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Recommendations, specific folk tales: Sisphyus and others
Hello, not sure if this belongs in books? Because I am looking for all forms of story telling (with an emphasis on folk tale, however).
Are there any other stories out there similar to: Sisyphus, "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly", and the Herculean task of slaying the hyrda?
For me the theme is, if you don't deal with the root problem, you're screwed/can't win.
Doesn't have to be English based, but I'll need a translation if it's not.
Thank you in advance!
The first one that pops to mind is the tale of Koshchei the Deathless from Russian folklore. Depending on the version, he keeps his mortality hidden outside of himself: locked up inside an egg, inside a duck, inside a hare, inside a casket, under a tree, in some desolate place, etc. Only by finding this and destroying it can the hero destroy him. You can find a version of the tale here..
For more, this type of story of the external soul is discussed in The Golden Bough. (Beware of somewhat "dated" cultural references). These types of stories are also classified as ATU 302, "The Ogre’s (Devil’s) Heart in the Egg" in the Arne-Thompson-Uther folklore motif index where you can find many more variations listed.
(Voldemort was hardly the first to get this idea.)
While not specifically "if you don't deal with the root problem, you're screwed" related, your question did send me down a bit of a fun folk-tale rabbit hole that I thought I would share the results of anyways:
Aesop's Fables (where Tortoise and the Hare, Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs, and lot of other famous stories come from, that often inspired countless other famous stories)
Grimms' Fairy Tales (where Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and many many other famous stories come from)
One Thousand and One Nights (where Alladin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, and many other famous stories come from)
Edgar Allen Poe also has a few famous folk-tale-like short stories/poems. E.g. The Raven and Tell-Tale Heart.
And there are also a lot of other authors whose stories I would argue have entered modern folk-tale like status at this point too. E.g. H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, Jules Verne's Journey to Center of the Earth + 20k Leagues Under the Seas + Around the World in 80 days, H.G. Wells Invisible Man + Time Machine + Island of Doctor Moreau + War of the Worlds.
p.s. The one folktale I know of which actually does fit your theme request almost exactly is Aesop's The Ant and the Grasshopper, the wikipedia article of which mentions another more modern (1874) fable with a similar moral, The Little Red Hen.
To anyone curious about Aesop's fables, I don't particularly recommend it. The fables worth knowing from it are the ones you already know. I just read the whole anthology in the past 2 months and I think of the few hundred tales I found there was maybe 5-10 that I thought were even remotely acceptable to modern audiences.
Now if you are interested in how brutal old tales are, and what the morals they found were important in the past, then it is a fascinating read. It really is interesting to see just how many stories can be told where the moral is you should know your place and not aspire for more. Also how much they considered doctors to be frauds and thieves is always interesting to me.
To be fair, doctors largely were frauds back during Aesop's time, 2600 years ago. Hippocrates (the father of medicine) wasn't even born until a hundred years after Aesop was thought to have died, and even he had some rather bizarre ideas about medicine, e.g. The Four Humors. It wasn't until the Age of Enlightenment that we start to see anything approaching modern, scientific, evidence based medicine, with the development of Germ Theory in the mid-late 1800s being the real turning point when medicine became more than just guesswork based on rudimentary observations and superstitions.
p.s. The History of Medicine is also a fascinating subject worth diving into too. :)