African Folktales at Internet Archive: Moorish Literature

Internet Archive has been doing some scheduled maintenance today, so I'm late with today's post in this week's North Africa series (so far: Libya and Morocco); today's featured book is Moorish Literature, with an introduction by Rene Basset, including 42 Berber folktales, along with other popular literature from northern Africa, such as ballads and romances. 

The Internet Archive copy is not accessible at the moment (I'll update this post when it is)... correction: now it is! Internet Archive link.

Because this book was originally published in 1901, so that means it is in the public domain. As a result, it's available at lots of digital library projects, such as Hathi Trust. This book has even been digitized at Project Gutenberg, which means you can snag a nice free epub or Kindle edition there.

Rene Basset was one of the main scholars of North African Berber and Arabic traditions, and he published many books in French, which are also available at Internet Archive. French really is the key language for North African books (yesterday's book was translated from French), so we are lucky that there is this collection of these stories in English. You can read more about Basset at Wikipedia. You can also use Wikipedia to learn more about the Berber peoples, or Imazighen, of northern Africa, which includes the speakers of Kabyle, one of the Berber languages.

One of my favorite characters in Berber folktales is the hedgehog, who is a sly trickster, often accompanied by his friend, the jackal, who is also a would-be trickster. This book contains one hedgehog story: The Hedgehog, The Jackal, and the Lion. Like many episodic folktales, it's really several stories all rolled into one

episode 1: the greedy jackal gets trapped in a farmer's garden but the hedgehog gives him advice that helps him escape, and he even gets a pair of shoes;

episode 2: the lion sees the shoes and wants a pair, so the jackal promises to make him a pair of shoes, but the jackal actually tortures the lion instead;

episode 3: in revenge, the lion ends up ripping off the jackal's tail;

episode 4: so then the jackal persuades all the other jackals to lose their tails also so that the lion won't be able to recognize him as the shoemaker.

That folktale is similar to a hedgehog-and-jackal folktale collected in Stroomer's An Anthology of Tashelhiyt Berber Folktales which I've summarized here: The Hedgehog and the Jackal.

episode 1: the greedy jackal gets trapped in a farmer's garden but the hedgehog gives him advice that helps him escape, although the jackal loses his tail in the process;

episode 2: so then the jackal persuades all the other jackals to lose their tails also so that the farmer won't be able to recognize him as the thief.

By comparing those two stories, you can get a sense of the mix-and-match which is who folktales vary from one storyteller to another! In this shorter story, there is no lion, but the story starts the same and ends the same... not to mention the fact that the motif of the jackals-losing-their-tails echoes an old Aesop's fable: The Fox without a Tail. Once you start comparing and contrasting folktale motifs, you never know just where you will end up!

Meanwhile, I'll be back with another book of stories from north Africa tomorrow!