Wiesner. Happy-Go-Lucky

Happy-Go-Lucky is a children's book by William Wiesner, adapted from a traditional Norwegian folktale, with art by the author, published in 1970. It is available at the Internet Archive.

This is a version of the popular European folktale about foolish trading-down exchanges. The man is returning home after taking his cow to market to sell, but with nothing to show for it; his neighbor bets him that his wife will be mad that he left with a cow and came home with nothing. The man accepts the bet. Then, he tells his wife what happened: he mistook the day and there was no market; so, trudging home with the cow, he met a man with a donkey and, wanting to ride home, he traded the cow for the donkey, but the donkey bucked and threw him into the mud. A man passing by with a pig offered to trade the pig for the donkey. As the man is narrating this to his wife, she gets excited about each trade, only to find out that he doesn't actually have it. The pig wouldn't go, so he traded the pig for a goat. The goat bolted, dragging him along, so he traded the goat for a rooster. But he felt so weak on the way home that he stopped at a pharmacist and traded the rooster for a "restorative pill." The wife is delighted by every turn of events (just the opposite of what the neighbor predicted), so, in the end, the man wins the bet and collects 20 crowns from his neighbor as his winnings. I don't know exactly the going rate for a cow back then, but I suppose, given the "lucky fool" theme of the story, 20 crowns is probably even more than he would have gotten for the cow. (That was how sure the neighbor was that the wife would be angry!)

Even though the story is Norwegian, the title is a very nice English idiom: "happy-go-lucky" is a phrase that has been in use in English since the late 1600s. An earlier version was "happy-be-lucky."

Of course, this is one of my favorite chain tale because it comes the idea of the "(lucky) fool" with the chain of trades, but instead of trading-up, like in most African and South Asian chain trade stories, this is trading-down, which is the most common European type of chain trade tale.

The illustrations by the author are very colorful and comical with lots of detail that could be talked about or used as prompts to make the narrative more detailed.