African Folktales at Internet Archive: Folktales of Egypt

Yesterday's north Africa book took us to the Sudan and storytelling communities on the Nile river there (Wisdom from the Nile), and today we'll follow the Nile onward to Egypt, with a fabulous book by Hasan El-Shamy: Folktales of Egypt. It's just a click away, thanks to digital lending at the Internet Archive:

This book, published in 1980, is part of the Folktales of the World series edited by Richard Dorson. You'll find 70 folktales in this book, organized into the following categories: Fantasy, Realistic and Philosophical, Religious, Aetiological, Heroes, Local, Animals, Formula Tales, Humorous, Tricksters, and Jokes. 

El-Shamy is the world's leading scholar of Arabic folktales. In this book, he published the results of his research into Egyptian folktales in the 1960s, and he has gone to produce a monumental book indexing folktales from all over the Arab world: Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Tale-Type Index. In addition, he has also published A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights. Those books are not available at Internet Archive (yet), but El-Shamy's Folktales of Egypt is a great way to learn about his work. In the introduction, he discusses some key folklore concepts, and he also provides detailed notes for each story.

There is also a wonderful introduction by Richard Dorson, who provides a very useful historical overview, including abundant examples of folktales collected by the Englishman William Lane; if Dorson's introduction makes you curious to read Lane's book, you can find that at Internet Archive also: The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians.

I'll have more to say about Richard Dorson in future posts, especially when I shift from African folklore to African American traditions; there are many of Dorson's books available at Internet Archive. 

One book I can highly recommend, for example, is his Folktales Told Around the World anthology, which includes over 100 pages of folktales from Africa: Gbande stories form Liberia, Yoruba stories from Nigeria, Gbaya stories from Cameroon, Nyanga stories from Zimbabwe, and Xhosa stories from South Africa, plus north African stories from Egypt and Tunisia that you'll find in the Middle East section.

So that's a super-abundance of books of stories here in today's post: enjoy! Being able to borrow El-Shamy's book from Internet Archive is a perfect way to immerse yourself in the Arabic storytelling traditions of northern Africa:

Folktales of Egypt.

by Hasan El-Shamy

I'll be back tomorrow with the final book for the week's series of folktale collections from North Africa; you can see the whole week on one page here.