Tricksters. How the Mouse Deer Became King

Last week was all about the tiny antelope trickster of western and central Africa, the "royal antelope" or Neotragus pygmaeus. This week, I will be writing about the tiny hooved trickster of southeast Asia, a chevrotain, also called "mouse-deer" (which I think is actually a useful way to refer to the African royal antelope also, since "mouse" rather than "royal" gives the right impression; that's how I decided to refer to the African trickster in my Tiny Tales).

The mouse-deer of Java is about the size of a rabbit, weighing just around 4 pounds. You can find out more at Wikipedia, which is the source of this photo. 

You can see the close resemblance to his African cousin!

In the folktales of Indonesia and Malaysia, this tiny trickster often goes by the name of Kanchil (spelled variously in English: Kancil, Kantjil, Kantchil, etc.). Another Malay name for the mouse-deer is "pelanduk" and the classic collection of mouse-deer stories is called the "Hikayat Pelanduk Jinaka" (various transliterations in to English), dating back in written form to 17th-century Malay manuscripts.

There are lots of great mouse-deer resources at the Internet Archive, so I'll have a full week this week, and another week of mouse-deer stories later on sometime too! To get started, I want to feature this beautiful book by Margueritte Harmon Bro: How the Mouse Deer Became King.

Bro [1894-1977] was a missionary in China who also traveled throughout southeast Asia; you can read more about her life and career at Wikipedia. In addition to the stories, this book has a helpful introduction about the enormous cultural importance of this tiny trickster. Here's what Bro says at the end (emphasis mine):

The tales recorded in this book have been gathered from various islands, sometimes taken down as they were heard, sometimnes found in children's school books, sometimes brought in by friends who had read them in Arabic. If one wanted to know all the other escapades and achievements of Kantjil, one would need to visit all of Indonesia's twenty thousand islands and multiply each island by twenty thousand pranks, which probably makes Kantjil the most famous hero of animal tales in the world — if only more people had heard of him.

I hope this week's books and blog posts can help spread the word so that more people will hear of this marvelous trickster character.

The illustrations for Bro's book are by Joseph Low, and they can help in imagining this distinctively tiny trickster. For example, here is Kantjil riding the elephant:

I'll be back each day this week with more of the mouse-deer's adventures, but I was so glad to find this book at the Internet Archive; it's a perfect place to begin!

How the Mouse Deer Became King

by Margueritte Harmon Bro