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694 documents across 38 sections. Filter by section, reader level, confidence or tag.
A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá wins a wager by goading Erin the elephant into carrying him into town, then escapes execution by persuading the elephant that mud is more lethal than stone.
A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá abandons his market stall to judge a fight between a shrew rat and a squirrel, takes a side, and loses his nose for it, with the Yorùbá text of the Jómijó song.
A famine tale in which Ìjàpá wheedles the secret of a magic yam-store out of the lizard, loads himself too heavily to leave, forgets the opening words, and is smashed and mended by insects.
An Ọ̀yọ́ variant of the magic yam-rock tale in which the rock opens to a song rather than a command, and Ìjàpá betrays his friend by bringing the whole country to empty the store.
A tale in which Ajá the dog plants the leaves Ìjàpá threw in his face, grows a tree that bears agidi, and repays the insult exactly, with the tortoise killed by a falling stone when he tries the same song.
A drought tale in which every large animal fails to reach the water and the despised tortoise solves it by asking one question, then is trampled by the animals coming to thank him.
The Yorùbá tradition holds no single account of the marks on the tortoise's shell, and this file sets the four sourced narratives side by side to show what varies and what does not.
A tale in which Ìjàpá roasts a pig in a covered fire-trench and loses the whole carcass to a dog blacksmith who stalls him over a seventh knife, explaining why dogs keep away from tortoises.
An aetiological tale of the buje dye-shrub, in which a woman who refused every suitor is assaulted by the tortoise and flees into the bush, and which Ellis used to adjudicate a competing published version.
The borrowed-feathers tale in which Ìjàpá flies to the birds' festival disguised as a bird, is stripped of his wings, and falls onto stones laid by an enemy imitating his wife's voice.
An Ọ̀yọ́ aetiological tale in which a tiny rat's three enormous sons are each driven off by a farm-robbing bird, until the ram fights him into the ground and the noise of that fight becomes thunder.
A very short aetiological tale in which the birds and the rats each disown a dead bat because he lacks their distinguishing feature, so he is left without relatives and without a funeral.
Two competing aetiologies of the leopard's markings printed consecutively by one collector, one in which Akiti the hunter's arrows leave dark marks on an invulnerable leopard, and one in which a bathing woman throws her soapy loofah at him.
An aetiological tale in which a jealous magician talks a grove of plain brown songbirds into trading their voices for bright feathers, explaining why the most beautiful birds cannot sing.
An aetiological comedy in which a woman digs a pit to trap her enemy, falls into it herself, is pulled out by hair that stretches as they pull, and is envied into starting a fashion.