Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Folklore Research Around the World: A North American Point of View
BY its very nature the study of folklore requires an international breadth of vision. The materials of folklore transcend all barriers of language and culture, traversing continents and spanning oceans in vast leaps and drifting across borders in easy stages. Cinderella has circled the globe. The Shanghai gesture, popular among American schoolboys as a thumb and finger wiggle of derision, roamed all over Europe in the past four centuries. One extended family of water goblins unites the Japanese kappa with the Scottish kelpie.1 In ballad and legend, romance and epos, the same protean hero performs the same sequence of marvelous exploits. Proverbs and riddles glide from one tongue to another to settle comfortably in a new idiom. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
