This reference work analyzes and classifies the story themes of Polynesian myths, tales, and legends according to an internationally employed system developed by Stith Thompson in his Motif Index of Folk-Literature ( 1955-1958). Thousands of tales, including those from almost all of the major original collections from the Polynesian area, have been examined and their thematic contents cataloged in this work. In his introduction, the author explains the concept of the motif as a basis for cataloging. He quotes from Professor Thompson's definition of a motif: “the smallest element in a tale having the power to persist in tradition,” for example, gods, marvelous creatures, magic objects, and certain kinds of incidents. The author believes “the function of an index of motifs is to cite bibliographical sources of narratives containing these viable (often irreducible) story elements, and thus to provide the investigator of specific story ideas with comparative Information.” The present work is an attempt to survey thoroughly the totality of Polynesian oral tradition and to indicate the distribution and relationships of narrative materials. Not since the publication of Roland B. Dixon's work on Oceanic mythology in 1916 has this been attempted. This index will be an invaluable reference tool for anyone doing research in Oceanic ethnology and folklore.

Storytelling is an ancient practice known in all civilizations throughout history. Characters, tales, techniques, oral traditions, motifs, and tale types transcend individual cultures - elements and names change, but the stories are remarkably similar with each rendition, highlighting the values and concerns of the host culture. Examining the stories and the oral traditions associated with different cultures offers a unique view of practices and traditions."Storytelling: An Encyclopedia of Mythology and Folklore" brings past and present cultures of the world to life through their stories, oral traditions, and performance styles. It combines folklore and mythology, traditional arts, history, literature, and festivals to present an overview of world cultures through their liveliest and most fascinating mode of expression. This appealing resource includes specific storytelling techniques as well as retellings of stories from various cultures and traditions.

A Companion to Folklore presents an original and comprehensive collection of essays from international experts in the field of folklore studies. Unprecedented in depth and scope, this state-of-the-art collection uniquely displays the vitality of folklore research across the globe. An unprecedented collection of original, state of the art essays on folklore authored by international experts Examines the practices and theoretical approaches developed to understand the phenomena of folklore Considers folklore in the context of multi-disciplinary topics that include poetics, performance, religious practice, myth, ritual and symbol, oral textuality, history, law, politics and power as well as the social base of folklore Selected by Choice as a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title

An imaginative and illuminating study, Finding Is the First Act places historical thinking in creative tension with literary appreciation. The structures of Jesus's parable of the hidden treasure (Matt 13:44) are examined by mapping its plot options (finding, acting, buying) in view of other Jewish treasure stories and the vast array of treasure plots in world folklore. Startling differences emerge in the plot options chosen by Jesus that point to a new understanding of the directive to give up all one has for the Kingdom of God. "Why Jesus' treasure parable? For three reasons that I am aware of. First, . . . the story has always fascinated me. . . . Second, in recent work on parables there has often been a tendency to concentrate especially on the longer parables of Jesus. I wanted deliberately to move in theopposite direction and to give full emphasis to a very short parable . . . . Third, this particular parable, in contrast, for example, to that of The Mustard Seed, does not furnish much grist for the diachronic mill of biblical studies. I was deliberately choosing an item which, in isolation from its Matthean context, could hardly sustain a monograph study along the standard lines of tradition criticism." --from the Preface

This volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate which topics and themes constitute the content of the stories, but also by the psycholinguistic and textlinguistic questions of how children acquire linearization and other narrative strategies, how they develop them and how they use them to structure these texts in an adult-like way. The tales are presented in morpheme-interlinear transcriptions with first textlinguistic analyses and cultural background information necessary to fully understand them. A summarizing comparative analysis of the texts from a psycholinguistic, anthropological linguistic and philological point of view discusses the underlying schemata of the stories, the means narrators use to structure them, their structural complexity and their cultural specificity.

“We joked often—laughed to the point of crying (that deep visceral laughter)—not just about the subversive antics of Letao, but to all the allusions to how he, my friend, and I, were tricksters in our own right, moving between our cultural worlds, illuminating ambiguities and celebrating them.” This rich, experimental ethnography plays within the margins of mythology and ethnographic practice to pursue a decolonizing method of inquiry and intercultural engagement. Through a range of mischievous narratives about the mythological trickster Letao, a riM̧ajeļ (Indigenous Marshall Islander) storyteller takes the author on a journey into a deep cosmological and epistemological past and back into the colonial and imperial present. Transcribed in this book, the simultaneously effortless and pointedly deliberate conversations between author Phillip H. McArthur and respected riM̧ajeļ elder Kometo Albōt subvert and dismantle boundaries of time, culture, and religion. Through lighthearted dialogue, Kometo explores serious histories of imperial abuse, war, atomic bomb testing, ideologies of social power, decolonization, Christianity, magic, sex, and death. He plays upon a range of ambiguities such as the slipperiness of mythic discourse, ethnographic entanglements, ambivalent analogies about Americans, cosmological musings about Western and Indigenous deities, the complexities of matrilineal kinship and modern manifestations of power, the interplay of magic within politics and religion, the social efficacy of ideologies of deception and revelation through divination, the way by which risky topics and profane stories bring the sacred into relief, and prophecies that presage the end of culture and the death of the trickster. In this way of relating, the boundaries blur between ethnographer and subject and the theories of myth and folklore—all become part of the dialogic process. The author critically attends to his positionality, as well as to how Kometo slyly positions them through his jokes and in drawing the author into trickster mythologies. Written in a narrative style that combines transcribed dialogue, poetic ethnographic descriptions, applied theory and sharp analysis, and storytelling, this book grants us insight into a decade-long friendship and honors the wisdom of a trickster.