Tricksters. French and Italian Folktales

In the first post of this trickster Devil week, I mentioned what an important role the Devil plays in medieval European folktales and in later fairy tale traditions, and I included a link in that post to a search for the Devil in stories collected by the Brothers Grimm. For today's post, I want to share similar collections of French and Italian folktales to show how you can do the same kind of searches there to look for traditional stories about the Devil.

For French folktales, a good collection to start with is the collection by Henri Pourrat, here edited by C. G. Bjurstrom and translated by Royall Tyler: French Folktales.

Using the Internet Archive, you can search the text for "devil" and find lots of hits; you can then scan down the list of hits in the left-hand column to find items that look especially promising. An entire section of the book, in fact, is entitled "The Devil," starting with a story entitled "The Devil and the Farmer."

This book is only a small section of the 1000 stories that Pourrat collected in the  Auvergne region of central France; you can read more about his work at Wikipedia.

Another monumental collection of European folktales is by the famous Italian novelist, Italo Calvino: Italian Folktales.

You will find a large number of stories about the Devil and his tricks here too!

The screenshot there shows a version of the Devil and the three sisters, which is a famous folktale across Europe; you can see a collection of examples from different countries at Dan Ashliman's website: How the Devil Married Three Sisters and other folktales of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 311. And, if that wonderful website should ever go offline, I am pleased to say it is archived in the Wayback Machine too!

Of course, the Devil shows up not in just in western European folktales, but also in eastern European folktales too; I'll be back tomorrow with some examples from Russian folklore. Meanwhile, enjoy this treasure trove of French and Italian folktales for now. :-)

French Folktales

by Henri Pourrat

Italian Folktales

by Italo Calvino