"Dogs Rescue Master from Tree Refuge," an African Folktale with World-Wide Analogs

Abstract

Where did a certain folktale come from? is a time-honored question in folklore studies. It is often asked in the hope that the answer will reflect credit on one or another culture. In the debate over the extent of influence on African-American culture, leading folklorists including Elsie Clews Parsons, Melville Herskovits, Alan Dundes, Richard Dorson, and William Bascom expressed opinions about the relative contributions of European and traditions to New folklore (Zumwalt 1988:13035). Both Dorson (1968) and another scholar, Florence Baer (1980), tried to determine the ancestry of each of hundreds of tales told by American blacks. Dorson relied on indexes that did not include much material, while others, Baer and Bascom in particular, more actively sought variants from Africa. William Bascom's series of articles called African Folktales in the New World (published in Researches in Literatures from 1976 to 1982, reprinted as Bascom 1992) was intended to show that many tales told in America came from Africa. Evidence for twenty tale types has been published, and Bascom was organizing material for some thirty to seventy more at the time of his death in 1981 (see Bascom 1981). His method of presentation (he summarized all the variants he found) lets the reader see how much variation there is in each tale, and whether the versions dif fer significantly from the American ones. This presentation is page-consuming but it is also more informative than a concise survey like Baer's (1980). For simple, single-incident tales that are only and AfricanAmerican, the situation is straightforward and Bascom's analyses and arguments are compelling. But for tales that also exist elsewhere, or are components of tales that exist elsewhere, his single-minded question (did this tale come to America from Africa?) is only one small part of a complex problem. And, particularly for tales with many variants, his presentation of the material in the form of a long list of summaries arranged geographically obscures the details of the stories. Dogs Rescue Master in Tree Refuge, for which Bascom (1992:155-200) presented 117 texts,l constitutes an example of such a complicated situation. Here is a typical variant: A hunter had four dogs called Sniff-sniff, Lick-lick, Tie-in-knots, and Gulp-down. One day he told his wife that he had seen a kola tree laden with nuts. She told him to pick some because they had none to eat and none to sell. Leaving his dogs at home, he climbed the tree and picked some of the kola nuts. There he was confronted by a forest spirit who owned the tree and who said he would kill the hunter. The hunter called his dogs by name and they came running. Sniffsniff sniffed the forest spirit. Lick-lick licked him, Tie-in-knots tied his throat in knots, and Gulp-down gulped him down. They returned home, and another incident follows (Bascom 1992:164 no. 16, from Ghana) . As Bascom defined it, Dogs Rescue Master in Tree Refuge consists of two parts: the man is trapped by an ogre in a tree (mot. R251), and his exceptional dogs come to his aid (mot. B524.1.2). Although, as we will see below, each of these parts is a well-formed episode that is found in other narrative contexts, Bascom confined his attention to tales that include both episodes in succession.2 Bascom noticed that this tale is the same as part IV of AT 315A, The Cannibal Sister, which Stith Thompson had added to the 1961 edition of The Types of the Fo&tale, citing several variants from India. In AT 315A at its fullest, a sister, who is discovered to be a voracious cannibal (in part I), is about to eat her brother (II). He flees (III) and escapes up a tree, which the sister tries to gnaw down. He calls to his dogs who come to his rescue and kill the sister (IV). Since only Indian examples of this tale were explicitly cited in The Types of the Folktale, Bascom decided that they were irrelevant to his purpose of determining the source of the tale in America. …