He Follows an Alligator into a Hole and Discovers a Kingdom of Women!

[00:00:00]In this tale, a man follows an alligator into a hole and ends up in a completely different world.

[00:00:07]>> [music] [music] >> Hello everyone and welcome to another video by Falling Down the Rabbit Hole.

[00:00:22]My name is Chris and this is my co-host Bartleby and today we are going to Nigeria to discuss the tale The Hunter Who Was The King. Let's get started.

[00:00:37]Once there was a hunter who was very poor and unfortunate. Unable to get enough to eat, he was desperate almost to the point of taking his own life. So, this hunter decided that he needed to go see a diviner. So, he set out and he went to the diviner and he told him of his situation. And the diviner told him, "You need to go out and hunt and you need to be satisfied with whatever you come across first, no matter how small or unworthy it seems."

[00:01:09]So, this hunter really respects the diviner. So, he goes home and the next morning he gets his cutlass and he gets his gun and he goes out to hunt. And he walks out into the bush and the first thing that he comes across is a small alligator. And this is an alligator that before he spoke with the diviner, he would have walked past and said, "No, that's unworthy of a catch." But, he remembers what the diviner has said. So, he decides to try and get this alligator. But, the alligator proves to be very difficult to hunt and it ends up getting away from the hunter and digging a hole and going into the earth. So, he's got his heart set on this alligator. The diviner told him he needs to catch the first thing that he sees and be satisfied with it. So, he wants to follow this diviner's instructions.

[00:02:02]So, he puts down his gun and he starts digging with his cutlass into the hole that the alligator escaped into.

[00:02:09]And he digs and he digs and he is slowly sinking further and further into this hole as he digs. And suddenly, he hits the spot where he feels his feet start to sink into the sand itself at the bottom of the hole. And the next thing he knows, he is standing in this huge town.

[00:02:30]And he walks around this town. He has no idea where he is and the architecture looks very strange to him. And he's trying to figure out where he is and he starts to notice that he's not seeing any men.

[00:02:45]Everywhere he looks, all he sees are women. And every woman that he passes is looking at him like he is the strangest thing they've ever seen. And there seems to be some kind of celebration going on in the town this day. So, he walks into this crowd and he's watching the celebration go on and he realizes that he is in a town with only one women. The celebration is for the queen of this town who rules over everything.

[00:03:18]And slowly, the crowd who was watching the ceremony start to turn to him and they start giving him a lot more attention than the ceremony itself and everybody is shocked because this is a town of all women and this is the first man that they've ever seen. And because of this, he instantly kind of becomes famous in this town. And everybody's interested in him and the queen herself takes an interest and she decides that he is so unique that she wants to set up a room for her him in her palace. So, she does just that and he starts living in this palace and he's living a more opulent life than he ever lived before.

[00:04:03]He was a poor hunter before and now suddenly he's living in the palace.

[00:04:08]Not only that, but as time passes, the queen starts to really like him and he starts to like her and eventually she decides to marry him and he becomes the first king of this town. Now, of course, this is a town run by women, so being king is secondary to being queen and while he has a ton of power, he doesn't have ultimate power and the queen shows him this in an interesting way.

[00:04:39]She walks him around the palace and around the grounds and she says, Oh, Bartleby doesn't like that. All right.

[00:04:49]He [snorts] had his fun.

[00:04:52]So, she walks him around the the palace and around the grounds and she says, "Look, all of this is yours.

[00:04:59]You are king over all of this, but there's one thing I need to show you."

[00:05:05]And she walks him down this corridor to this special door and she says, "This door is not for you.

[00:05:13]You are not allowed here. You are not allowed to open this door. Do not, under any circumstances, open this door. Do you promise?" And he promises. He says, "Absolutely, I will not open this door."

[00:05:26]And she says, "Great." And he enjoys being king for quite a long time. He's in love with the queen. He has money.

[00:05:36]He's living in the palace. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing and he is happy with everything that he has recei- received, but as time goes on, he starts to be less content with everything he has, and the fact that there is a door in the palace that he cannot open really begins to bother him. He can't really stand that.

[00:06:02]Uh because he feels like he is the king.

[00:06:06]He's supposed to have power over everything.

[00:06:10]Uh and the fact that there's just this one place that he randomly cannot go is too much for him. So, time passes, and he obsesses, and he obsesses over this door, and eventually he gets to the point that he can't stand it anymore.

[00:06:24]And he decides, late at night, when uh the palace is quiet, that he is going to go and open this door. And he does just that. He gets out of bed, he stumbles down these corridors, and he gets to the door, and he grabs it, and he throws the door open. And all of a sudden, he is standing in the hole, exactly where he was before, when he was digging down into the hole. And he is devastated because he is now, once again, a poor hunter. He's lost everything.

[00:06:58]And [snorts] he he is absolutely distraught, and he gets out of the hole, and he goes back to the diviner, and he tells the diviner the story, and says, "I I need you to help me get back." And the diviner says, "You can't get back. I warned you to be content with what you had, and you couldn't. You had to open that door." And the hunter never sees that land again.

[00:07:29]>> [music] >> One of the things that I really love about reading fairy tales is how these tales interact through different cultures. And that's why I love collecting from so many different cultures. And this is a really unique one. I got this book recently. I did a book haul a few weeks back showing when I got this book. And so I was not familiar with these Nigerian folktales.

[00:07:57]So I was very excited to crack this open. And I just started with the first story in the book, which is not this one. This is the third story in the book. And I am going to cover those other two in the coming weeks. But I loved this story specifically because of course we see motifs that we see in a lot of fairy tales.

[00:08:15]For instance, [snorts] the room that is forbidden to be opened.

[00:08:20]This is of course most famously in the fairy tale Bluebeard.

[00:08:23]Uh but what I love is that reading it through this cultural lens, we see a completely different tale. Alligators becoming women. I We see that motif in Japan. Here we see it in a completely different way. And that says a couple of things. First off, it says that these stories are so old that they have traveled uh through and around so many different cultures. And that these stories are told in so many different ways.

[00:08:55]Uh but it also uniquely points to these specific Nigerian tales and the ways that they have upended or changed the motifs are really interesting. In this specific case, we do have uh an alligator that presumably turns into people. I don't know if that's true or not. The tale doesn't really point directly at that. What we get is an alligator going into a hole and a man digging down into kind of an underworld concept and meeting this town. And this town is all women. And it could be alligators uh turned into women, who knows. But this town is all women, which is interesting in itself.

[00:09:39]And they've never seen a man, so they're very excited about seeing this man. But I love the Bluebeard trope from the other direction. I love this king who is not as important as a queen, so the queen gets to put a limit on him, and I love seeing the male curiosity take over, or the male pride, right?

[00:10:03]Because in Bluebeard, of course, it's always women's curiosity get them in trouble. And in this fairy tale, we see that it's curio- it's not curiosity from the man, but pride that gets him in trouble.

[00:10:15]His hubris that he should have rule over the entire palace is what leads him to opening that door and finding himself on the outside back into his regular world, losing everything he had gained up until that point. Really, really interesting tale with a lot of motifs presented in a in a in a different way.

[00:10:39]I had a lot of fun with that, and I thought it was a wonderful way for us to break into Nigerian tales. We are going to spend a couple more weeks with these Nigerian tales because they're really good, and I think you will absolutely enjoy them. Also, I'm going on vacation.

[00:10:54]I'm driving across the United States.

[00:10:56]I'm going from my home here in New Mexico, and I will end up all the way to Virginia Beach, Virginia. Uh yeah, for the next couple of weeks, uh I will be posting videos that I've pre-recorded here, and I might not be as good at getting to comments, but I will be back in in about 3 weeks, so. All right, thank you very much for watching.

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