The Greenwood Library of American Folktales offers a wide first-reader’s window into American folktale texts collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This massive compendium, running to four volumes and nearly 1600 pages, organizes its subject by region, dividing the nation as follows: The Northeast, The Midwest, The Mid-Atlantic (vol. 1); The South, The Caribbean (vol. 2); The Southwest, The Plains and Plateau, The West (vol. 3); and The Northwest, “Cyberspace” (vol. 4). Within each regional section, texts are divided into four categories: “Origins” (dominated by Native American myths), “Heroes, Heroines, Tricksters, and Fools” (represented largely by märchen and jokes and anecdotes), “The Powers That Be: Sacred Tales” (more accurately, “Supernatural Tales,” for this section includes vampires and witches and consists preponderantly of belief legends), and “The Powers That Be: Secular Tales” (encompassing historical and personal experience narratives among other genres).
In his preface, Thomas A. Green supports his regional focus by stating that folktales, through their frequent “focus on the origin of plant and animal life, social and sacred institutions” and “local landmarks,” “provide crucial evidence for gauging the importance of region to the human experience” (1: xii). We are invited to consider how place affects story, but we see almost nothing of the interpersonal processes that connect the landscape to the folktale text.
“Folktale text” is the operative term here. The apparatus and commentary are sparse: a preface of six pages, an introductory note for each region (with five pages devoted to the Northeast, for example, and seven to the South and the Caribbean combined), and a glossary explicating 24 terms (two entries of which read, in their entirety, “genre: Type or category”; “variant: Version of a standard tale type”). Headnotes (averaging, by my estimate, about ten lines per story) attempt to bridge the thin frame of region and the substance of the text. For example, the note to “The Coyote and the Woodpecker” (Isleta Pueblo, narrator identification “unavailable,” published in 1910) reads,
This story of the trickster trying to imitate another occurs in other variants in the Southwest (See, for example, the Jicarilla Apache, “Tales of Fox: Fox and Kingfisher,” p. 116). As in the tale types designated by folklorist Stith Thompson as animal tales, “The Coyote and the Woodpecker” offers a moral lesson. The philosophy of acceptance and noncompetitiveness is consistent with general Pueblo worldview and morality. (3:109)
The texts are undeniably valuable, even if the great majority predates the current professional standard of exact transcription as well as the recording technology to make such transcription practicable. Most of the tales are reprinted from early numbers of the Journal of American Folklore (some three-quarters of the narratives in the New England section and almost two-thirds of those representing the South were taken from the pages of JAF ). Many of the greatest early American folklorists and ethnologists--including Austin Fife, Aurelio Espinosa, Arthur Huff Fauset, Herbert Halpert, Zora Neale Hurston, James Mooney, and Elsie Clews Parsons--are represented here, and many of the tales are relatively hard to find for those without ready access (via hard copy or the Internet) to a complete run of JAF .
While it is good to see these texts available in such beginner-friendly form, it is dismaying to see them presented as literary artifacts standing almost utterly alone. In the section devoted to the South, for example, nearly two-thirds of the narrators are unnamed. The major reason for the storytellers’ anonymity is, of course, that most of the earliest collectors did not identify their sources, and Green’s texts are extremely early. Twenty-one of the 47 New England texts pre-date 1900, the most recently collected dates from 1941, and their average date is 1904. In the early twentieth century, it was a truism among American folklorists that traditional culture varied relatively slightly over time, but relative greatly by region. This principle, which most contemporary folklorists consider problematic for portraying much twentieth-century American folk culture, is renewed in exaggerated form by Green, whose preface acknowledges that “the majority of the tales in the present collection were drawn from the ‘Golden Age’ of regional collections,” but he dates that period “from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries” (1:xii), a considerable misrepresentation of the books’ contents.
Although it is true that many of the tales anthologized in the Greenwood Library of American Folktales first appeared in JAF with little or no significant commentary, many of the collectors--including Fauset, Hurston, and Mooney (not to speak of Halpert)--rank among the great contextualists of their times. Early scholars sometimes used JAF principally as a repository for texts, but they also provided copious contexts in their other published work, nearly all of which goes uncited in Green’s bibliographies.
The result is a mass of important narratives stripped of their connections to the individuals and groups that shaped and sustained them. Consider the seven tales narrated by Jane Gentry in the anthology; these derive from the earliest published collection of narratives from the Hicks-Harmon family, the most studied and widely known märchen-telling family in the United States. Gentry is the protagonist of a full-length book and several articles; she is also cited in many of the scores of publications that treat other famed family members, including Samuel Harmon, Ray Hicks, Stanley Hicks, Maude Long, and Marshall Ward. Yet Green does not mention any of these connections, nor do his bibliographies and lists of “suggested readings” cite one publication that discusses the family and its narrative traditions. It is not reasonable to ask a 1600-page anthology to do everything, but it is essential to expect a twenty-first century folklore publication to do more. Folklorists are likely to welcome the fact that many of our most important early texts have found a new home, but many are likely to regret, as I do, that The Greenwood Library of American Folktales fails to point the beginner toward the artists and communities behind the texts.
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[Review length: 983 words • Review posted on November 7, 2007]