The popular appeal of the ballad is perennial, and few literary genres give so much pleasure to so many kinds of people. This anthology, first published in 1973, is drawn from the richest ballad tradition in Britain, that of the Northeast of Scotland. It provides a fresh and original choice of songs that ranges from the old ballads like 'Gil Brenton' and 'Willie's Lady' to the bothy ballads like 'The Tarves Rant'. The collection illustrates the development of a tradition over the centuries from the oral stage down to the modern, and exemplifies the methods of composition and transmission, the...

Scottish folk literature is characterised by a wide range of creative expression: story, song, play and proverb. This anthology, first published in 1984, provides an authoritative introduction to Scottish folk literature, and is unique in that it deals with all the genres intrinsic to Scottish tradition. Its selected texts offer an unusual and diverse enjoyment to the reader, including such forms as wonder tales or Marhcen, classical ballads, riddles, jocular tales, lyric and comic and occupational folksongs, rhymes, historical and supernatural legends, and guisers' plays. The texts chosen...

'Once upon a time' is the English translation of the title of this collection of twenty-eight Pidgin tales from Cameroon in West Africa, first published in 1979. These are richly illustrative of the various folklore genres of the region and are presented in a modified standard orthography, with an English translation facing the original Pidgin text. Notes are provided on each tale with the intention of illuminating some of their unique stylistic and linguistic patterns. The tales are often witty, never protracted, and are pleasurable in their own right. They also provide linguistic and...

This collection, first published in 1969, presents essays written by twenty of the most eminent scholars from the British Isles and Europe on aspects of folk life studies. The essays are written in honour of Dr Iorwerth C. Peate, Curator of the Welsh Folk Museum and doyen of folk life studies in Britain, to mark his retirement as the first President of the Society for Folk Life Studies. In the present book all the various aspects of folk life, from linguistics to sociology, from architecture to agrarian history, are covered, reflecting the wide interests of Dr Peate and his valuable...

The central tale studied in Turandot's Sisters, first published in 1993, is The Princess Who Can Not Solve the Riddle, AT 851. Other wisdom tales are surveyed to show that they are separate from the riddle tales in material and in spirit. Customs and beliefs concerning riddling and riddle contests are examined to see what motifs from the tales are taken from reality, leaving the rest to be either fantasy motifs or stylistic traits. The central tale AT 851 is analysed in detail to exhibit its obligatory and optional elements, a wealth of possibilities that enables it to adapt to a range of...

This monumental book, first published in 1992, represents a major contribution to Sephardic and Hispanic studies as well as to comparative folklore scholarship in a worldwide perspective. After many years of fieldwork and extensive archival investigations in Spain, Israel and the United States, the author has brought together and analysed a massive body of primary sources. This is the first collection of Sephardic narratives offered to the English-speaking reader, and constitutes an important addition to the understanding of Sephardic cultural tradition.

The twenty essays that comprise this book, which was first published in 1994, were written by leading paremiologists and folklorists from Africa, Canada, Great Britain, Germany and the US. They represent the best scholarship on proverbs in the English language, and together they give an impressive overview of the fascinating advances in the field of paremiology.

Yanagita Kunio almost singlehandedly initiated the serious study of folklore in Japan. Even modern Japanese folklorists who may disagree with his approach or his methods must take his body of work as a point of departure for their own. This book, first published in 1990, puts Yanagita's career within a historical framework and context, full of detail about Japanese political and literary trends which influenced or were influenced by the folklore scholarship of Yanagita.

Routledge Library Editions: Folklore is a collection of previously out-of-print titles from a variety of academic imprints. It provides in one place a wealth of important reference sources on a wide variety of folklore topics. The international authors include academics from a number of worldwide universities, and many are the acknowledged experts in their respective fields. The books span a wide date range, demonstrating both the development of the field and, at the same time, providing valuable background to current academic thinking. This set contains many essential texts, available now...

Crucial to the world history of folkloristics is this key study, first published in 1992, of the development of folklore study in the Soviet Union. Nowhere else has political ideology been so heavily involved with folklore scholarship. Professor Howell has examined in depth the institutional development of folkloristics in the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century, concentrating especially upon the transition from pre-revolutionary Russian to Soviet Marxist folkloristics. The study of folklore moved from narrator studies to the description of the relationship of lore to...