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The Magic Crocodile and Other Folktales from Indonesia
Hundreds of language and cultural groups, each with its own myths and legends, make Indonesia a rich source of stories. Selected to give young readers an understanding of the Indonesian people through their folklore, 29 tales reveal the islands from Sumatra to Irian.
144 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1994
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March 14, 2025
The magic crocodile, like so many creatures in folklore, brings a great gift – but one must listen carefully in order to benefit from the gift, and one must also watch out for those whose greed makes them willing to kill for what they want. The stories brought together for the 1994 collection The Magic Crocodile and Other Folktales from Indonesia partake of many of the archetypes of folklore and mythology, and they express well the spirit of Indonesia and its people.
Author Alice M. Terada, who has also written about Vietnamese folklore, arranges these tales geographically – starting with Sumatra, in the westernmost part of Indonesia, and proceeding eastward across the 17,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago, across regions like Java, Bali, and Kalimantan (the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo), until arriving at Irian Jaya at Indonesia’s eastern extremity (the western half of the island of New Guinea). There is, to put it mildly, a lot of cultural variety across all those miles and all those islands.
Terada recounts the tales well, and follows each tale with a helpful explanation of its significance, as with “The Green Princess,” from Sumatra. This sad and moving little tale recounts how a Sumatran princess and her identical twin brother were given matching gold rings; the twin brother later left home and stayed away for a long time. Years later, after the princess’s parents have died, a handsome young man comes to the village, and he and the princess fall in love and plan to marry. But the young man turns out to have the ring that the princess knows is her brother’s! Wanting to avoid the spectre of incest, the heartbroken princess does what she knows she must do:
The princess returned his ring, then took hers off and offered it to him. “Here,” she said. “Take this ring, please, my brother.”
And she stepped into the waters of the lake.
Before the young man could reach out for her, the water turned green. He called her name, but there was no sign of her. Only the wind answered him by picking up the waves and tossing them against the side of the boat, rocking it. (p. 25)
Terada then explains not only that the story reinforces traditional prohibitions against incest, but also that in real life, “The water in the lake” of Danau Laut Tawar in northern Sumatra “contains a great deal of seaweed and algae. There are superstitions surrounding the waters of this lake, and the local people do not swim in it” (p. 25). Thus we see how this folktale sets forth a key social value, provides an explanation for a natural phenomenon (the green water of the Danau Laut Tawar lake), and influences the behaviour of people in the present (because local people still refrain from swimming in the lake).
Many of these stories reinforce values of the Muslim faith that remains the predominant religion of Indonesia. “The Widow and the Fishes,” from Java, tells of a poor widow who sees some fishes stuck in a mud puddle. The widow hears the fishes praying – “Allah, ya, Allah! Send us rain! Give us rain or we will die!” (p. 57) – and sure enough, a torrential rain comes, enabling the fishes to swim safely home to their river and lake.
Not knowing the tenets of Islam, but seeing that the power of prayer seemed to work for the fishes, the widow prays for three nights to Allah, asking for money so she can live. An ill-tempered neighbour, annoyed by her prayers, drops a bag full of junk onto the woman, through a hole in her roof; but the next day, when she opens the bag that her neighbour dropped on her, “Silver and gold coins spilled out into her lap” (p. 58).
The cruel neighbour decides that the same route will lead to wealth for him; so he prays to Allah for three nights, and then tells his servant to drop a bag full of junk through his roof onto him. Spoiler alert: his scheme doesn’t work for him, and thus the difference between prayer with and without a pure heart is emphasized.
Standards of good and bad behaviour are likewise a focus of “The Overflowing Pot,” from the small island of Roti in the Nusa Tenggara region of Indonesia. An elderly widow tells her young grand-daughter to use only one grain of rice in preparing the evening meal. The grand-daughter thinks that can’t be right, and puts the usual two handfuls of rice in the pot; but then, when she began to cook the rice, it started to overflow the pot, and “the rice kept flowing out of the pot, filling the one-room house” (p. 128). This part of the story reminded me of the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence from Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940).
When the grandmother gets home, she beats her grand-daughter, angered at what she sees as the child’s disobedience. But then, to the grandmother’s dismay, comes a moment of transformation worthy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
Then, to her surprise, Grandmother saw the girl disappear before her eyes. She blinked, and there was a monkey in place of the girl. Hopping on one foot, then the other, the monkey laughed and jumped onto the branch of a tree and said, “Grandmother, you won’t have me to help you anymore. You will not have anyone to talk to, or to take care of you.” The monkey disappeared. (p. 128)
Thus the grandmother is left alone, with no one to help her in her age. And Terada as collector of these tales informs the reader that “It is said that the boys and girls of Roti are never beaten, because the people are afraid the children may turn into monkeys and leave their parents to look after themselves in their old age” (p. 128).
One of the most frequently recurring motifs in folklore is that of the character who cannot use physical force against larger and stronger adversaries, and therefore must use their wits to escape danger and preserve the good. We even see such folk motifs in our modern commercial society, through cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny.
Such is the emphasis in “No Tigers in Borneo,” from Kalimantan. In the story, the Raja of All Tigers, from his lair in Java, sends a messenger to Borneo to demand tribute, under threat of war, and sends along a whisker from his face to show his size and strength. The mouse-deer Kancil is understandably frightened at the minister’s demands, but he contrives a solution: he asks his friend the porcupine for a bristle, and tells the tiger raja’s messenger that it is a whisker from his king. And when the messenger returns to Java and reports to his tiger king, “The Raja of All Tigers gazed at it from all angles with a very thoughtful expression on his face. At last he said, ‘I have decided. Borneo is too far for us’” (p. 101). And that, we are told, is why, while there have been tigers on other Indonesian islands like Java and Bali, there have never been tigers in Borneo.
I read The Magic Crocodile and Other Folktales from Indonesia while travelling in Indonesia. While I only visited two of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands – Bali and Java – I got a strong sense of the way the folklore of the past informs the lives of the modern people of this vibrant nation of 282 million people.
Published at Honolulu by the University of Hawaii Press – a university press that has always excelled at publishing folkloric and cultural materials pertaining to the Indigenous people of the Pacific basin – The Magic Crocodile and Other Folktales from Indonesia is a fun and engaging read for any student of folklore, or of Indonesian culture.
Author Alice M. Terada, who has also written about Vietnamese folklore, arranges these tales geographically – starting with Sumatra, in the westernmost part of Indonesia, and proceeding eastward across the 17,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago, across regions like Java, Bali, and Kalimantan (the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo), until arriving at Irian Jaya at Indonesia’s eastern extremity (the western half of the island of New Guinea). There is, to put it mildly, a lot of cultural variety across all those miles and all those islands.
Terada recounts the tales well, and follows each tale with a helpful explanation of its significance, as with “The Green Princess,” from Sumatra. This sad and moving little tale recounts how a Sumatran princess and her identical twin brother were given matching gold rings; the twin brother later left home and stayed away for a long time. Years later, after the princess’s parents have died, a handsome young man comes to the village, and he and the princess fall in love and plan to marry. But the young man turns out to have the ring that the princess knows is her brother’s! Wanting to avoid the spectre of incest, the heartbroken princess does what she knows she must do:
The princess returned his ring, then took hers off and offered it to him. “Here,” she said. “Take this ring, please, my brother.”
And she stepped into the waters of the lake.
Before the young man could reach out for her, the water turned green. He called her name, but there was no sign of her. Only the wind answered him by picking up the waves and tossing them against the side of the boat, rocking it. (p. 25)
Terada then explains not only that the story reinforces traditional prohibitions against incest, but also that in real life, “The water in the lake” of Danau Laut Tawar in northern Sumatra “contains a great deal of seaweed and algae. There are superstitions surrounding the waters of this lake, and the local people do not swim in it” (p. 25). Thus we see how this folktale sets forth a key social value, provides an explanation for a natural phenomenon (the green water of the Danau Laut Tawar lake), and influences the behaviour of people in the present (because local people still refrain from swimming in the lake).
Many of these stories reinforce values of the Muslim faith that remains the predominant religion of Indonesia. “The Widow and the Fishes,” from Java, tells of a poor widow who sees some fishes stuck in a mud puddle. The widow hears the fishes praying – “Allah, ya, Allah! Send us rain! Give us rain or we will die!” (p. 57) – and sure enough, a torrential rain comes, enabling the fishes to swim safely home to their river and lake.
Not knowing the tenets of Islam, but seeing that the power of prayer seemed to work for the fishes, the widow prays for three nights to Allah, asking for money so she can live. An ill-tempered neighbour, annoyed by her prayers, drops a bag full of junk onto the woman, through a hole in her roof; but the next day, when she opens the bag that her neighbour dropped on her, “Silver and gold coins spilled out into her lap” (p. 58).
The cruel neighbour decides that the same route will lead to wealth for him; so he prays to Allah for three nights, and then tells his servant to drop a bag full of junk through his roof onto him. Spoiler alert: his scheme doesn’t work for him, and thus the difference between prayer with and without a pure heart is emphasized.
Standards of good and bad behaviour are likewise a focus of “The Overflowing Pot,” from the small island of Roti in the Nusa Tenggara region of Indonesia. An elderly widow tells her young grand-daughter to use only one grain of rice in preparing the evening meal. The grand-daughter thinks that can’t be right, and puts the usual two handfuls of rice in the pot; but then, when she began to cook the rice, it started to overflow the pot, and “the rice kept flowing out of the pot, filling the one-room house” (p. 128). This part of the story reminded me of the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence from Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940).
When the grandmother gets home, she beats her grand-daughter, angered at what she sees as the child’s disobedience. But then, to the grandmother’s dismay, comes a moment of transformation worthy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
Then, to her surprise, Grandmother saw the girl disappear before her eyes. She blinked, and there was a monkey in place of the girl. Hopping on one foot, then the other, the monkey laughed and jumped onto the branch of a tree and said, “Grandmother, you won’t have me to help you anymore. You will not have anyone to talk to, or to take care of you.” The monkey disappeared. (p. 128)
Thus the grandmother is left alone, with no one to help her in her age. And Terada as collector of these tales informs the reader that “It is said that the boys and girls of Roti are never beaten, because the people are afraid the children may turn into monkeys and leave their parents to look after themselves in their old age” (p. 128).
One of the most frequently recurring motifs in folklore is that of the character who cannot use physical force against larger and stronger adversaries, and therefore must use their wits to escape danger and preserve the good. We even see such folk motifs in our modern commercial society, through cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny.
Such is the emphasis in “No Tigers in Borneo,” from Kalimantan. In the story, the Raja of All Tigers, from his lair in Java, sends a messenger to Borneo to demand tribute, under threat of war, and sends along a whisker from his face to show his size and strength. The mouse-deer Kancil is understandably frightened at the minister’s demands, but he contrives a solution: he asks his friend the porcupine for a bristle, and tells the tiger raja’s messenger that it is a whisker from his king. And when the messenger returns to Java and reports to his tiger king, “The Raja of All Tigers gazed at it from all angles with a very thoughtful expression on his face. At last he said, ‘I have decided. Borneo is too far for us’” (p. 101). And that, we are told, is why, while there have been tigers on other Indonesian islands like Java and Bali, there have never been tigers in Borneo.
I read The Magic Crocodile and Other Folktales from Indonesia while travelling in Indonesia. While I only visited two of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands – Bali and Java – I got a strong sense of the way the folklore of the past informs the lives of the modern people of this vibrant nation of 282 million people.
Published at Honolulu by the University of Hawaii Press – a university press that has always excelled at publishing folkloric and cultural materials pertaining to the Indigenous people of the Pacific basin – The Magic Crocodile and Other Folktales from Indonesia is a fun and engaging read for any student of folklore, or of Indonesian culture.
September 17, 2019
I liked that the stories were divided by island/region and that there was a good variety of stories told. I liked the bit of background the stories were given, and would have liked to hear even more historical context.
September 6, 2022
What a wonderful collection!
November 17, 2014
Even I, as an Indonesian, haven't heard some of the stories before. So this is really a collection :)
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews