Tale
Jamaica Anansi Stories
Martha Warren Beckwith · 1924
Synopsis
One hundred and forty-nine tales, often given in several variants, divided into animal stories, old stories of witchcraft, European tales and sung and danced pieces, followed by riddles. In the foreground is Anansi, the cunning spider, who ties up, rides or strips Bredda Tiger, tricks Rabbit, Goat or Monkey, and brings back to his wife Tacoomah what he has stolen; other stories feature witches, the dead and obeah, as the storytellers of the remote districts told them at wakes.
Context
The collection appeared in 1924 in New York as the seventeenth volume of the memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society. Its author had collected the tales from more than sixty storytellers, naming each of them, during two stays, six weeks in the summer of 1919 and five weeks in the winter of 1921; Helen Roberts, who accompanied her in 1921, noted down the music, on the spot or from phonograph recordings, in order to preserve the storytellers' manner, which sometimes mixed narrative, song and dance.
Who it is for
Short tales in Jamaican Creole, recorded as close to speech as possible, with the sung tunes; a book to leaf through rather than read in one go.
Prizes and reception
Now in the public domain, it can be read freely online, on Project Gutenberg and on Sacred Texts, with its musical scores.
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