Notes on the Tales

[It was clearly the intention of A. K. Ramanujan (hereafter AKR) to provide complete notes for each and every folktale included in this collection. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to finish that task. We decided to include the two dozen or so sketches of such notes and to leave them unedited (except for obvious misspellings and incomplete references to sources) with the full awareness that they would have been revised and amplified by AKR. Note that when AKR places “Ind.” after a tale type number (e.g., 455 Ind.), he is suggesting that the tale in question is an Indic variant of the Aarne-Thompson (hereafter AT) tale type; see also AKR's incomplete notes on tellers and collectors, which are printed here as an appendix. We have added tale type and motif identifications wherever AKR had not provided them or where we believe another identification is possible. All such editorial additions are contained in brackets. In those instances where we could find no tale type identifier, we have noted “No known tale type” (NKTT). This does not mean that the tale in question is not a bona fide tale type but only that it is not to be found in the standard tale type indices:

Aarne, Antti, and Stith Thompson. The Types of the Folktale. 2nd revision. FF Communications No. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961.

Bødker, Laurits. Indian Animal Tales: A Preliminary Survey. FF Communications 170. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1957.

Jason, Heda. Types of Indic Oral Tales Supplement. FF Communications No. 242. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1989.

Thompson, Stith, and Warren E. Roberts. Types of Indic Oral Tales: India, Pakistan, and Ceylon. FF Communications 180. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1960.

For tales not to be found in the above standard reference sources, we consulted the relevant motif indices:

Thompson, Stith. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. 6 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–1958.

Thompson, Stith, and Jonas Balys. The Oral Tales of India. Indiana University Publications Folklore Series No. 10. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958.

The fact that more than a third of this rich Kannada corpus of traditional folktales is not identifiable by tale type number suggests that the task of tale-typing Indic folktales is by no means yet complete. When a revision of the Aarne-Thompson index is undertaken, we trust that all the tales contained in this anthology will be included.—Eds.]