The Project Gutenberg EBook of Filipino Popular Tales, by Dean S. Fansler

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Title: Filipino Popular Tales

Author: Dean S. Fansler

Posting Date: December 9, 2008 [EBook #8299]
Release Date: June, 2005

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FILIPINO POPULAR TALES ***

Produced by Jeroen Hellingman

Filipino Popular Tales

Collected and Edited with Comparative Notes

By

Dean S. Fansler,

1921

PREFACE.

The folk-tales in this volume, which were collected in the Philippines
during the years from 1908 to 1914, have not appeared in print
before. They are given to the public now in the hope that they will be
no mean or uninteresting addition to the volumes of Oriental Maerchen
already in existence. The Philippine archipelago, from the very nature
of its geographical position and its political history, cannot but be a
significant field to the student of popular stories. Lying as it does
at the very doors of China and Japan, connected as it is ethnically
with the Malayan and Indian civilizations, Occidentalized as it has
been for three centuries and more, it stands at the junction of East
and West. It is therefore from this point of view that these tales
have been put into a form convenient for reference. Their importance
consists in their relationship to the body of world fiction.

The language in which these stories are presented is the language
in which they were collected and written down,--English. Perhaps
no apology is required for not printing the vernacular herewith;
nevertheless an explanation might be made. In the first place,
the object in recording these tales has been a literary one, not a
linguistic one. In the second place, the number of distinctly different
languages represented by the originals might be baffling even to the
reader interested in linguistics, especially as our method of approach
has been from the point of view of cycles of stories, and not from the
point of view of the separate tribes telling them. In the third place,
the form of prose