"Dogs Rescue Master from Tree Refuge," an African folktale with world-wide analogs

Western Folklore, Winter 1998 by Goldberg, Christine

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 African 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 African traditions to New World 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 African 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 African 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 African 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 African 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.

Examples of the two episodes (the refuge in the tree and the rescue by the dogs) of this tale are so far-ranging, and so able to blend into other tales, that a search for the ultimate origin of the two-part tale is unlikely to lead to a convincing result. Nevertheless, much can be learned about its area of distribution and its various forms. An analysis of these forms suggests that its path to the New World was not only from Africa but also from southern Europe. Furthermore, because this is a tale with separable parts, it permits a case study of the nature of the bonds between episodes that are joined together in a tale type. Thus we have in microcosm another of the classic problems that interest folktale scholars: why do tales keep the forms they do?

TALES WITH BOTH THE TREE ESCAPE AND THE ANIMAL RESCUE AT 315A The Cannibal Sister

Throughout African Folktales in the New World, Bascom relied on The Types of the Folktale and the Motif Index of Folk Literature to tell him whether his tales were known in Europe. In his own words, "The Aarne-Thompson index [1961] is an invaluable resource when searching for European analogues. If it cites none, one may conclude that a given tale type has not been recorded in Europe" (1992:20; similar comments appear on pp. 71, 84, 104, 137, 146, 201, and 212). Ideally, this strategy should have worked. Unfortunately, however, the Aarne-Thompson index is subject to omissions. Furthermore, and on a happier note, there are now more published variants of AT 315A and several regional tale type indexes that include this type number. These come from eastern Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, Persia, and Japan.