W is for Wishes

         (My A to Z Challenge theme this year is How to Make a Fantastical Creature, in which I explore 26 traits that are widely shared among the monsters and marvels of fantasy and folklore.  Have you been visiting some of this year’s other participants?  Find them here!)

        The ability to grant wishes is presumably a subcategory of M-is-for-Magic, but it’s a special enough sort of magic that it gets its own post.  There are many tales about people receiving the magic of having wishes come true, and sometimes these wishes and their stories have happy endings, but sometimes… not so much.

        Perhaps the most famous wish-granting beings are the jinn.  The usual story is that a jinni is imprisoned in some sort of artifact (bottle, lamp, ring…), and offers wishes to whomever sets them free.  Sometimes they become enslaved to the holder of the artifact and fulfill unlimited commands, while in other stories there are only three wishes.  (But in still other stories, they claim to have made a vow to kill the one who sets them free.  If that’s the kind of jinni you find, consider my Pro Tip under T.)

        Another famous wish-giving species is the leprechaun, that diminutive sprite (flashback to P) of Irish folklore.  If you can catch a leprechaun he may bargain for his freedom with three wishes, although in modern folklore it has become more common for leprechauns to bargain instead with the gold they keep at the end of the rainbow.  I suppose it’s a distinction without a difference for those numerous people whose first wish is wealth anyway.

        A particularly dangerous creature from which to obtain wishes is the animalito of Spain.  As their name implies, these are tiny animals (another flashback to P), small enough that they are kept in lengths of reed with a node at one end and a cork at the other.  They have lizard heads and dog mouths, and anyone protected by an animalito cannot be killed except by a silver bullet.  However, in return for this protection and the fulfillment of infinite wishes, an animalito must be fed every day on the flesh either of unbaptized children or of their own masters.  As you can imagine, this can become… difficult.

        Another dangerous wish-granter is the hinnagami, a sort of living doll, almost a sort of homunculus, made with a very long, complicated magical procedure involving cemetery earth and human blood.  A hinnagami will grant all wishes, but the downside is that after every wish it immediately asks “What next?” without any pause or rest, so that it haunts the owner obsessively - even going with them into the afterlife to torment them for eternity.

        This problem of having your wish-giver destroy your afterlife is shared by the eponymous Bottle Imp of the 1891 short story by Robert Louis Stevenson.  As with many wish-granting tales, the fulfillment of wishes is often double-edged, and there’s always a catch.

        Of course any magical being may offer wishes under certain circumstances, especially as bargaining chips in return for their life or freedom, or as rewards given in gratitude for kindness.  Probably the best-known of these 

is the golden fish who offered the fisherman a whole series of wishes - none of which could satisfy the fisherman’s ungrateful wife.  Many are the wishes bestowed by fairies and even gods, only to be squandered on foolish things such as sticking sausages onto and then back off of noses.

        The moral of these stories is always to be careful what you wish for, as you may find that things can all too easily go terribly wrong.  (A corollary is that it’s not nice to hold magical creatures for ransom, and wishes given resentfully because of extortion are that much more likely to become twisted into curses.)  A Pro Tip for wishers is never to use the phrase “I wish” as a mere colloquialism, lest you waste a precious opportunity.

        And if you could have one wish, what would it be?  What if you could have three wishes?

[Pictures: Jinni, illustration by F. Gross from Tausend und eine Nacht, 1838 (Image from Hathi Trust);

Leprechaun, vintage St Patrick’s Day card, c1900; 

Hinnagami, illustration by DJ-Duskie, 2018 (Image from Deviant Art);

Magic Fish, illustration by Kay Nielsen from Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories, 1924 (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Golden Fish, illustration by Ivan Bilibin from Du Oetit Poisson D’Or, 1933 (Image from Vintage Illustrators).]