Review of A Treasury of North American Folk Tales. By Catherine Peck, Ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998. xx + 380 pages. Hard bound. ISBN 0-393-04741-5. (price not available)

I liked this book -- in most respects.

Unlike many of the others with such titles, this book was edited by a folklorist; she seems to recognizes the value of the scholarly approach. That is, Peck prefaces each tale with some “folkloristic apparatus.” She gives us some of the information we need to understand these tales as folk artifacts rather than presenting them just as entertainments. Kudos to her for that. Peck also provides us with a list of her sources, though I find it sort odd that she calls them “Acknowledgements,” rather than “Sources.” I don’t quite get that.

I also like this book for the breadth of what she includes. There are stories from all of North America -- Canada, Mexico, the U. S. -- and from most of the cultural groups represented therein. At least, so it seems. She’s really rather inconsistent in what information she gives us. “The Boy of the Red Sky,” for instance, she identifies only as Native Canadian. I’d like more specific information. In other words, more interpretive apparatus would be welcome. One of the stories she includes is called the “Snake-Bit Hoe Handle.” I believe that Vance Randolph included this tale in one of his books. I’d really like to see such correlations mentioned, not just with this story, but with all of them. Peck says that she consciously chose to focus on modern storytellers retelling old stories, which I think is a great idea. I would have liked at least a nod to the older versions. Readers will leave this book thinking this story is a Tennessee tale, rather than a transplanted Ozark tale (which was probably originally transplanted to the Ozarks from Tennessee). By not pointing out the story’s folk heritage, she misinforms the readers, or creates false impressions for them. If we want to know how, where, when and by whom the stories were collected, we’re going to have to go to her souces and look for ourselves. I’d rather she give it to us in the story prefaces.

This book is organized by story theme rather than, for instance, by cultural group or geographic origin, either of which I would have preferred. However, I usually judge books like this (that is, edited collections of tales) first on how useable they would be in a folklore course. Peck’s goal, on the other hand, as she tells us in her Introduction, was to represent the “richness of our heritage” (p. Xix) and says that she was constrained by the limits of her book. She “was asked to choose one book’s worth of stories” (pp. xix-xx). I understand that, but would still have preferred a different organization. Though she subordinates entertainment to enlightenment in her prefatory comments (p. xx), this organization, along with the decision to title the first section “How The World Was Made” instead of something like “Etiological Tales” suggests the opposite.

It’s easy to criticize the work of others, so perhaps I need to get off of that. My primary judgement of this book is that it is very good. It is useful to folklorists, though it could be more so, as a collection of exemplary tales. The collection is such, too, that it will appeal to lay readers. I recommend it.

Jim Vandergriff

Knox College

Galesburg, IL