African Folktales at Internet Archive: Stories Collected in Ethiopia

After the story collections earlier this week from Kenya and from Uganda (here's all this week's posts on a single page), we're moving north today, to Ethiopia:

The book is by Elizabeth Laird, and it consists of stories she collected while traveling in Ethiopia in the 1990s; be sure to see the acknowledgments to the storytellers and translators in the back of the book, which is just a click away at the Internet Archive: When the World Began: Stories Collected in Ethiopia.

This was an exciting book for me because it contains two excellent chain tales, and many wonderful animal stories. Those two genres are my main focus right now, and I'm collecting notes on those types of stories. So, that means you'll find notes there on 12 of the 20 stories in Laird's book; just use the links in this table of contents to find them.

You can also see the notes displayed in Diigo. In the case of this book, you can just search my Diigo on the name Laird because this happens to be the only book by someone named Laird: Diigo - Laird.

In the case of books by authors with more common names or multiple books by the same author, you can search Diigo by the unique ID which I've assigned to each book: Diigo - 202103271595.

Since Laird's book is not in the public domain, I've just written up notes, but for books that are in the public domain, I'm snagging the actual text of the story; more about that, see this earlier post: African Animal Tales in the Public Domain / Koelle's stories from Sierra Leone.

I'm just at the beginning of what I expect will be a one or even two year research project, but the stories are already accumulating nicely; you can see a clickable title list here.

And for some great animal stories from Ethiopia, I can highly recommend Laird's book, which also has lovely illustrations by with lovely illustrations by Yosef Kebede, Emma Harding, Griselda Holderness, and Lydia Monks. Here is the illustration from one of my favorite stories in the book, which shows a sheep and a goat hiding high in a tree while the leopard, hyena, and lion are plotting against them down below:

So, just a click away, wonderful stories from Ethiopia await you:

When the World Began:

Stories Collected in Ethiopia

by Elizabeth Laird