Tricksters: Trickster Makes This World

For this week of trickster books, I've decided to highlight some useful secondary resources, i.e. books about tricksters, rather than actual trickster story books. Of course, you will also find lots of stories along the way in these secondary resources also. I'll start with a study of tricksters that includes tricksters from all over the world: Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde.

This book is a wide-ranging account of trickster figures from many different cultures, and Hyde provides in-depth analysis of each, paying special attention to the social and mythical dimensions of the stories. He starts with his own first awareness of trickster through the figure of Coyote, and in addition to the mythical European tricksters Hermes and Loki, Hyde pays special attention to the African trickster Legba. He doesn't spend as much time as I would like on Rabbit, Tortoise, and Spider, but in a sense that is what makes the book more valuable for me, as Hyde focuses on different tricksters than the ones who preoccupy me, so that means I learned a lot from this book. Highly recommended!

There are some Lewis Hyde videos you can find at YouTube too; here's a talk on tricksters that he gave back in 2017:

So whether tricksters are new to you or whether you are already well versed in these stories, I am sure you will learn lots from Hyde's book too!

Trickster Makes This World:
Mischief, Myth, and Art
by Lewis Hyde