl at the end. It was also sad to read that the farmer didn't learn a lesson from his sons death and was still willing to give the snake milk for gold coins. I do think that this story could be interesting to rewrite but change the ending to something happier, and maybe change the characters as well.
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