Day 22: The Remarkable Antilles

I've now started working through Elsie Clews Parsons's remarkable 3-volume collection of folktales collected throughout the Antilles: Trinidad, Grenadines, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, Guadaloupe, Les Saints, Marie Galante, Montserrat, Antigua, Nevis, St. Kitts, St. Eustatius, Saba, St. Bartholomew, St. Martin, Anguilla, St. Croix, St. Thomas and Haiti. The tales are reported in English and in French, but in the third volume she provides English summaries of all the tales, including the French ones, arranged in a numbered series of motifs that cross-references all the variants in the first two volumes, making it instantly easy to compare the stories and to see how widespread the motif is. This is infinitely more useful than the bibliographical approach in Stith Thompson's tale indexes and motif indexes because you can actually get a sense of what the stories / story episodes are like. Here's an example:

Her summaries are basically in the same style that I aspire to in writing my own story summaries for Diigo, so I am able to just copy her summaries to use for my own purposes; that's a big boost in moving the project forward with summaries, which is something I had been struggling with. Using Parsons' summaries for these stories will give the whole Caribbean part of this project a solid foundation!

So far I've got about 170 Antilles items in Diigo, and I've transcribed 25 of the summaries so far. There will be hundreds more to come! Of course, not all the stories are animal stories, so I'm focusing on those, and for many of them, it's worth transcribing the summaries of the different variants, especially when they feature different animals. This is going to give me a depth of coverage for the Caribbean that I did not expect I would be able to acquire so easily. Thank you, Elsie Clews Parsons!