Tall tale

The tall tale has become a fundamental element of American folk literature. The tall tale's origins are seen in the bragging contests that often occurred when the rough men of the American frontier gathered. The tales of legendary figures of the Old West, some listed below, owe much to the style of tall tales.

The semi-annual speech-contests held by Toastmasters International public-speaking clubs may include a tall-tales contest. Each and every participating speaker is given three to five minutes to give a short speech of a tall-tale nature, and is then judged according to several factors. The winner proceeds to the next level of competition. The contest does not proceed beyond any participating district in the organization to the international level.

The comic strip Non Sequitur (1992–present) sometimes features tall tales told by the character Captain Eddie; it is left up to the reader to decide if he is telling the truth, exaggerating a real event, or fabricating a story entirely.

About imaginary people

Paul Bunyan's sidekick, Babe the blue ox, sculpted as a ten-meter tall roadside tourist-attraction

Subjects of some American tall tales include legendary figures:

• Paul Bunyan – huge lumberjack who eats 50 pancakes in one minute, dug the Grand Canyon with his axe, made Minnesota's ten thousand lakes with his footprints, and also has a blue ox named Babe who made the Mississippi River
• Tony Beaver – a West Virginia lumberjack and cousin of Paul Bunyan
• Pecos Bill – legendary cowboy who "tamed the wild west"
• Cordwood Pete – younger brother to lumberjack Paul Bunyan
• Febold Feboldson – a Nebraska farmer who could fight a drought
• Johnny Kaw, a fictional Kansan whose mythological status itself was in one sense a figment, in that it was created recently, in 1955. Adherents of this assessment deem such stories fakelore.
• Joe Magarac – a Pittsburgh steelworker made of steel
• Alfred Bulltop Stormalong – an immense sailor whose ship was so big that it scraped the Moon

The Australian frontier (known as the bush or the outback) similarly inspired the types of tall tales that are found in American folklore. The Australian versions typically concern a mythical station called The Speewah. The heroes of the Speewah include:

• Rodney Ansell
• Big Bill – The dumbest man on the Speewah who made his living cutting up mining shafts and selling them for post holes
• Crooked Mick – A champion shearer who had colossal strength and quick wit.

Another folk hero is Charlie McKeahnie, the hero of Banjo Paterson's poem "The Man from Snowy River", whose bravery, adaptability, and risk-taking could epitomise the new Australian spirit.

The Canadian frontier has also inspired the types of tall tales that are found in American folklore, such as:

• French Canadian tales of Big Joe Mufferaw, a giant of a lumberjack and woodsman from the Ottawa Valley, loosely based on real-life lumberjack Joseph Montferrand
• Johnny Chinook, a Métis cowboy and rancher in Alberta.
• Sam McGee, the hero of Robert Service's poem, "The Cremation of Sam McGee" (1907)

The Columnar basalt that makes up the Giant's Causeway; in legend, a fine set of hexagonal stepping stones to Scotland, made by Fionn mac Cumhaill

Some European tall tales include:

• Toell the Great was one of the great tall tales of Estonia.
• The Babin Republic, in Renaissance Poland (1568), was a satirical society dedicated entirely to mocking people and telling tall tales.
• Juho Nätti (1890–1964), known as Nätti-Jussi, was a Finnish lumberjack known for telling tall tales; his stories have also circulated as folk tales and been collected in books.
• The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (16th century) by the French writer François Rabelais told the tale of two giants; father and son.
• The many farfetched adventures of the fictional German nobleman Baron Munchausen, some of which may have had a folklore basis.
• Legends of the Irish mythological hunter-warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill, also known as Finn MacCool, have it that he built the Giant's Causeway as stepping-stones to Scotland, so as not to get his feet wet, and that he also once scooped up part of Ireland to fling it at a rival, but it missed and landed in the Irish Sea; the clump became the Isle of Man, the pebble became Rockall, and the void became Lough Neagh.
• Laughter and Grief by the White Sea, a Soviet film, depicts tall tales of the Pomors. A Pomor elder describes several stories, including a brown bear coating himself in baking soda to be acceptable to humans as a polar bear.
• The Cumbrian Liars, a United Kingdom association who follow in the seven-league footsteps of Will Ritson.[4]
• "The Irish Rover" is a well-known Irish folk song about an implausibly large sailing ship with a fanciful cargo.
• Oskar, later known as "Unsinkable Sam," was a ship's cat that was supposed to have survived the sinking of three ships during WWII: the German Bismarck on 27th May, 1941, HMS Cossack on 27th October, 1941, and finally HMS Ark Royal on 14th November, 1941. While photographs exist of a ship's cat purported to be Oskar on HMS Ark Royal, the historicity of this legend is debated.

Early 20th-century postcards became a vehicle for tall tale telling in the US.[5][6] Creators of these cards, such as the prolific Alfred Stanley Johnson Jr.[7] and William H. "Dad" Martin, usually employed trick photography, including forced perspective, while others painted their unlikely tableaus,[6] or used a combination of painting and photography in early examples of photo retouching.[8] The common theme was gigantism: fishing for leviathans,[6][9] hunting for[6][10] or riding[11][12] oversized animals, and bringing in the impossibly huge sheaves.[6][13] An homage to the genre can be found on the cover of the Eat a Peach (1972) album by The Allman Brothers Band.

• Big Fish – Tim Burton movie relating the story of a dying man exaggerating the details of his life to his son
• Bill Brasky
• Campfire story
• Chuck Norris facts
• Fairy tale
• Folklore
• Mythomania
• Snipe hunt
• The Most Interesting Man in the World
• Unreliable narrator
• Urban legend

• Brown, Carolyn. (1989). The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature. Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 0-87049-627-1.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tall tales.

• American Tall Tales
• Tall Tales, Whoppers and Lies – Audio Recording