Although this anthology was in many ways an enjoyable read, it is also one of the oddest collections of folk narrative I have read in recent years.
The oddity of the collection is apparent from the beginning. Green writes in his preface, for instance, that “the following volumes contain a varied collection of folktale types--sacred and secular, fictional and historical” (xi). The volumes do contain a wide variety of forms of folk narrative, some of which are folktales, but it is clearly an error to present the texts of this collection as folktales--many are folktales, others are legends, some are personal experience narratives, and yet others are prose translations of poetic texts.
Green tells us that “the collection not only incorporates variants of narratives that have become ‘standards’ by virtue of their repeated inclusion in folktale anthologies, but also makes a special effort to include those tales that, despite their cultural importance, have been heretofore inaccessible to many potential readers” (xi). Though some of his selections do come from old issues of the Journal of American Folklore or some relatively inaccessible collections--such as his selections of Chukchee stories in volume 2--he never explains what he means by “culturally important stories” nor does he tell us which ones have been inaccessible to readers. Most of his selections, in fact, come from either readily accessible collections or from nineteenth-century collections, some of which are not “classic,” if by this Green means collections that have become culturally important to their respective cultures, such as Afanasiev’s collection of Russian folktales or Jón Árnason’s collection of Icelandic folktales and legends. Some of the translations chosen are in fact themselves obscure, without even the status of classic English translations. Green’s logic in choosing these older collections is that “the earliest available collections of narratives were consulted to obtain ‘baseline’ tales that represent traditional rather than contemporary repertoires” (xii). But in choosing them he has often chosen poorly, with many of the stories reflecting highly rewritten or literary versions of folktales and other narratives rather than the traditional forms of the tales. The nineteenth-century folklorists created a wealth of original language and translated anthologies of high quality, which are almost invisible in Green’s anthology. A reader could read all four volumes and know only a few of the names of the great nineteenth-century collectors.
As Green gives no rationale for the number or types of tales he has selected for the various areas, the coverage for any given cultural area is thus extremely uneven. It is not at all apparent what his principles for selection were. Sometimes the selections come from odd places--the Yiddish stories chosen as representative of Eastern European Yiddish folk narrative, for example, are from a collection of Yiddish folklore done in the US. While the material does refer to life in Eastern Europe, there are collections of Yiddish folktales that were done in Eastern Europe, and recent translations of Yiddish folktales, that are better sources for Yiddish folk narrative, though, yet again, a reader of Green’s collection would have no idea of this.
The annotation to the stories is also very uneven. While Green indicates, for instance, the tradition bearer, where knowable, in the headnotes to the stories, he gives no explanation of why this information is important, nor any contextual information that would make this bit of knowledge meaningful. Aarne-Thompson tale type and motif numbers are given inconsistently as well.
The anthology has something of the feel of a nineteenth-century compendium of folk narrative like Andrew Lang’s colored fairy books, which Green is, in fact, at times heavily dependent on. Who, then, is the audience for this collection? Most likely it would be professional storytellers, teachers, and general readers who are looking for folktales but have little concern for the context or study of folk narrative. Folk narrative scholars will easily find the stories included in Green’s anthology elsewhere, in better translations and with better annotation.
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[Review length: 654 words • Review posted on June 12, 2008]