Suriname folk-lore

8. Arrangement of Bibliographic Notes

A word must be said regarding the bibliography of collections of folk-lore read for the purpose of finding correspondences for the Suriname stories. It will be noted that it is chiefly the West African literature that was gone through, and to which correspondences in plot and incident will be found. This selection was made advisedly, for in the light of our historical knowledge of the West African derivation of the Suriname Negroes, and the manner in which comparative study of African customs and languages validated the historical data², it seemed best to concentrate upon the literature of that area, rather than to achieve a thin sampling of literature from all of Africa. It was also desired, however, to indicate the correspondences with New World Negro folk-tales, and several of the more extensive collections of New World Negro lore have therefore been employed to this end. Since all but one of these collections have especially full bibliographies on the New World material, no attempt other than this was made to cover the field in this area. For European correspondences, the work of Bolte and Polívka has happily lightened the labors of the comparative folk-lorist, and, with Dähnhardt's Natursagen, has been relied upon to indicate where the correspondences between this collection of tales and those of Europe are to be found. No correspondences, either African, European, or New World Negro, were attempted for the proverbs or riddles, since the series in this volume were not felt to be sufficiently full to provide an adequate sample of the resources of the Suriname Negroes in these forms, and to proceed to investigate correspondences on the basis of inadequate samples would

2 Cf. Herskovits (III).

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lead to biased results. In the comparative notes appended to each tale, the references are arranged in the following order: first come the West African correspondences from the north and west (Senegal and the Sudan) along the coast to the Congo; these are followed by New World references; and finally, by the Indo-European.¹

1 Where correspondences with Van Cappelle's and the Penard brothers' collections have been found, these are also noted. Two of the Penards' four tales are found in our collection, and nineteen of Van Cappelle's thirty-nine. In addition, two of Van Cappelle's tales (given as correspondences, though not close, to two of ours) are identical with two we collected in West Africa.