Tale
Publications of the Princeton Expedition to Abyssinia
Enno Littmann · 1910
Synopsis
Tales, customs, names and songs of the Tigré tribes, dictated in Tigré and published with their translation. Animal tales predominate, in which the fox takes the role of the jackal; to these are added stories from Arabic literature, accounts of fights between tribes, legends, beliefs about the stars, then the rites of birth, marriage and funerals, war cries, the names of swords and she-camels, and the women's funeral songs.
Context
The work appeared from Brill, in Leiden, from 1910 to 1915, in four volumes: Tigre text and English translation of the narratives, then 715 songs, nearly fourteen thousand lines of verse, with their German translation. Most of it was collected and explained by Naffa wad Etman, a young scholar from Gheleb, son of a bard, who came to work for two years with Littmann in Strasbourg; the preface names him and pays tribute to him, as well as to the Swedish pastor Sundström.
Who it is for
A scholarly corpus in four volumes, to be consulted rather than read straight through; digitised and freely available online.
Prizes and reception
Littmann presented in it a literature “made known for the first time”, and these texts were to form the basis of a grammar and a dictionary of Tigre.