African Folktales at Internet Archive: Tales, Customs, Names, and Dirges of the Tigre Tribe

For today's book, I want to across the continent to eastern Africa, featuring a monumental collection of folktales published in 1915: Tales, Customs, Names, and Dirges of the Tigre Tribes by Enno Littmann. Because this book is in the public domain, it is available at any time, not just for digital checkout.

This is Volume 2 of "The Princeton Expedition to Abyssinia" (which took place in 1905), and it contains 125 folktales translated into English. Many of the stories are animal tales and, beware, Littmann has rendered the Tigray word hashil or "jackal" with the word "fox" as the jackal is playing a role similar to the role played by the clever fox in European folktales. So, if you see a fox, that's really a jackal!

Volume 1, which is also available at Internet Archive, contains the Tigre text of the stories.  

Volume 2 includes some photographs as well, such as these pictures showing how young women wore their hair:

and this photograph of bread-making:

As you can see from the book title, this dates back to when Abyssinia was used for the name of the countries now known as Ethiopia and Eritrea; the English name Abyssinia comes from the Arabic al-Habash. The Tigray region, which is where these stories come from, is in northern Ethiopia, inhabited by the Tirgrayan people who speak the Tigrinya language. You've probably been reading about the Tigray conflict in the news.

So, if you would like to learn something about the Tigrayan people and their traditions, this monumental book of stories is ready for you to read and explore!

Tales, Customs, Names, and Dirges

of the Tigre Tribes

by Enno Littmann