A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.

Overview

King Palmarin finds a tuma in his powder-case while considering his daughter’s marriage. The small insect grows until it fills the box, and three days after being moved to the cellar it fills that space too. An unnamed voice predicts that it could eventually fill the entire kingdom, but this final growth is not enacted: the voice instructs the king to kill it, burn its flesh and make drum-heads from its skin. The footnote translates tuma as “louse.”

The resulting drum becomes the basis of a deadly marriage wager. Palmarin has the servant who prepared it killed to preserve the secret, but Don Juan later learns the answer through a returned soul and identifies the skin correctly. These events belong to Anastacia Villegas’s close paraphrase of a Pampango metrical romance, which Fansler explicitly distinguishes from an independently collected oral folktale. The voice is not given a personal identity, and the insect’s narrated expansion is not a claim about natural lice.

Grows to fill a powder-case and cellarFurther expansion is predicted onlySkin becomes the marriage-wager drum
01

Origins & earliest records

Philippines; Anastacia Villegas of Arayat, Pampanga, paraphrasing a Pampango corrido

02

Records & interpretation

Complete tale and shared comparative notes read in the retained 1921-edition transcription.

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

  1. 01

    Filipino Popular Tales

    Dean S. Fansler, collector and editor; Anastacia Villegas of Arayat, Pampanga, paraphrasing a Pampango corrido · 1921

    Tale 11c, The Story of King Palmarin, pp. 98–114; louse chiefly pp. 99–100; shared notes pp. 114–116; all shared notes and footnotes inspected

Family & connections

A source-supported family tree or inspiration record has not yet been compiled for this profile. Related reading below indicates a connection in subject matter, not a proven lineage or creative influence.

Primary records and illustrations

Complete main account, all shared comparative notes and ten attached footnotes read

Dean S. Fansler, Filipino Popular Tales (1921)

Tale 11c, The Story of King Palmarin. pp. 98–114; louse chiefly pp. 99–100; shared notes pp. 114–116

Cache fansler-11.txt. Anastacia Villegas of Arayat, Pampanga, paraphrasing a Pampango corrido. Source-specific identity and ending retained; comparative theory not asserted as proven transmission.

Inspect the digitized plate · Source collection manifest

References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

  1. Historical collected narrative or identified corrido paraphraseFansler, tale 11c: The Story of King PalmarinResearch access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.

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