CONTENTS

Acknowledgements . .... . .
Foreword .......
List of Illustrations

PART ONE

A FRAME OF REFERENCE

Introduction .................
……………………………………………………………………….3

The study of folklore and the folk-tale .....….…………………………………………...4

The folk-tale genre: function, form and field. . …………………………………………12

The collection and study of folk-tales in Burma………………………………………..20

A categorisation of selected tales from Burma. ……………………………………….26

Summaries of selected tales . . …………………………………………………...…….31

Suggestions for further research ....………………………………………………….….41

PART TWO

A SELECTION OF BURMA'S FOLK-TALES

Introduction ....................
…………………………………………………………………...51

SECTION I (A): HUMAN ORIGIN TAKES

Commentary ………………………………………………………………………………53

1 The earliest humans………………………………………………(Mon)……………58

2 After the old world was destroyed by the flood…………………(Eastern Lisu) . .61

3 The Lahoo narrative of creation………………………………… (Lahu) …………66

4 Why the Kachins have no alphabet………………………………(Kachin)………..70
The Chin and the Burman are brothers…………………………(Mindat Chin)….70
6 The Naga and the Burman are brothers…………………… (Tan-hkun Naga)..73

7 The story of the goats……………………………………………….(Palaung) …….75

8 The extinction of the Ari…………………………………………..(Tan-hkun Naga).75

9 Plainsmen and hill men……………………………………………(Lahu) ………..79

10 Why the Kachins have so many nets……………………………..(Kachin)……...80
11 The name given by a ghost………………………………….……(Eastern Lisu)..81
12 The 'Eating Early Rice' festival……………………………………..(Asho Chin)….84
13 Why people die………………………………………………………(Kachin)……...85
SECTION I (B): PHENOMENA TAKES

Commentary ....................
………………………………………………………………….88
14 The original state of the earth……………………………………(Kayah) ………. . 91

15 Sunset and sunrise ………………………………………………(Yaw)…………….95

16 The story of the rainbow…………………………………………..(Shan)…………..97
17 The eclipse of the sun…………………………………………….(Rawang)……….98
18 The eclipse of the moon (I)……………………………………(Tan-hkun Naga)..100
19 The eclipse of the moon (II)………………………………………(Burman)……...102

20 The life-restoring plant on the moon…………………………….(Lahu) …...........105

21 Why we have earthquakes……………………………………(Tan-hkun Naga)...106

22 In-daw-gyi, or Naung-lut……………………………………………(Kachin)……...108
23 The elephant……………………………………………………(Sgaw Karen)…….111
24 Buffalo and man…………………………………………………….(Shan)………..113
25 Kyi-kan………………………………………………………………..(Asho Chin)….114
26 Why the owl's eyes are open wide………………………………..(Karen)……….115
27 The grass snake…………………………………………………….(Kayah)………117
28 A-eik-pa……………………………………………………………….(Chin)….. .......119
29 How tea was discovered …………………………………………...(Yaw) .…….....120
30 Thu-ya…………………………………………………………………(Yaw) ..
…........121

31 Hsa Ma ['Lady Salt']…………………………………………………..(Rawang)…...122

Section II (A): WONDER TAKES

Commentary ……………………………………………………………………………...127

32 The were-tiger and Keik Sal……………………………(Hpo Nwan Chin)………133

33 The were-horse…………………………………………(Karen)…………………..139
34 The Snake Prince……………………………………….(Burman)………………..141
35 36 Two Burmese crocodile tales…………………….(Burman)………………..149
37 Concern for humans only brings me pain……………(Arakanese)……………150
38 Win-leik-pya: or, the soul-butterfly……………………...(Burman)……………….153
39 Cham Seng and the pe-et………………………………(Palaung)………………158
40 The ghost in the royal service…………………………..(Burman)……………….159
41 Aran Aung and his friend………………………………..(Mon)……………………160
42 Hpo Hkwe: from painter to king………………………...(Karen)…………………162
43 Nan Yi-hsaing Kaw………………………………………(Shan)…………………..168
44 The brown lotus…………………………………………..(Arakanese)…………...173
45 Smim Katut Kalawam……………………………………(Mon)…………………...176
46 Nan La An………………………………………………….(Karen)………………...183
47 Ein-daw Shinma…………………………………………..(Intha)………………….192
48 Master Born-of-Egg……………………………………….(Mon)…………………..195
49 The Silver Hill………………………………………………(Burman)……………...204
50 The Story of Tugleba………………………………………(Bwe Karen)………….209

CONTENTS
Section II (B): Trickster / SIMPLETON Tales ETC.

Commentary ..............
51 The man in a boat who wasn't afraid of ghosts
52 The canny Lord of Death
53 Liar Mvkang sells ashes
54 Stick spear and golden spear
55 If you shit on the way, there's a hundred to pay

56The story of Ataplem

57 The monkey and the crocodile
58 Kyong-si, the sparrow and the Naga king
59 The rabbit and the fox

60 The elephant versus the tiger

61 The fellow at the town-eater's house
62 The ten simpletons

63 Tall tales

64 Mr Golden Simple and his wife

65 The end of the Na Hsaung Soe ogres 66

The painting competition

III (A): GUIDANCE TALES (LAY)

Commentary ....

IX

218

(Mon) 221
(Pa-o) 222
(Rawang) 225
(Lahu) 226

(Intha) ........
(Mon) .........
(Shan) .........
(Palaung) ......
(Mindat Chin) . .
(Palaung) ......
(Taungyo) .....
(Arakanese) ....
(Yaw)

(Burman) .

(Padaung) ....
(Palaung) .

67 The peacock, king of the birds

68 The 'no hands' dance
69 The long-tongued person
has twice the burden
70 The wise fox
71 Jackfruit tree and bitter gourd vine
72 Five hundred steps
73 To each his own
74 Looking for true love
75 The abbot's mantra
76 The coconut palm owner
77
78

(Karen) ........
(Lieu) . .
(Intha) . .
(Somra Naga) . .
(Maw)
(Rawang) .
(Mon)
(Lahu) ....
(Pa-o) ....
(Kachin) . .
The man who looked for the Lord of Death (Arakanese) ....

Let's have a carve-up (Mon)

III (B): Guidance Tales (Clerical)

Commentary: Law tales (All Burman) 79 Tiger as judge ................ 80 The ardent
young lover as judge .

228
230
235
236
238
239
241
243
250
255
258
262

267

268
269

271
274
276
277
279
281
284
288
290
294

297

298

299

CONTENTS

81 The promise ............................. 82 The elephant-driver who lost his elephant ....
83 Make-believe tales ......

Commentary: Monk's tales (All Burman) 84 To each his own foot.....

85 Saturday-borns................. 86 The monk and the dwindling tiger 87 I ran because

the other ran 88 The British envoy............................. 89 The village wiseman and the
elephant tracks ......

Commentary: Jataka tales (Various sources) ............

90 The lovesick widower (Assaka-Jataka) . .

91 The narrow highway
92 The grateful elephant
93 Learning an old one's tricks
can get you out of a fix
94 The naga prince
95 The hare

IV: Compound tales

Commentary

96 The elephant and the man [I(B) + II(B)] (Kayah) . .

97 Hkun Hsaik [I(B) + III(A)](Shan) . . .
98 The rose apple tree [I(B) + I(A)] (Burman) .
99 The legend of Taw-me-pa[I(A) + II(B)] (Karen) . .
100Nang Upem and Khun Samlaw [I(A) + I(B)] (Shan) . . .
101Don't trust every smooth talker [III(A) + II(B)] (Pa-o) ....

[Rajovada-Jataka] .... . [Alina-Citta-Jataka] .. . .

[Tipallattha-Miga Jataka] [Bhuridatta Jataka] .... [Sasa-Jataka] ..........

300 303 304

. 307

..... 308

310
311
312
313
314

.... 315
316
319
322

326
329
332

336
337
338
342
345
349
353

Bibliography 357
Ethnological notes 366

Index.... .........

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We must first of all thank Anna Allott for her part in the genesis and development of
this volume. By encouraging us, by providing various texts and by assisting
editorially, she has played a substantial part in seeing the book through from concept
to printed page. Others also helped greatly by obtaining and providing texts. Chief
among those assisting in this way were Maung Maung Thwe and U Aye Myint in
Rangoon and John Okell in London. We are also grateful to Anne-Marie Esche,
Patricia Herbert,Justin Watkins and Mya Mya Win for sending us useful material. We
made unsuccessful efforts to contact Christine Price, some of whose woodcuts (from
Keely and Price, 1972) enliven our pages; we here make due and grateful
acknowledgement to her and to her publisher Frederick Warne, who raised no
objections to our using her work. Thanks are also due to the Kyi-bwa-yei Press,
Mandalay, to Martin Smith and The Burma Project of The Open Society Institute for
permission to reproduce the map on page 367, and to Ko Win Maung for several
illustrations from Eugen, ed. (1980).

Two sources of help at the university of Manchester also deserve warm thanks: the
staff of the John Rylands library for bibliographical assistance, and David Griffiths of
the Faculty of Education, who gave generous technical help with the illustrations.
FOREWORD

Our purpose in producing this book has been threefold. Firstly we wanted to make
available to the wider world a substantial and representative sample of Burma's large
inventory of folk-tales. This involved gathering them from various publications, many
of them either available only in Burmese or otherwise rather difficult of access. A
subsidiary aim here was to represent the various styles used in those already
translated into English. Here, we have retained the original spellings. As for those
tales that had been hitherto available only in Burmese, we have translated them in a
plain style which, while remaining faithful to the sense of the text, approximates to
colloquial English. Some readers may regard certain tales as coarse: flatulence,
urination, defecation and menstruation are all mentioned, and we have neither edited
these features out nor prettified the language used.

Secondly, we wished to present the tales in some appropriate class)fication,

however broad that might have to be. This necessitated studying the published work
of various folklorists with a view to making use of their suggested schemes. We
eventually contented ourselves with a mainly functional categorisation which, though
broad, seemed to cater for the vast majority of the tales we encountered. This
class)fication will no doubt need to be mod)fied and extended in the light of further
studies.

Finally, and in some ways most importantly, we wanted to start the process of
placing the folk-tales of Burma's various peoples in a global context—to put them 'on
the map'. This meant relating them to the folk narratives of other peoples, however
distant in time or place they might be. In this respect we are aware that we have only
begun to scratch the surface of a rich seam that still remains to be worked.

ILLUSTRATIONS

A monastery class
(Illustrator unknown) .....

1. A Burmese naga .........

2. The flood

(Christine Price) ........

3. The Chin and the Burman

4.

Ko Win Maung ......

. The eclipse of the moon

(Paw Oo Thet) .......

5. The farmer and the mermaid

(Ko Ko Lay) ..........

6. Tuskless leading his herd

(Ko Win Maung) ................

. Thoodanoo and Dwaymenau

(Ko Win Maung) ...............

8. Golden Simple and his wife

(unknown) . . .

9. Ta-ta-aung paints his picture

(Paw Oo Thet) ..............

10. The hunter carries the hermit

(Ko Win Maung) ............

. Trying to hide from the Lord of Death

(Ko Win Maung) ........................

12. "I will eat you up ...

(Christine Price) ....

13. The hare

(Christine Price) ................

14. She became more and more ugly

(Ko Win Pe) .......

15. Burma's major ethnic groups

(The Open Society Institute).

16. A Burman girl

(P. Klier) .....................

17. A Karen girl

(C. Laplante)..

.... Frontispiece

...... 57

... 62

71
123

161

205

263

272

291

301

333

339

367

369

372

XIV

18. Padaung women

(unknown) . .
19. A Shan girl
(unknown) ....

ILLUSTRATIONS

378

........... 381

INTRODUCTION

To this day in the cities of the East you can see the story-teller sitting in the
market-place, surrounded by a circle of eager listeners, and hear him tell the tales
that he has inherited from an immemorial past.
W. Somerset Maugham Points of View, 1958.

The quotation from Maugham serves to remind us straight away that the folk-tale is
essentially neither a printed document nor a thing of the past, a mere artefact for
antiquarians or text for philologists. Maugham might well have added that today's
equivalent in the West is not so much the reading of a child's fairy-story as the telling
—in the pub, the club, the convention or the domestic gathering—of anecdotes,
jokes, 'urban myths' and so on. Nevertheless we must begin by looking back to the
past in order to review, however briefly, the history of folk-tale study in general;
indeed the paucity of published commentary on Burma's folk-tales makes this doubly
necessary. We shall need to consider some of the ways in which folklorists have
attempted to analyse tales from elsewhere in terms of their purpose, their structure
and their content, before turning to such commentary as exists on the folk-tales of
the Burman and other ethnic communities inhabiting Burma. Setting aside other folk
literature such as proverbs, rhymes, folk-songs and drama, we shall offer a simple
categorisation into which we think most of Burma's folktales will fit and then provide a
few summarised tales, drawn from a variety of ethnic groups, to illustrate each
category. Finally, before presenting the tales themselves, we shall indicate a few
routes that scholars might take in pursuing folk-tale research in Burma.

THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE AND THE FOLK-TALE

The concept of folklore seems to have emerged in sixteenth-century Europe as a

result of a growing interest in antiquities; the earliest extant European collection
containing fairy tales, Le Piacevoli Notti (Straparola, 1550-1553) appeared in Venice
at this time and contained some forerunners of tales well-known in Europe, such as
'Puss in Boots' and 'Beauty and the Beast'. However, it was not until the
mid-nineteenth century that the term folklore was coined by Thoms (1846), and
readily adopted as a replacement for labels such as 'Popular Antiquities' and
'Popular Literature'. By that time, following the example of the collection Reliques of
English Poetry (Percy, 1765), Von Arnim and Brentano had published their collection
of folk and folk-like poems and songs Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806-08) and from
1812 onwards the Brothers Grimm had followed this up with their collections of
'Children's and Household Tales' (Kinder- und Hausmärchen). Today the folk-
element of Thoms' term is interpreted as referring to any social group sharing a
language or religion or occupation or off-duty activity or many another common
factor, and the - lore component is seen as any information orally transmitted by such
a group and constituting a tradition. Moreover, because such a tradition is generated
by human interaction it is in a continuing process of change. Given such breadth and
instability, it is not surprising that there is no widespread agreement on exactly what
does and does not constitute 'folklore', witness the fact that the Standard Dictionary
of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (Leach and Fried, eds. l 984) lists no less than
twenty-one concise definitions.

In nineteenth century Britain, what had started as an amateur quest for antiquities
became a serious study. Muller (1856) used his skills as a comparative philologist to
devise what he considered to be a unifying 'solar' theory in dealing with myths of the
gods, legends of great men and women, and tales of adventure. With the work of
Tylor (1871) folklore study became firmly established as an anthropological pursuit.
Dorson, an American, calls him 'the father of anthropology and godfather of
the-anthropological school of folklorists'(l 968: 187). Tylor surveyed the beliefs,
practices and products of the peasant with an eye for 'survivals', time-honoured relics
of the past. From evidence gathered far and wide, he became con
THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE AND THE FOLK-TALE 5

vinced that the faculty of myth-making was common to every ethnic group in the
world; he showed that the traditions of the so-called primitive peoples were related to
those of the soi- disant civilised races; and he developed a folklore model that traced
an evolutionary progression of human thought, from the simplest animism and
personifications of natural phenomena through to myths which attempted to account
for the mysteries of life itself. Darwinism was in the air, but according to Tylor's
disciple Lang (1907:3-4) this folklore model derived not so much from Darwin as from
'the long-ignored or ridiculed discoveries of the relics of Palaeolithic man by M.
Boucher de Perthes'. The Frenchman studied the development of early Man's
activities by examining his implements and weapons; Tylor studied the evolution of
human beliefs and customs by examining the 'survivals' in folklore, including
folk-tales. We shall see later how the British folklorists widened their sphere of
activity in the latter half of the nineteenth century to include other territories,
especially India; meanwhile, for further details of Tylor's predecessors and
successors, see Dorson (1968).

Folklore has been regarded as legitimate subject-matter by scholars in various

disciplines. The cultural anthropologist and the ethnologist view all the oral traditions
of a people, as expressed for example in the passing-on of such practical know-how
as farming and fishing methods, knot-tying and herbal remedies, as legitimate data.
But in addition, such activities as the singing of lullabies, the use of proverbs and
riddles and the telling of folk-tales provide the descriptive linguist and the philologist
with texts for phonetic, lexical and syntactical analysis and comparison. To others,
folk-tales are a source of literary pleasure and inspiration: Boccaccio and Chaucer
both re-worked folk-tales, and Kipling's Just So Stories and Orwell's Animal Farm:
afairy story also spring to mind. The influence of the folk-tale on modern writers has
been noted by many scholars, including Davidson (1975) in general terms, Russell
(1982) with regard to science fiction and Kotzin (1980) with reference to Conrad's
early works. Taylor (1948) reminds us, however, that whereas folk-tales make
undisguised use of conventional themes and devices, the literary artist normally
avoids such cliches of form and content.

The interaction between folklore and literature has had one unfortunate
consequence. In the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries it was all very well for such figures as Walter Scott and William Wordsworth
to use folk

A FRAME OF REFERENCE

lore as a source of inspiration for their historical romances and pastoral verses.
However, the reverse influence was harmful in that folktale studies became tainted
with literary aspirations. The Brothers Grimm themselves, having produced their first
1812 collection in the tradition of recording tales that had been told orally, retouched
later editions in an attempt to develop character and clarify plot, and soon it was
assumed by many an amateur folklorist that it was acceptable to rewrite a tale
completely. (See David and David, 1964.) The very popularity of some folk-tales led
to their being prettified
so that for example, tne wolf that ate Ked Riding Hood was not slit open since this
was considered offensive to delicate sensibilities. The quality of many a tale must
have become distorted or diluted in this way.

There has been a tendency for folk-tale research to follow in the wake of
developments in linguistic science. Structural linguistics stimulated, if it did not give
rise to, attempts to identify structural patterns in folk-tales. With the advent of
transformational-generative (TG) grammar (Chomsky 1957,1965) and the rise of
psycholinguistics, it was not long before TG grammar was being pressed into service
by the folklorist. Georges (1970) suggested that 'the creation/ recreation of a folktale
may be regarded as a psycho-linguistic process for which the operations can be
described.' More recently Zan (1989), while rejecting linguistic and psycholinguistic
models, nevertheless calls for the elaboration of a structural model by means of
which folk-tales can be generated: in a somewhat abstruse argument he
recommends that folk-tale structural research 'should discover a non-linguistic
concept of generation in which the use of apparently finished-product-dependent
units is scientifically acceptable' (ibid:228). Colby (1989), discussing Zan's paper,
appears to hint that possibly the systemic linguistics of Halliday (1985) may be more
amenable for this purpose than Chomsky's TG grammar. The application of
sociolinguistic concepts and procedures, which we consider later, may also prove
productive.

Psychology and psychiatry, too, have contributed to folk-tale studies. Dorson

(1968:345-346) tells how in the province of Sind in 1896 an archaeologist called
Stein sampled the repertoire of a professional storyteller called Hatim, whom he
regarded as 'a living phonographic machine'. Stein recorded Hatim's tales again after
an interval of sixteen years and found him remarkably consistent. Such mnemon
7

ic phenomena are clearly in the realm of the psychologist. Bartlett (1920), the
distinguished authority on memory, examined changes in the transmission of
narrative both over time and from person to person. In the first case twenty subjects
were presented with an English version of a native American folk-tale and required to
recall it over increasingly lengthy periods of time; in the second, a different tale was
presented to one subject, and this was passed on from person to person, changes in
the story being noted at each stage. Although the experiment had its faults, further
such work could well throw light upon the content and structure of the spoken
folk-tale. Lowie (1942), eliciting folk narrative from native Americans in their own
language, detected variations that appeared to reflect cultural and even individual
bias, a phenomenon which led him to doubt the historical accuracy of any oral
traditions. Other psychological studies of folklore transmission include those of the
Hungarian folklorist Ortutay (1959) and, more recently,Johansen (1993) and Rubin
(1995). As for psychiatry, Freud himself claimed in The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900) that the symbols recurring in our dreams occurred in a 'more developed
condition' in folklore, the tales being expressions of our subconscious fears and
desires; for dung, they were expressions of the 'collective unconscious'; and
Bettelheim (1976), who worked with severely disturbed children, viewed fairy tales as
vehicles of various cultural messages about children's preoccupations, such as
dealing with sibling rivalry (see, eg, 'Cinderella') and generational conflict (ea.
stepmother/stepchild relationshinps. "Each fairy tale" he says

(ibid:309), ' is a magic mirror which reflects some aspects of our inner world, and of
the steps required by our evolution from immaturity to maturity'.
 The folk-tale, then, has been studied from a variety of viewpoints. But what kind of
narrative do we class as a folk-tale? Like the man in the art gallery who knows what
he likes when he sees it but cannot say why, we may recognise a folk -tale when we
encounter one but be unable to define what is and what is not a folk-tale. Certainly
such a story would have to be (or have been) orally transmitted in order to qualify,
but then many jokes are also stories that have been passed on by word of mouth.
These are a part of folklore, but are they to be classed as folk-tales? It might be
objected that folktales, unlike jokes, generally have a moral. But this is by no means
true of all folk-tales, and in any case we would presumably want to

A FRAME OF REFERENCE

exclude other types of moralising narrative such as the parable and the sermon and
the 'object lesson' story, factual or not, such as might be told by a mother to a
daughter, about what once happened when a certain girl disobeyed her mother. If it
is objected that the folk-tale is not meant to be helieved, would we be obliged to
exclude tales that are believed—that is, accepted as factual—by those communities
to whom such stories belong: narratives such as certain religious stories legends and
myths? And should it not be they, those communities, and not 'we' who decide?

Malinowski (1926) found that the Trobriand Islanders recognised only three forms
of native narrative, summarised below:

1. Fairy tales (kukwanebu): fictional, dramatically told, and privately owned. There
is a vague belief that their recital has a beneficial influence on the new crops.

2. Legends (li6wogwo): believed to be true and to contain important factual

information. They are not privately owned; they are neither told in any stereotyped
way nor magical in their effect.

3. Myths (liliu): regarded not merely as true, but as venerable and sacred. They
accompany rituals, and are told when such rituals are questioned.

While Oring (1986:34) follows Malinowski's islanders in his tripartite class)fication,

most folklorists recognise the need to establish more than just three types, though as
we shall see they seldom agree in their categorisations; but let us first look briefly at
these three terms and consider what is meant by them.

It is generally agreed that the fairy tale, or wonder tale, deals with the magical, the
monstrous, the otherwordly or any combination of these, and calls for a total
suspension of disbelief. The Opies (1974) point out that the earliest known
collections of such tales were Indian, and that the fifth-century Hindu Panchatantra
and the eleventhcentury Katha Saris Sagara contain stories with motifs that occur in
well-known European tales—monsters, magic and transformations from human to
animal form and vice-versa—all of which are also familiar features of Burma's
wonder tales.

The term legend has been used in contradistinction to folk-tale to indicate that the
former claims some factual basis, but in practice the two are often difficult to tell
apart. The distinction between legend and myth is also tenuous: a myth is usually
deemed to be an account once (and possibly still) believed by the intended audience,

9
a narrative which explains how the world, or humankind, or some aspect of local
culture came to be as it is. Again, many of Burma's ethnic groups have such tales—
creation myths, flood tales and stories that account for such things as human
diversity, the origins of species and animal behaviour. A legend, on the other hand, is
usually seen as a story, normally about some heroic person or figure, which stands
somewhere between a myth and a historical narrative—as, for instance, do British
tales about Beowulf, King Arthur and Robin Hood. But such stories vary in credibility
and people vary in credulity. It is unlikely that anyone in Burma today for example

would believe 'The Rose-Apple Tree' (Tallantyre,1939j, a story about a historical king
and subtitled 'concerning the adventures of the ruler of Burma, who traversed the
entire world upon a bamboo raft'. Ashliman (1987:xi) says 'One person's magic is
another's religion'. We might add that one person's history may be another person's
fiction.

Levi-Strauss (1978) argues that myths are attempts to confront life's great
questions by dealing with binary oppositions (youth and age, life and death, animal
and human, etc), and his approach has been successfully applied to the myths of
many regions, including India. Campbell (1976:31) views humankind as having lived
'largely out of the visions, either of great teachers such as the Buddha, Moses,
Zarathustra, Jesus and Mohammad, or ... of their own village seers and shamans.'
Such powerful stories are the only ones Campbell would call myths, and he stresses
that every myth 'is "is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives are to be read,
therefore, not literally, but as metaphors'(l988:55). Much of our nightmarish history,
he maintains, is the consequence of people's literal readings of myths. Be that as it
may, what matters most to the folklorist ought surely to be the status accorded to a
narrative by its intended audience, not the analysis of outsiders such as Campbell.

Most folk-tale studies of any note have been carried out by Europeans and North
Americans who, while tacitly in general agreement over what constitutes a folk-tale,
disagree on how to divide the tales into basic categories. In the following comparison
of categories as listed by four authorities, it will be seen that there is unanimity only
across the first three:

10

Fig. 1. Some categorisations of folk-tale types

Krappe (1930) Thompson (1961)

Edmonson (1971) Ashliman (1987)

the fairy tale ordinary folk-tales fairy tales magic tales

including tales of
magic
the merry tale jokes and anecdotes humour anecdotes
and jests

the animal tale animal tales animal tales animal tales

the local legend - - -
the migratory
legend
the prose saga - epics

unclassified tales*
trickster cycles creation cycles prophecy hero cycles history

religious tales romantic tales formula tales

* The size of Thompson's 'unclassified' category would of course be in inverse

proportion to the success of his general scheme.

One category on which those four authorities appear to agree is 'the animal tale'; yet
even here questions arise. An animal tale may be a fable, popular since the time of
Aesop as a story with a moral in which the characters are animals that often behave
as human beings; or it may tell of successful trickery and have no apparent moral; it
may attempt to explain an animal's appearance or behaviour; or it may have a
religious sign)ficance, as in the Jataka tale, popular in Burma, about 'the hare in the
moon'.

Disagreements occur not only in the typology of folk-tales but also with regard to
their genesis. Jacob Grimm thought his stories might be fragments of old pre-Roman
myths, and Muller (1856), no doubt influenced by the philological discoveries of the
age, put forward a pan-Aryan theory of origins which held that the tales current in
Indo-European cultures were all descended from Indian myths. Frazer (1922) also
regarded folklore as the remnants of myths associated with heathen rituals. The
study of the folk-tale has even been subject to political influences: whereas some
German authorities had contended that folklore was a debased form of originally
aristocratic entertainments and recitals, socialist folklorists of the 1930s in

THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE AND THE FOLK-TALE

countries to the east of Germany turned this theory on its head and accorded their
folk storytellers high honour. Starting in 1953, according to Ortutay (1962:56),
prominent storytellers in Hungary were given the title 'Master of Folk Art', a financial
award and, in due course, a reasonable pension. (See also Sokolov, 1950.) In Soviet
Russia from the mid-1960s onwards, a large number of tales from Asia and Africa
were published in translation.

Scholars such as the Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne, meanwhile, contented

themselves with studying collected tales in order to establish a register of tale types,
and this approach was to prove attractive to folklorists in other countries. First
published in German in 1910, Aarne's The Types of the Folktale was eventually
translated into English and augmented by the American folklorist Stith Thompson.
The result was a massive catalogue (Aarne and Thompson, 1961) of some 2500
basic plots, drawn from European and Near Eastern storytellers, which has been and
remains an indispensable tool for folk-tale researchers. However, a more amenable
and more recent single-volume listing is that of Ashliman (1987), who follows the
Aarne/Thompson system very closely.

Among others, Propp (1928, bans 1958) had noticed that numerous folk-tales,
while differing in content, shared certain similarities of structure, and he also drew
certain conclusions about their narrative functions, of which he posited thirty-one.
These included such themes as 'need - satisfaction of need', 'interdiction - violation
of rule', 'contest - victory'. He also claimed that those occurring in any one tale
always did so in the same order. However, as Luthi (1982:127) points out, the
characters are equally important: of the European folk-tale he says that 'the genre ...
cannot be imagined without kings, princes, princesses, witches or magic objects.'
Luthi identifies seven leading roles—those of villain, donor (ea. of magic power),
helper, object of quest (ea. princess), dispatcher, hero and antibero (ea. usurper).
Burmese tales provide ample illustration of these roles; but his assumption (ibid:81)
that 'the form of the folktale must correspond to its function', and that we should
therefore be able to deduce the latter from the former, is surely wishful thinking in
any context.

These, then, are some of the Western scholars who have presented us with their
often conflicting observations concerning matters of function, form and content in the
genre that we call the folk-tale. The work of Burmese folklorists is considered in a
later section.

THE FOLK-TALE GENRE: FUNCTION, FORM AND

FIELD

Although the validity of the very concept of 'genre' has been ques
tioned Jason, 1986), it will be convenient to follow Swales (1990:58)
in viewing a genre as a class of communicative events sharing a
purpose (or purposes) recognised by its audience as constituting the
rationale for that genre, a rationale that may shape the structure and

• .1 . . r .1 1~

constrain me content OI tne discourse as well as ltS manner. What Swales calls
purpose, Content and structure we refer to respectively as function, fi eld and form.

Function

The anthropological folklorist is primarily interested in the social purpose of folklore,

and would wish first of all to know what functions folk-tales perform. (These are not of
course the same as Propp's narrative functions.) As Malinowski (1960) points out,
the reason why genres such as the folk-tale survive at all is that they serve social
functions within the community. Despite the conclusion reached in a Burmese
context by Leach (1954:279ff) that ritual performances do not necessarily denote or
even encourage group solidarity, most authorities would agree with Bascom (1954)
that folklore is an important mechanism for maintaining a group's culture. Nicolaisen
(1990) goes so far as to see group storytelling as a vital means of acquiring a
historical identity. Certain more specific functions have been suggested regarding
folk-tales, perhaps the most obvious being that tales offer amusement (as in the
'trickster' and 'simpleton' tales) and wish-furfilment (as in 'wonder tales') as an
escape from the hardship and boredom of everyday life. Some contribute to the
education of the young (particularly in the non-literate society). Some have an
explanatory function in that they expound the origin of the world, or of the people
themselves, or account for the existence of some other phenomenon such as a
well-known creature, or its physical characteristics. Others illustrate and support the
group's moral codes and norms of behaviour, or even—as a sort of safety -valve—
provide a socially acceptable way of seeing such taboos broken, as in
THE FOLK- TALE GENRE

13

many tales in which a trickster flouts a rule but emerges unscathed and unpunished.
Any one tale may of course perform more than one of these functions, and probably
others. Certainly all those mentioned above are apparent in Burma's tales, as we
shall see later.

As for f eld, i.e. the typical elements within the folk-tale, Thompson
elsewhere (1955-1958) offers an index of traditional narrative motifs
which he says fall into one of three classes, by and large. To para
phrase him in terms of drama, the first comprises the cast (humans,
animals, spirits, etc), the second refers to the setting, scenery and
'props' (ea. known taboos, special places, magic objects) and the
third deals with the story-line or plot. He sets out 22 classes of motifs,
not counting a miscellaneous category:

A Mythological motifs
B Animals
C Taboo
D Magic
E The dead
F Marvels
G Ogres
H Tests
J The wise and the foolish
K Deceptions
L Reversal of fortune

M Ordaining the future N Chance and fate

P Society

Q Rewards and punishments R Captives and fugitives

S Unnatural cruelty
T Sex

U The nature of life V Religion

W Traits of character X Humour

Subsumed under each of these classes are dozens, sometimes hundreds, of motifs.
They are not put forward as mutually exclusive elements, however, and clearly
several may co-occur in one tale. Furthermore it is sometimes difficult to see where
to draw a boundary between one and another, ea. between 'magic' and 'marvels', or
between 'the nature of life', 'chance and fate' and 'reversal of fortune'. There are pros
and cons in Thompson's approach, as we can see in the following application to
three Rawang 'trickster' tales collected in the far north of Burma. On the positive side,
his index of tale ypes makes world-wide cross-referencing possible, witness the
fourth entry below:

14

Fig. 2. Some tale types (Aarne & Thompson, 1961)

Type Number Tale Type Title

-

6 Animal captor persuaded

 to talk
1535 The rich and the poor peasant

1535

1535 "

Tale Title

Liar Mukang and the Water Snake (Burma) Liar Mukang sells ashes (Burma) Liar
Mvkang and the rich villagers (Burma) Pedro Urdemales Cheats Two Horsemen
(Chile)

[Extracted from Dorson, 1975:590-594]

The comparison of tales across cultures is clearly a very desirable pursuit that can
yield fascinating parallels. For example, in The story of fugleba, a moving Bwe Karen
tale recorded in 1954 (Henderson, 1997) a young couple die in tragic circumstances
and are buried. They spring up as two bamboos but these are cut down and stored in
the roof-space of the family home. As soon as the house is empty each day, the
couple become human again and do all the household work, reassuming their
bamboo form before anyone returns. Now this 'secret housework' motif is found in
tales elsewhere in the world, the one best-known in Europe being Grimm's story of
the elves who every night make shoes to help a poor cobbler. The similarity between
this German motif and the Karen one is all the more striking when one bears in mind
that, of the several interpretations put forward concerning elves, the most convincing
is that they are embodiments of the dead (see Krappe, 1930:87-88).

On the negative side, however, any catalogue of motifs will surely tend to show a
certain degree of arbitrariness. Take for example a Burmese tale of the Rawang
which begins:

Long ago there was an orphan boy who lived with his old grandmother. They were so
poor that they didn't even have any spoons or bowls. The orphan grew up day by day
and as he got older he realised how poor they were. (Dorson, 1975:285)

Thompson's motifs as listed by Dorson include 'Orphan hero lives with grandmother'
but there is no indication of poverty despite the fact that this is a basic component of
the story. Again, how significant does a variant element have to be in order to
necessitate the establishment of a new motif? For example, if a tale were collected
15

in which an orphan girl lived with her well-to-do grandfather, would we need a
different motif? What if the girl were not an orphan, or lived with her grandmother?
And so on. Furthermore, a catalogue of motifs becomes unwieldy. The well-known
list compiled by Thompson (1955-58) is a massive work containing thousands upon
thousands of motifs. Here are the few that Dorson (op.cit.) lists for the three Rawang
tales shown in the table above:

Fig. 3. Some folk-tale motifs (Thompson, 1955-58)

Motif No. Motif Title Tale Title

Liar Mvkang and the Water Snake

A1023 Escape from deluge on tree
A2413.5 Stripes of alligator/big snake
K607.2 Crocodile/snake masking as a ''
log obeys suggestions that he
move upstream
K941.3 Enemies burn their house to Liar Mukang Sells Ashes
be able to sell ashes
K714.4 Victim tricked into entering Liar Mvkang and the Rich Villagers
basket
K842.1 Dupe persuaded to take
prisoner's place suspended
in air
K1051.1 Dupe dives for alleged jewels "

[Extracted from Dorson, 1975:564-589]

While this is not an entirely unmanageable number of motifs, elsewhere in Dorson's

inventory we find, for example, one Peruvian tale called The Lake of Jangui that has
no less than twenty-nine. Some of Burma's longer tales are probably equally rich in
motifs. As so far listed, neither tale types nor motifs have been compiled into works
of reference that are as easy to use as dictionaries or encyclopedias; on the other
hand in scanning them one soon finds that, although Thompson's types and motifs
were drawn from European and Near Eastern sources and might therefore be
expected to have little relevance to the Burmese context, they have much in common
with those observed in Burma's tales.

However, some contemporary authorities have objected to any analytical approach

of this sort on the grounds that its proponents 'murder to dissect'. Such a taxonomy,
says Warner (1994:xviii) 'provides a list of ingredients and recipes with no evocation
of their taste or the pleasure of the final dish, nor sense of how or why it

16

A FRAME OF REFERENCE

was eaten'. Many would prefer to deal with live storytellings, videorecorded if
possible, so as to treat the folk-tale as a cultural performance. This approach would
yield actual transcripts of the oral delivery, rather than the dry versions, recorded in
written language that is usually tidied up and sometimes made 'literary' by the
collector, which are often all that we have to study; it would also permit analysis of
any interaction between performer and audience. While this approach has the merit
of highlighting the actual performance of a tale and thereby possibly clarifying its
social function it is sadly necessary to remind ourselves that in some cases little or
nothing may be left of the community which created and preserved a folk-tale—apart
from the tale itself, fossilised in written form. This may well be true of various parts of
the Burmese scene today.

With regard to the cast, or characters, Luthi (1982) identifies in the European
folk-tale what appears to be a general characteristic: their lack of depth. They show
no complexity of personality or motivation, little or no reaction to the amazing events
around them, and no real development of character. Their physical attributes and
contexts are usually limited to simple contrasts (good/bad, beautiful/ugly, rich/poor,
etc.) and, like the characters in Tom end Jerry cartoons, they may be grievously
harmed one minute and fully recovered the next. Nor do they normally have any past
or future, except perhaps for an orphaned beginning and/or a 'happy ever after'
ending. It has recently been suggested (Cardinaud, 1998) that the high-profile part
played in Burma's folk-tales by female characters—princesses, queens, widows,
ogresses, etc.—contrasts strongly with the low-profile role of women in Burmese
political and religious life. However, this thesis needs to take counter-evidence into
account: for instance, the fact that Shinsawbu reigned in her own right as queen of
the Mon people and raised the Shwe Dagon pagoda to roughly its present height'
that Suhpayalat and her mother were highly influential in the events leading to the
British annexation of Burma; and that at present the leading advocate of democratic
reform in the country is a charismatic woman known worldwide.

Otherworld beings, typically encountered not in the village but far from home, are
as one-dimensional as the humans. This cardboard thinness is generally true of the
characters in Burma's tales, and may be due to the fact that for both storyteller and
audience a tale's setting and human characters are to be taken for granted, the
17

assumption being: 'except for what is narrated, everything is like your village,you
people here now'; but it is also true that what matters most in a tale, apart perhaps
from the status of the protagonist, is the storyline.

Form

Attempts at rigorous analysis of story form for the purpose of defining a genre or any
of its subcategories (such as myths, legends and so on) have so far not met with
great success. True, Olrik (1909) found in folk narratives several rules which he
called 'the epic laws', some of which we can readily recognise. His 'law of three', for
example, is based mainly on the well-known fact that many tales contain a series of
three central episodes and/or characters. In the very first episode of the Burman tale
The Snake Prince, for example, an old widow has three daughters, bribes three
anthropomorphised features of her surroundings and lies in wait on the third night.
Olrik's 'law of two to a scene' refers to the less obvious but equally valid fact that
almost always in folk-tale conversations only two characters interact at any one time.
He concedes that such features are by no means universal, but they seem to hold
good for Burmese tales. (See Olrik, 1992 for work unpublished at his death in 1917.)
It is also a general rule that the narrative sequence in the story-telling coincides with
the sequence of actions being described, there being no flashbacks as in the novel
or the film. Formulaic openings and closings such as 'Once upon a time..' and
'happily ever after' may also be noticeable features, but not in all regions.

Propp (1958) observes that numerous folk-tales may differ in content but share a
similar structure; it has been well established that certain plots and episodes crop up
in various parts of the world; and Luthi (1982), as we have seen, has identified
sign)ficant regularity in the sequencing of episodes. Structuralist approaches treat for
n as 'course of action' or 'plot structure' and, having established a typical structure
the folklorist may suggest that, simply because his corpus of tales largely conforms
to such a pattern, this pattern is in itself aufficient to differentiate a folk -tale from a
story in any other genre. Such a conclusion would of course be false since, as Propp
himself admits, there are non-folk-tales which follow similar schemes. This point is
stressed by Zan (1989:209) who, taking as his example a plot sequence 'Interdiction
- Violation - Consequence' which had

A FRAME OF REFERENCE

been proposed as a pattern typical of native American folk-tales, counters the

argument by citing an account of a real-life tragedy:
... a late friend of mine got married. She was advised by doctors that she had a weak
heart and should not try to bear a child because she would not survive the birth
[Interdiction]. She ignored the warning got pregnant [Violation] and died shortly after
she delivered the baby [Consequence].

For Zan, what sets apart the folk-tale is a quality largely inherent in the plot structure
but more a matter of function than of form. The distinguishing mark is what he calls
'instructiveness', which is 'the ability to make sign)ficant emotional, intellectual or
socio-culturally useful impacts'. However, this criterion on its own is clearly
inadequate: many a novel by Dickens has this sort of 'instructiveness'. Furthermore
we have to remember that, as Colby (1989) points out in a discussion of Zan's paper,
apart from the plot structure there are other systems at work in all folk-tales. These
include linguistic systems (sounds, words and grammar), rhetorical systems (voice
delivery, pausing, repetition, etc), poetic systems (use of metaphors, metonymy and
so on) and of course the underlying cultural systems of which all of these are a part.

One eminent authority (Dundes, 1980:2) has gone so far as to admit bluntly that
'not so much as one genre [here = 'type of folktale'] has been completely defined'
despite the efforts made ever since the early work of the Brothers Grimm. Other less
complex folk texts such as lullabies, proverbs and riddles may remain structurally
stable over time and therefore maintain their form; but scathing political ditties can
shift in function and become nursery rhymes; and fairy stories and other folk-tales
can change in both form and field not only over time but also across ethnic
boundaries, and thus make themselves difficult to pin down. Nor is it just the
characters within the tales, animal or human, that can undergo metamorphosis:
possibly one major reason why folk-tales have such stayingpower is that, as Warner
puts it (1 994:xx) ' the meanings they generate are themselves magical shape
shifters, dancing to the needs of their audience'. Fine (1988) makes the same point
in his five assertions concerning the relationship between folk narrative and social
structure: that social structure shapes the content of cultural traditions; that this
content in turn influences social structure; that traditions are always in a state of
dynamic tension.and change; that the act of transmission obeys social structures;
and that in performance, folk
THE FOLK-TALE GENR

19

narratives observe appropriacies in terms of language, occasion and social

patterning.

Narrative structuralism having been of limited use, Zan (1989:228) recommends

that structural research 'must abandon the notion that story or folktale structure is
analogous to linguistic syntactic structure'. However,though he lists various
desiderata he offers no practical procedures. As we have seen, he appears to
suggest that just as structural linguistics has been superseded by Chomskyan 'deep
grammar', so structuralism in folk-tale analysis should give way to a system capable
of generating narrative types instead of simply analysing them. Whether this can be
done remains to be seen.

THE COLLECTION AND STUDY OF FOLK-TALES

BURMA
It is at this point that we return to the activities of British folklorists in the latter half of
the nineteenth century. Muller had drawn his inspiration from India's classical texts,
and the gathering of folktales in the subcontinent had already begun; but now the
wish to govern the subject peoples of the Empire by means of a benevolent system
of administration gave an added impetus. True, various administrators—district
officers, magistrates, military officers and civil servants—had already spent a great
deal of their spare time collecting information about local cultures and had
contributed significantly to the store of folk literature, and so too had many an
expatriate wife. Now, though, in the very year that Burma as a whole was annexed to
the British Empire, Temple (1886:208) expressed very clearly a new idea: folkloric
knowledge as raw material for a politics of expediency.

The practices and beliefs included under the general head of Folklore make up the
daily lives of the natives of our great dependency, control their feelings, and underlie
many of their actions. We foreigners cannot hope to understand them rightly unless
we deeply study them, and it must be remembered that close acquaintance and a
right understanding begets sympathy, and sympathy begets a good government.

Richard Carnac Temple, born in India in 1850, became an Indian Army officer, had
his first taste of service in Burma at Thayet-myo (the frontier town between Upper
Burma and British Lower Burma) and was later tranferred to the Punjab, where he
began collecting the tales that appeared in his three-volume Legends of the Panjâb
(1884-1900). In the year of annexation Temple was sent to Burma, posted to the
royal capital Mandalay as custodian of the city and its palace buildings. As tireless
and efficient in his scholarship as he was in his military and administrative capacities,
he subsequently held numerous high posts in Burma while pursuing his antiquarian
interests. Unfortunately for the student of Burmese folk-tales, however, while he was
able to spend forty years of his life editing and contributing to fee Indian Antiquary
and pursuing numerous other interests, he did not turn his attention to Burma's
folk-tales. Nor

21

did any of the other diligent and scholarly British amateur folklorists who were serving
in India and amassing thousands of tales. (See Dorson, 1968:333-348, 'India', for a
more detailed account.)

Britain's first territorial acquisitions in Burma dated from thel820s. The country was
and is culturally quite distinct from India, yet the whole of British Burma was treated
as a mere province of India and administered from Calcutta, and later from the new
capital Delhi. This policy was naturally regarded as an insult by the Burmese and
seen as counter-productive even by many of the British administrators working on
the spot, yet the arrangement continued almost up to the beginning of the Second
World War. Burma was thus treated as a second-class territory politically, and it is
disappointing to record that even her folk-tales seem to have been considered
unimportant in comparison with those of India.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, the fact that the British folklorists did
not collect Burmese tales meant there was no solid body of scholarly commentary for
others to build upon later. One has only to add the fact that Burma is a highly
multicultural country comprising several dozen ethnic groups each of which is

undergoing rapid change, to realise the difficulty of pinning down the subject today,
and covering it adequately in a limited space. Nevertheless Burma is fortunate in one
respect: whereas many of the world's smaller ethnic groups have regarded their
folk-tales as too humble to merit being placed on record, Burma now has a
substantial archive of printed folk-tales, the vast majority of which were collected and
published by one of her own citizens, the remarkable Ludu U Hla. Given his
achievements in this field, it seems appropriate at this point to devote some time to a
brief summary of his life and work.

As a boy in his home village near Nyaung-le-bin he listened spellbound to the tales
he heard at home and nearby, an experience which was to influence his whole life.
On matriculating from a Government high school in Rangoon he did not go on to
university as his parents wished, but found employment in journalism and clerical
work. In his late twenties he set up his Kyi-bwa-yei Press and published his first two
books. The following year he married a woman who had submitted an article to him
for publication. Daw Amar became not only a devoted wife but also a lifelong
professional colleague. U Hla moved his press to her home-town Mandalay, where
he published the first of his own compositions, Soviet Russia (1940),

22

A FRAME OF REFERENCE

but the couple had to move the press again when the city was largely destroyed by
Japanese bombing in 1942. Back in Mandalay after the war, U Hla became secretary
of the local branch of the AntiFascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL), and from
this point his output of magazines, newspapers, articles and books on various
subjects was prolific.

Unfortunately he became suspect in the eyes of U Nu's government and was

arrested five times for propagating allegedly pro-communist views. During a
three-year stretch of captivity U Hla collected folk-tales from fellow-prisoners so as to
be able to send interesting letters to his five young children. From 1962 onwards he
began to publish these tales, of which he had by the time of his death in 1982
collected thousands from many of Burma's ethnic groups, plus a few from India and
Europe. Enlisting the help of others, he travelled widely in Burma for this purpose,
gathering folksongs and other traditional lore as well as tales. Since his death his
dutiful collaborator Daw Amar has continued to see some of the many hitherto
unprinted tales through to publication. Section II of our bibliography shows clearly the
debt that Burma owes to U Hla and Daw Amar. For a fuller account of his life and
work, see Allott (1997). A true man of the people (the sobriquet 'Luau' with which he
prefaced his name means 'the masses'), U Hla hoped that publication of the tales
would help facilitate inter-ethnic understanding in Burma. His own introductions and
notes are therefore largely descriptions of cultural backgrounds.

For commentary and analysis we must turn to the only other major figure in the
literature on Burmese folk-tales, Maung Htin Aung. In the introduction to his first
published collection (1948) we are informed that tales of this kind were told in Burma
up to about the time of the First World War but had become 'half-forgotten' by the
end of the Second, and that these particular tales were collected in the period
1933-1937. Bearing in mind the lack of consensus among European and American
folklorists with regard to categorisation, one can only sympathise when, in attempting
to classify his tales, Htin Aung exhibits the sort of uncertainty we have come to
expect. In the space of a few pages he tries first one class)fication then a second,
before settling for a third. In summary:

23
Classification I (p.ix)

There are three 'categories' of tales:

1. Folk-tales, which are not easily distinguishable from ..

2. Folk legends (a) about heroes/magicians appearing in

chronicles;
(b) about places; and
(c) about buried treasure.

3. Jatakas, many of which are animal fables with a moral.

Classification II (p.xii)

There are four 'groups' in 'Burmese literature':

1. Jataka tales.

2. Moral/religious tales from Sanskrit/Pali sources.

3. Proverbial tales.

4. Juristic tales, illustrating judgements or points of law.

Classification III (p.xv)

He puts the tales in his own book 'for the sake of convenience' into 'four classes':

1. Animal tales.

2. Romantic tales.

3. Wonder tales.

4. Humorous tales.

(This last class)fication is, he confesses, 'more arbitrary than

scientific'.)

No doubt well aware of the difficulties that would be involved in any further analysis,
Htin Aung offers none, choosing instead to clarify the cultural content for the reader.
Unlike Ludu U Hla, he is a somewhat ethnocentric Burman, referring at one point
(p.xi) to the 'less civilized peoples of Burma, especially the Karens and the Chins'.
Nevertheless, he deserves recognition for producing the firstever published collection
of Burmese tales, whether in English or Burmese. Tales from Burma had hitherto
appeared in print only in dribs and drabs, often as short articles or afterthoughts in
the works of foreigners.

Later, and with regard to Shan tales only, Sao Saimong (1960) also distinguished
four types, though only two of these match those in Htin Aung's collection:

24
A FRAME OF REFERENCE

1. Religious stories.

2. Animal stories.

3. Legends from the Shan chronicles.

4. 'Real folk romances'.

Looking elsewhere to see how the folk-tales of other eastern countries have been
class)fied does not help us very much. Let us take two volumes in the
highly-regarded Folktales of the World series produced under the general editorship
of Dorson: those dealing with Japan (ea. Seki, 1963) and China (ea. Eberhard,
1965). In the Foreword to the Japan volume the editor recognises three 'great
groups' class)fied according to 'thematic resemblances':

Animal tales
Ordinary tales
Jokes and anecdotes

13 per cent
50 per cent
37 per cent

Setting aside the fact that percentages probably count for very little in the dynamic
folk-tale context, we may note that the care taken over the collection and inclusion of
the 63 tales, drawn from a collection of 240 texts, is exemplary: the tales were
recorded word for word and were representative of all tale types as well as all parts
of Japan, and records were kept of dates, informants and locations. In the body of
the book, however, the three 'great groups' give way to six sets identified by what we
have called 'field', the first three according to the cast, and the rest largely according
to the characters' behaviour:

I Animal tales
II Ogres
III Supernatural husbands and wives
IV Kindness rewarded and evil punished
V Good fortune
VI Cleverness and stupidity

The categories in this China volume exhibit only partial overlap with those in the
Japanese collection:

I The origin of human, animal and plant characteristics

II Luck and good fortune
III Tales of love
IV Supernatural marriages
Persons with magic powers

THE COLLECTION AND STUDY OF FOLK-TALES

VI Help from spirits and deities

VII Kindness rewarded and evil punished
VIII Cleverness and stupidity

25

The problem with these categorisations—as with those used by Htin Aung and Sao
Saimong—is the inconsistency in their choice of criteria, some types being based on
function (eg religious, moral, juristic) and others onfeld (eg animal tales, wonder
tales); wisely, perhaps, none has tried to useform as a criterion.

Our own task in this book being no easier than theirs, we shall incline towards
function as the main factor in our own simple classification and make feld a
secondary consideration; we shall not attempt to useform as a criterion. Moreover,
since we exclude certain types of tale while including others, some preliminary words
of explanation are necessary.

A CATEGORISATION OF SELECTED TALES FROM

BURMA

We had no hesitation in excluding stories, such as those contained in Palace [ales

(Fielding-Hall, 1900), which constitute literary rather than folk material. For lack of
aufficient samples and information as to their currency in Burma, ghost stories were
not given a separate section but were placed along with 'wonder tales', by which we
mean stories demanding a willing suspension of disbelief. We recognise that this
accommodation is not entirely satisfactory, since many in Burma who do not believe
in (say) were-tigers or bodily transformations actually do believe in ghosts.

Along with ordinary homespun tales of the sort collected by Ludu U Hla, we have
included three groups of tales which some might

not wish to classify as strictly folk material: (i) the Law tales (Mating Htin Aung,
1962), (ii) the Monk's tales (Mating Htin Aung, 1966) and (iii) the Jataka tales. Let us
look at each group in turn.

(i) The Law tales

During the period 1926-1929, Maung Htin Aung gathered sixtyfive Law tales which
he at first excluded from his own folk-tale collection, believing (a) that they were of
Hindu provenance and (b) that they were already incorporated in various extant
Burmese legal documents. His change of mind on discovering that he was mistaken
on both counts is, we believe, aufficient just)fication for us to include Law tales here.
In his opinion, moreover, tales of this kind were told even before the official
introduction of Buddhism as the state religion in AD 1056. They present various
cases for a judge to pronounce upon. Often this is an imaginary ideal judge called
ThePrincess-Learned-in-the-Law, but sometimes the tales are fable-like in that some
or all of the characters are animals. The tales seem to have been a lighthearted way
of establishing a case law system. As Briggs (1962) says in her review of Maung Htin
Aung's book, the tales were 'intended as models and precedents for judges', and
presumably would also have been used by village headmen and the like.

A CATEGORISATION OF SELECTED TALES

(ii) The Monk's tales

27
Unlike the Law tales, these are a comparatively recent creation. In the reign of
Mindon Min (1853-1878) the highly respected Thingaza Hsayadaw devised short
tales for inclusion in his informal sermons during the decade preceding the
annexation of Upper Burma—a time when it was feared that the Buddhist way of life
would give way to Western culture. Originally, then, they were the work of a single
person and had an underlying political function. However, they seem to have been
spontaneous oral compositions:

For this reason, and because the new genre was taken up and extended by other
venerable monks, and also because the stories continued to be told at least until
1926-29 (the period of Htin Aung's collection) we decided, despite what the purist
might say, to make room for them in our scheme.

The monk's tales were always told by their author on the spur of the moment, and
originally were not noted down by him or his listeners. By word of mouth they
reached villages all over the country, and took their place alongside the 3atakas, the
folk tales, and the law tales in the repertoire of the village storytellers.

(Mating Htin Aung,

1 966:35)

(iii) The Jataka tales

This collection of Buddhist birth-stories is found in one of the three great 'baskets' of
the Pali Buddhist scriptures. In the ancient ninefold categorisation of the Buddhist
canonical writings, the collection constitutes the seventh anga, or division. Like The
Thousand and One Nights, the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, the Jataka is a
'frame story'—in this case, a series of about 550 tales in a framework of Buddhist
teaching. The stories are moral tales, often resembling the Greek fables; in narrating
the experiences of the Buddha in his previous incarnations, they inculcate various
virtues and behaviours. If we are to believe such authorities as Francis and Thomas
(1916:5), such tales were in existence as early as the fourth century BC, most being
versions of Indian tales and pre-Buddhistic in origin. This dating would place them
some two centuries after Aesop, but this need not imply any Greek influence; indeed,
influences may already

28

A FRAME OF REFERENCE

have been mutual for a considerable period, since there were trade routes between
Greece and India in ancient times.

Their long life-span and their widespread dispersion by word of mouth is enough to
warrant the inclusion of these tales here. They also, much later, spread westwards
through literary channels: for example, Jataka 48 in the Francis and Thomas edition
—a story of robbers and treasure—resurfaces as Chaucer's Pardoraer's Tale, and
the tale of the tortoise and the geese (Jataka 215) appears in the fables of La
Fontaine. Furthermore, in Burma the Jataka stories have remained in the popular
memory-bank and some continue to be told as lay folk-tales—a trickster tale about a
crocodile and a monkey, for example, being derived from a Jataka tale. We therefore
had little hesitation in including them.

The function of all three types above is clearly to offer guidance

to the audience. As for all the other tales, in view of the evident
difficulty—impossibility, perhaps, in our present state of knowledge—
of categorising them with any degree of rigour, we have not at
tempted any highly specific analysis. We have simply identified three
broad functioins and selected two f elds within each; and because func
tions are not mutually exclusive and any tale will contain a number
of different fields, we have categorised the tales according to what
we perceive as the salient function and salieaat field. Category I tales

are primarily explanatory in iunction. Many of these tales would seem to qualify as
either 'myth' or 'legend', and we recognise that there is no firm dividing line between
fields IA and IB. We also recognise that some scholars might wish to add somewhere
a separate category to accommodate the semi-historical legend. The main function
of Category II tales is to amuse, and here we keep the wonder tales separate from
the group that includes amusing anecdotes along with trickster and simpleton tales.
Gategory III tales offer guidance, and here we differentiate the traditional 'lay' stories
from the Law/ Monk's/Jataka tales, which we label 'clerical' for want of a better term.
So much for the three broad functions and their fields. With regard to form, we
attempt no analysis; we shall simply present three summarised tales, drawn from a
wide range of ethnic groups, to exemplify some typical storylines in each of the
resulting six fields.

Quoting a well-known Burmese saying, Ludu U Hla once said (we paraphrase) that
in order to do justice to Burma's store of folktales, one would need Mount Meru as
one's paintbrush and the

A CATEGORISATION OF Selected TALES

29

whole sky as one's canvas. Although our choice is only a minute sample of that rich
store, we think it places Burma's tales in global context by demonstrating that they
fall into categories that appear to be universal, namely (I) the mythic explanatory tale
which, though perhaps not the most numerous worldwide, is possibly the most
widespread; (II) the tale that offers sheer entertainment through magic and mystery,
trickery and foolery; and (III) the didactic tale, which seems to have been with us
since before the time of Aesop. However, one awkward fact still remains. Some of
the longer tales appear to furfil more than one function; indeed some, like the
picaresque novels of the eighteenth century, consist of a whole series of episodes,
sometimes with a narrative development so loose that each episode might well
perform a different function and be capable of being treated as a tale in its own right.
Of course, such stories are consequently rich in motifs, as well as having more than
one function. Like Maung Htin Aung, therefore, we too have decided, 'for the sake of
convenience', to have not three but four groups, category (IV) being labelled
'compound tales'. It is into this group that many of Burma's quasi-historical legends
would probably fit most comfortably.

Legends, folk-tales end Jataka tales also form the subject-matter of the pwe the
traditional Burmese drama. Although Burmese drama is outside the scope of this
book, we include in Category IIA part of one dramatised version (The Silver Hill) of a
tale which has links with the Cinderella story. This inclusion serves both as a
reminder that the pwe and the folk-tale have subject-matter in common and as an
illustration of the literary style employed by some amateur folklorists in Victorian
days. Here, then, is our simple scheme:

Fig. 4. Broad categorisation of some folk-tales from Burma

SALIENT SALIENT
FUNCTION FIELD

SAMPLE
TALES

I: To explain A Human 1 After the old 2 The Chin and 3 Why the
Kachins

origin world the Burman are have no alphabet.

tales flood. 6rothers.
(E. Lisu) (Chin) (Kachin)

B Phenomena 1 The eclipse of

tales the moon (I).

2 The story of 3 fhe elephant.

the rainhow.
(Tan-hkun Naga) (Shan) (Sgaw Karen)

30

Fig. 4. Continued

A FRAME OF REFERENCE

SALIENT SALIENT
FUNCTION FIELD

SAMPLE TALES

II: To A Wonder 1 Aran Aung 2 The were-tiger 3 The ghost in the

entertain tales and his friend. and Keik Sal. royal service.
(Mon) (Chin ) (Burman )

B Trickster/ 1 Liar Mukang 2 Stick spear and 3 The ten

simpleton sells ashes. golden spear. simpletons.

tales, etc. (Rawang) (Lahu) (Arakanese)

III: To A Guidance 1 A story of 2 Jackfruit tree

3 The man who
train tales (lay) Kwawnhai and hitter gourd lookedfor the
vine. Lord of Death.
(Palaung) (Maw) (Arakanese)

B Guidance 1 Tiger as 2 To each his 3 The hare.

tales judge. own foot.
(clerical) (Law tale) (Monk's tale) Jataka tale)

IV: Any Compound tales, eg

.
combmahon
of the above

1 The rose-apple tree. 2 The legend of Taw- me pa 3 Nang Upem and Khun
Samlaw.

In order to characterise these groupings, we offer the following brief storyline

summaries of the tales listed above. The full text of each of these resumes except
IIIA1 above appears in Part Two of this book.

SUMMARIES OF SELECTED TALES

I A: HUMAN ORIGIN TAKES

(1) After the old world was destroyed hy theflood (Eastern Lisu )

Just before the flood destroyed the old world, there lived in a high Himalayan village
a brother and sister. As they were clearing an area for cultivation one day, a wild cat
and a viper warned them that the world was about to be flooded. They must hollow
out a log and stay inside it. This they did, taking a dog and a cockerel with them. The
rains came and the waters rose and carried them away. Months later, the flood
receded, leaving them high on a mountaintop. Hearing their rooster crowing, their
dog barking and a bird singing outside, they climbed out and set out in opposite
directions to see if anyone else had survived. Many years later, having found no-one,
they met at their starting-point. Settling down, they married with the consent of the
spirits and produced three sets of twins—the first pair yellow, the second black and
hairy and the third big and white. Twin married twin, and the parents sent the yellow
pair to the east, the black pair to the middle of the world and the white pair to the
west. Although they had all spoken the same language, across time and distance
their speech changed. Villages and towns sprang up. An old man in the yellow group
had nine sons, none of whom could speak, and seven daughters. When the sons
angered their father one day he beat them, whereupon in their pain each began to
speak in a different way. The father gave a different area to each. Their descendants
became the Kachin, Karen/Kayah, Chin, Tibetan, Chinese, Muma (Mon?), Burman,
Shan and Lisu peoples.
Momentos antes que la inundación destruyera el viejo mundo, en una pequeña aldea
de los montes Himalaya vivía una pareja de jovenes hermanos un muchacho y una
muchacha. Pues mientras trabajaban en depejar una pequeña area para la cultivar
sus productos, un gato salvaje y una víbora les advirtieron que el mundo estaba a
punto de ser inundado. Que debieran ahuecar un largo y grueso tronco y
permanecer dentro de él. Así lo hicieron y tomaron con ellos un perro y un pollo. Las
lluvias vinieron y las corrientes de las aguas y los llevaron lejos. Meses más
adelante, la inundación retrocedió, dejándoles en la cumbre de una montaña. Para
ese entonces el pollo se había convertido en gallo y con su cantar, el rasguñar del
perro y un pájaro que cantaba afuera, se estimularon para salir del tronco subieron y
vieron hacia todas las direcciones para percatarse si alguién había sobrevivido.

Muchos años más tarde, no habiendo encontrado a nadie, decidieron dar comienzo,
dar inicio a algo nuevo,. Se colocaron en la parte bajaq de la montaña y se casaron
con el consentimiento de los espíritus y produjeron tres pares de gemelos el primer
par amarillos, el segundo negros y melenudos y el tercero grandes y blancos.
Gemelo se caso con gemela y los padres enviaron el par amarillo al este, el par
negro al centro del mundo y el par blanco al oeste. Aunque todos hablaban la misma
lengua, a través de tiempo y la distancia sus idiomas cambiaron. Las aldeas y las
ciudades se originaron. Un viejo hombre en el grupo amarillo tenía nueve hijos y
siete hijas ninguno de ellos podía hablar. Un día los hijos encolerizaron a su padre y
él los regaño y golpeó , cada cual con su dolor comenzó a hablar dediversa manera.
El padre dió a cada uno un área diferente. Sus descendientes crearon los pueblos
Kachin, Karen/Kayah, barbilla, tibetano, chino, Muma (mon?), Burman, shan y de
Lisu.
[Hla, Ludu U. 1 968c: 1 19-135.]

(2) The Chin and the Burman are hrothers (Chin)

A young man borrowed a fish hook from his elder brother and went fishing. The line
broke as a fish carried away the hook. The elder brother insisted on getting his own
hook back, so the villag

32

(3) Why the Kachins have no alphahet (Kachin)

A FRAME OF REFERENCE

ers helped the younger brother to catch the fish and recover the hook. Some days
later the elder brother borrowed an earthenware frying-pan from the younger and
accidentally broke it. When the owner insisted on getting his own pan back whole,
the two quarrelled. The elder brother departed for the plains, the younger for the hills.
The elder's descendants came to be called Bama, the younger's Chin.

(Compare tale III A1 below)

[Hla, Ludu U 1969a:236-239]

At the beginning of time, the powerful spirit Nin-da-khun-wama-gun summoned all

human beings. So that they could record things, he gave each group an alphabet
and some writings. For some these things were written on bamboo sheets, for some
on paper and for others there were collections like books, but for the Kachins the
letters and literature were on a big leather sheet, so that they would not lose it easily.
Each group then went home and studied, and developed in various ways; but for the
Kachins the journey home was so long and arduous that hunger forced them to grill
the leather and eat it. That's why they have no literature and had to borrow another
people's alphabet.

[Hla, Ludu U. 1975:92-94]

I B: PHENOMENA TAKES

( 1 ) Why there are lunar eclipses (Tan- hkun Naga

The guardian of the earth, a gigantic tiger, is all-powerful, invisible and (since the sky
is close enough at the horizon for even a man to climb up it) able to move between
earth and sky at will. When hungry, he begins to gnaw at the moon because it looks
like a round pancake. When he bites at the east side, the people to the east will
starve; when he chews at the bottom of it, those in the south face famine; and so on.
If we make a terrific din, we can prevent the tiger from eating the whole moon, so that
it can grow again.

[Hla, Ludu U. 1967c:71-73]