Grandpa's Blanket

About the legend

Being

Tagalog family tale

Cultural meaning

In many Filipino families, grandparents live at home with their children and grandchildren, and respect for elders is part of every day. Children greet an elder with the mano: they take the elder's hand and touch it to their forehead to ask for a blessing. To ask an elder's forgiveness, a person may take both of the elder's hands to their forehead, sometimes kneeling, as Nilo's father does in the hut. A note in a book of Filipino tales printed in 1921 already calls kissing the hands of parents and grandparents "the usual Filipino salute of respect."

Fun fact

People in France were already telling a story about a blanket cut in two more than 700 years ago.

Cultural notes

This is the tale Dean S. Fansler printed as "Respect Old Age" in Filipino Popular Tales (1921). It was told by José Ignacio, a Tagalog from Malabon, which was then a town in the province of Rizal and is now a city in Metro Manila. Fansler gathered his tales between 1908 and 1914, and his informants wrote them down in English. In the same book, Cipriano Seráfica of Mangaldan, Pangasinan, tells "The Golden Rule": a man makes his trembling old father eat from a wooden plate, and the grandson starts carving wooden plates for his own parents. Its moral is "Do unto others as you want them to do unto you." In a version from Pampanga, written down by Eutiquiano Garcia and printed in 1911, the father means to leave the grandfather in the forest, and the boy offers to go back for the rope so it will be ready for his father's turn. Fansler compares these tales with the Grimms' "The Old Man and His Grandson", where it is a wooden bowl, with the Takkala Jataka, a Buddhist tale from India, and with a Spanish example in the fourteenth-century "El Libro de los Enxemplos". Of the three Filipino versions, only the one from Malabon turns on a blanket divided in two.

About this retelling

Traditional Tagalog tale, retold for children The Tagalog tale "Respect Old Age" from Malabon, about a boy who cuts his grandfather's blanket in two, retold for children.

The heart of the story is old: a poor family, a boy of ten, a grandfather of eighty who can no longer work, a rainy morning, a basket of food and a blanket for the hut on the farm, the boy's tears, the blanket cut in two with one half kept for his father's old age, and the father who takes back his order and cares for the old man ever after. In the old telling, a hot-headed wife forces her husband to send his father away. We changed this for children: here a flood has taken the rice, the father suggests the hut until the harvest, the mother agrees, and both are ashamed of it, so no one in the family is a villain. In the old telling the boy cuts the blanket when he is given the order; here the family walks to the hut first, and the father changes his mind there, so Grandpa is never left alone. Nilo cuts with his mother's sewing scissors. The name Nilo, the flood, Grandpa's stories, the walk home, the red seam and all the words the characters speak, apart from the boy's half-blanket promise, were written for Filipino Tales.

Sources

• Dean S. Fansler, "Respect Old Age", Tale 34 in "Filipino Popular Tales" (American Folk-Lore Society, 1921) (Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive (1921 scan))
• Harriott Ely Fansler, "The Old Man, His Son, and His Grandson", in "Types of Prose Narratives" (1911) (Project Gutenberg)
• Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, "The Old Man and His Grandson", in "Household Tales", translated by Margaret Hunt (1884) (Project Gutenberg)

Themes

• Respect
• Family
• Compassion
• Malabon
• Tagalog
• Luzon
• grandparents
• family
• respect for elders
• blanket
• rainy season
• moral tale
• Filipino folktale

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