Tricksters. More Devil's tricks

I'll finish up this week of stories about the Devil's tricks with some children's books that I found at the Internet Archive.

In The Story of the Jack O'Lantern by Katherine Brown Tegen, you can read the story of Jack and his bargain with the Devil. 

The story is also told in Jack-o'-Lantern by Edna Barth.

The illustrations are by Paul Galdone; here's the Devil confronting Jack:

Sometimes people manage to escape from their bargain with the Devil, out-tricking the trickster, but not Jack. You can find out more about Stingy Jack and his dealings with the Devil at Wikipedia.

You might recall Paul Galdone from his illustrations for Pura Belpré's Dance of the Animals: A Puerto Rican Folktale, and he also did the illustrations for her book Oté: A Puerto Rican Folk Tale which features a near-sighted devil.

In her book Old Devil is Waiting: Three Folktales, Dorothy Van Woerkom retells three folktales about the Devil in which there is a battle of wits between the Devil and his would-be human victims, all of whom manage to out-trick him in one way or another. Frustratingly, she does not provide any information about her sources (a common problem in books that are part of publishers' "reading series" for children, where stories are freely taken out of context for the series), but it is a fun book just for the reading:

And finally, here is a book by James Joyce (yes, that James Joyce). The text comes from a letter that he wrote to his grandson, and it's another devil's bridge story: The Cat and the Devil.

As you might guess from the title, it is a cat who crosses the Devil's bridge first, which is definitely not what the Devil expected or wanted! The illustrations are by Richard Erdoes: 

And those are just a few of many children's books inspired by this fun folklore tradition where the Devil is definitely dangerous, as the Devil must be... but where there are all kinds of ways in which people escape his snares by using their wits to out-trick the old trickster.