# Village Mocking Tales

Less than five per cent of Hungarian folk tales treasure consists of the village mocking tales (falucsúfoló mese). These occupy a place between tales and legends, and supernatural elements also occur in them. A smaller number of them narrate real events, while others have international itinerant themes. Some of these tales have clung tenaciously through centuries to certain villages, towns, or regions. Their short epic structure consists mostly of a single motif. These tales generally do not come up during story-telling but during rests in communally performed work or during the telling of anecdotes, when the entertainer of the company tells these one after the other. It also happens that certain ones of these village mocking tales explain some kind of a saying, which is in more general use. Most of such tales are connected to the village of Rátót (Veszprém County), which is why the Hungarian technical literature also refers to these as rátótiáda. The following tale (AsTh 1287), for example, makes fun of the village magistrate of Rátót.

... Then the village magistrate says: “But first let us count and see if all ten of us are here, just to make sure that this big tree didn’t pull some of us into the water.”

Then he begins to count, but when he had counted up to nine he never counts himself. He counts some five times, but it always remains nine! He throws up his hands, looks up to the sky, then he begins to shout, saying:

“Oh, one man was taken by the water! Oh, oh, what will become of me, when I am responsible for all ten! Now I cannot go home again, with this man lost.”

Well, eight more men besides him count the company again, but they too can find only nine. One of them also suggests that he won't go home either, because he too is responsible, since he recommended that they drop the tree in the water. Then when the tenth, the one who has not counted yet starts on it, he says:

“You know what, let’s smooth down the clay, make it smooth and really soft, then lie down on our bellies, press our noses into the soil, all ten of us, or as many as we are here, and then we can count how many holes there are.”

So that is what they did. When they lay down they pressed their noses into the soil really hard. They counted and, what do you know, there are ten of them. Hah! They started to jump up and down:

“Here they are, here they are, all ten of them, everyone!”

With that they went home, and unless they died, they are still there.

The deviation arising from the mistake that the counter leaves himself out is a very widely spread motif of the rátótiáda. This motif is known in {568.} Western and Northern Europe and has been recorded among the Russians and also in India and Indonesia. Such motifs can easily be adopted into local tales.