"The Two Old Women's
Bet." In Richard Chase, Grandfather Tales.
Boston: Houghton, 1948, pp. 156-61. With one
full-page drawing of the climax of the tale, at the
funeral, by Berkeley William, Jr. This humorous
tale depicts two women who try to outdo each other in
making fools of their husbands. One talks her man
into believing he has died, while the other wife claims
she is using virgin wool that cannot be seen by anyone
who lies to his wife, thereby convincing her husband to
go out in an invisible suit of clothes she pretends to
sew for him. At the funeral, the husband who isn't
really dead laughs at the husband who appears in his
underwear. Reprinted in collections by Jimmy Neil
Smith, Why the Possum's Tail is Bare (NY: Avon,
1993); Jane Yolen, Favorite Folktales from Around the
World (NY: Pantheon, 1986); Joanna Coles, Best-Loved
Folktales of the World (NY: Doubleday, 1982); Kevin
Crossley-Holland, Oxford Book of Folktales
(Oxford Univ. Press, 1998). "The Foolish Bet." Told by NC storyteller Connie Regan-Blake in Dive-Into Stories: A Telling Performance. Audio CD. Asheville, NC: Storywindow Productions, 2006. The two women fool their husbands into thinking one is dead and the other has a new suit that is invisible to lying husbands. In the end no one can decide who won the bet so humorous arguments about the winner continue forever. (Other contents: "Lantern," a funny tall tale about two girls telling fishing tales; "Two Friends and One Horse," a folktale told in Israel about making peace"; "Rice Balls," a Japanese tale about a hungry old woman outsmarting hungry and perpetually hungry ogres; and "Lucky Duck," a true story about a mentally retarded man and a social worker. "Ray's Amazing Grace" tells of Regan-Blake's close friendship with Ray Hicks and his family.) "The
Three Old Women's Bet," by
R. Rex Stephenson,
story
theatre dramatization for
The Jack Tale Players, 2001. Published
by I. E. Clark
(Schulenburg, TX), 2002. Stephenson included a third wife
found in tale type 1406, The Merry Wives Wager. He
realized that the man pretending to be a dog would be a
big hit with younger children in his adaptation set in
the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Notes: Although this silliest of tales may seem intended for pure fun, it does explore issues worth discussing with children and students—not only questions about how jokes and satires use exaggeration and overgeneralization, but also ideas about the character types portrayed. Each woman is especially clever at exploiting her husband’s particular fears or vanities to make him act so incredibly foolish. Tale type 1406, with female tricksters and foolish or "noodlehead" men, is found in many countries from Iceland to Russia. Although none of the tales cited here contains explicit references to infidelity (except the Ozark tale below), this tale type is related to medieval fabliaux and jests adapted by authors such as Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare (e.g., The Merry Wives of Windsor) in stories about unfaithful lovers or spouses and tricks played on the opposite sex. "The Miller with the Golden Thumb" is an example of a short jest from Shakespeare Jest-Books, 1864. Other examples and resources are give at The Fabliaux, in Harvard's The Geoffrey Chaucer Page. Jane Yolen notes that the Appalachian tale also includes tale type 1313, The Man Who Thought Himself Dead (Favorite Folktales from Around the World, Notes, p. 485). Many folktale collections contain sections on "sillies," fools, noodleheads or tricksters. In "Jack and the Three Sillies," Jack has a wife who learns that others are as foolish as he is, after Jack engages in a series of unwise trades, ending up with a rock in place of their cow. (His mother faints after his similar foolish trading in “Jack Goes A-Swappin.’”) In many other Jack Tales, and in "Mutsmag," giants, and sometimes witches, are gullible enough to be tricked by the smaller but smarter hero. Compare with: "The Merry Wives Wager," in Andrew Lang's The Pink Fairy Book. Lang used a Danish version of tale type 1406. Reprinted online at Rick Walton, Children's Author: Classic Tales and Fables. "The Emperor's New Clothes" by Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen uses tale type 1620, The King's New Clothes, with two male schemers pretending to be tailors as the tricksters, while tales based on The Merry Wives Wager show that women can easily outwit the men. Reprinted online at Rick Walton, Children's Author: Classic Tales and Fables. Another version based on Andersen, from Andrew Lang's The Yellow Fairy Book, is also at Classic Tales and Fables, and at the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center, with an 1894 illustration. "The Emperor's New Clothes" - more tales of type 1620 from different countries, edited by D. L. Ashliman, with his translation of Andersen's tale. Ashliman notes that "Andersen's source was a Spanish story recorded by Don Juan Manuel (1282-1348)." In "The King and the Clever Girl" from India, a girl tricks a king into lying about whether he sees God, so the king marries her and she becomes famous as an honored and wise counselor. "Now I Should Laugh, If I Were Not Dead." In The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book, ed. by Angela Carter. New York: Pantheon, 1990, pp. 102-3. In this Icelandic tale, the first woman simply tells her husband she is making linen "too fine to be seen with the eye." The naked husband is proud of his wife's skill when she pretends to dress him in the invisible suit. The second wife has a window put in the coffin after convincing her husband he is dead. He cries out when everyone laughs at the naked man at the funeral. From Icelandic Legends collected by Jon Arnason, transl. George Powell and Erikr Magnusson (London, 1866), Vol. 2. pp. 627-30. Carter notes "that if a marriage is the ultimate destination of so many fairy tales, marriage itself and its conditions are universally treated as a joke" (p. 237). "I'd Laugh, Too, If I Weren't Dead." Another version of the Icelandic tale. In Noodlehead Stories: World Texts Kids Can Read and Tell by Martha Hamilton and Mitch Weis. Little Rock, AR: August House, 2000. "Job was Pretty Stingy." In Stiff as a Poker: A Collection of Ozark Folk Tales. Collected by Vance Randolph. Illus. Glen Rounds. Notes by Herbert Halpert. 1955. Rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993, pp. 78-79. Jack and Job's wife have fun together after Jack gets some of Job's precious drink by tricking him into putting his finger in the spigot hole of his applejack keg. Job is stuck in the cellar because he is too cheap to let the applejack leak out. Later he won't admit that Jack and his wife got the best of him. Halpert's notes refer to other variants (one from NC, in Journal of American Folklore, vol. XLVII, 308), in which the husband "brings the situation on himself" or makes a bet with the wife that she can't fool him. Last
update: 06/02/2007 |
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The third wife convinces
her paranoid silversmith husband that their dog has
disappeared, so he must put on a dog collar and floppy
ears to protect his silver from an approaching band of
robbers, the Growling Grizzly Gunther Gang. It is
even more amusing when the fearful husband can’t get
the name of the gang right, calling them the Growin’
Green Gardenin’ Gang and the Genuine Gamy Generic
Gang. The wife whose husband is vain about his
clothing convinces him that she is making him a new brown
suit “from the finest virgin wool in
existence.” Since she says that a man who has lied
to his wife can’t see the fabric, her husband is
duped into donning an invisible suit and going out in
public in his long red underwear. The story ends at
the wake of the man whose wife has actually convinced her
hypochondriac spouse, through her powers of persuasion,
that he has fallen sick and died. In other Appalachian
versions, the wives keep arguing at the end about who won
the bet, but the narrator in this dramatization
interrupts the action, asking the audience to decide
which wife made the biggest fool out of her husband. The
winner gets her house cleaned by the husbands. Since this folktale typically begins with women who
are close friends even though they are competitive and
argumentative, Stephenson’s ending in which the
women go out together and enjoy themselves leaves us with
a positive final image of female companionship and
victory. The narrator declares at the very end that
“if there is a moral to our story, it would be,
there ain’t a woman alive that can’t make a man
look foolish.” For more discussion, see AppLit
article 
Other photos of Jack Tale Players Performance of "