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More books from the folktale haul of earlier this year!
The Bird Who Cleans The World And Other Mayan Fables, by Victor Montejo
This one is, as should be obvious from the title, Mayan. The author grew up in a Mayan village with his mother and other elders in the community telling these and other stories, and eventually when he was older he wrote them down so that these stories from his heritage wouldn't be lost. And a fair number of the stories definitely seemed to be to be the sort of story a parent would tell a child. Especially the one about how important it is to honour your mother for all the hard work she did raising you! :P The other story I found particularly interesting was the one with the personification of Death, as Death is gendered female, which isn't something I recall having seen much before.
The Adventures of Nanabush: Ojibway Indian Stories, by Emerson Coatsworth and David Coatsworth
I like that this collection of folk stories actually provides named credit to all the people who told the stories, not just to the compilers. And it's a fun collection to read -- getting a bunch of stories about a single character all together means you get a better sense of that character. Nanabush is something of a trickster, and sometimes he ends the story successful and sometimes not, but something I appreciate about him is that when he faces consequences as a result of a foolish thing he did, he's often like, okay yeah fair I deserved that.
Paul Bunyan, by Esther Shephard
A book of tall tales told by loggers in the 19th and early 20th century in North America - collected and published in the 1920's, a time when the stories were still alive and being told in logging camps, though to some degree on their way out. This author lists many of her sources, the people who told these stories to her. Something I love about what the author's done with collecting these stories is that she's kept in a lot of the talk that might be extraneous to the main thrust of the story but is clearly relevant to the way these kinds of stories were told, which really helps to bring this folk tradition to life for the reader. The point of a folk story doesn't have to be just what the story is, the tangential stuff a storyteller says while introducing the story or interrupting the story can be relevant and interesting too, as is the fact of it being an informal-enough type of storytelling that that's common. (The author is clearly cutting out the swears, though.) (Also, she mentions in the intro that she hasn't included stories that are too closely interested in extremely local details about regions, or insider knowledge about logging, and I for one am disappointed.)
The Bird Who Cleans The World And Other Mayan Fables, by Victor Montejo
This one is, as should be obvious from the title, Mayan. The author grew up in a Mayan village with his mother and other elders in the community telling these and other stories, and eventually when he was older he wrote them down so that these stories from his heritage wouldn't be lost. And a fair number of the stories definitely seemed to be to be the sort of story a parent would tell a child. Especially the one about how important it is to honour your mother for all the hard work she did raising you! :P The other story I found particularly interesting was the one with the personification of Death, as Death is gendered female, which isn't something I recall having seen much before.
The Adventures of Nanabush: Ojibway Indian Stories, by Emerson Coatsworth and David Coatsworth
I like that this collection of folk stories actually provides named credit to all the people who told the stories, not just to the compilers. And it's a fun collection to read -- getting a bunch of stories about a single character all together means you get a better sense of that character. Nanabush is something of a trickster, and sometimes he ends the story successful and sometimes not, but something I appreciate about him is that when he faces consequences as a result of a foolish thing he did, he's often like, okay yeah fair I deserved that.
Paul Bunyan, by Esther Shephard
A book of tall tales told by loggers in the 19th and early 20th century in North America - collected and published in the 1920's, a time when the stories were still alive and being told in logging camps, though to some degree on their way out. This author lists many of her sources, the people who told these stories to her. Something I love about what the author's done with collecting these stories is that she's kept in a lot of the talk that might be extraneous to the main thrust of the story but is clearly relevant to the way these kinds of stories were told, which really helps to bring this folk tradition to life for the reader. The point of a folk story doesn't have to be just what the story is, the tangential stuff a storyteller says while introducing the story or interrupting the story can be relevant and interesting too, as is the fact of it being an informal-enough type of storytelling that that's common. (The author is clearly cutting out the swears, though.) (Also, she mentions in the intro that she hasn't included stories that are too closely interested in extremely local details about regions, or insider knowledge about logging, and I for one am disappointed.)
