I’ve recently started a very fruitful and enjoyable collaboration with Legends Myths and Whiskey, a podcast about, well, Legends, Myths and Whiskey!

Now, it’s not because I’m involved in it, but the podcasts are mightily interesting.
So if you are, like me, lucky enough to have a job that allows you listening to stuff without being distracted by it, I whole-heartedly recommend to subscribe, or at least to give it a try.

Just so you know, I’m not normally into podcasts (either I keep a documentary on the secondary monitor while I work, or just music), and the only two other podcasts I follow are StarTalk and There’s No Such Thing As A Fish.

So yeh, Legends, Myths and Whiskey is that good:)

LMAW produces three new podcasts every month, each with two new myths from around the world.
Between one story and another, as you might have figured, the host will talk about a specific brand of whiskey, which I think is a pretty cool thing to pair with ancient stories.

Anyway, I’ll be posting the illustrations as we go along with the podcasts, and this week’s was about an Indonesian legend about a girl called Timun Emas

To make a long story very short, there was a couple who couldn’t have children, so they thought the next best thing after fertility therapy was begging the giant monster Butho Ijo to help them with his magic powers (the illustration depicts the moment the supplicants make their case before the demon).

The monster agrees, but under the condition that the child would return to him once she’s grown up.

In an admirable display of “uh that might be a problem later on but I’ll do it anyway and think about it later”, the aspiring parents take the deal, go back home and after nine months their dream comes true.

They lead an uneventful but happy life with their offspring, until, many years later, the monster knocks at their door demanding they fulfill their part of the deal.

The two parents, quite ungentlemanly I have to say, manage to delay him for some time, lying shamelessly, until Buto Ijo can’t take their excuses any more and decides to run after the poor girl.

Luckily Timun Emas has been given some magic trinkets to defend herself, and after an adventurous escape though the forest, she manages to overcome the monster and get back to her parents, to live happily ever after.

The story teaches us that it’s morally acceptable to break a deal if your counterpart is a blood-thirsty monster.

You can find the story, properly narrated, here.

by Paolo Puggioni