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Folkloristic Analysis Each tale is introduced here by both its English and its Arabic name, and by the name and age of the teller (when available) and her or his place of residence. Tales are identified as to Type following Aarne and Thompson's Types of the Folktale (abbreviated as "AT"); citations for international parallels to the tales included here may be found in that volume as well. Motif numbers are drawn from Thompsons Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. In the "Parallels" section, we have listed Arabic parallels according to their geographic proximity to Palestine, beginning with the Mashreq and moving westward to Egypt and North Africa. For multiple entries within a geographic location, authors are listed in alphabetical order and entries are separated by semicolons (although multiple entries for a single author are separated by commas). A book or article title may be found by reference to the Bibliography; in cases where an author has multiple publications , the specific date of publication is given in parentheses. Roman numerals always indicate volume number, whether for book or for journal (for journal abbreviations, see Key to References, p. xix); arabic numerals indicate either page number (when directly preceded by a colon) or tale number (when no punctuation comes before), or, very occasionally, the number of a journal issue (following a roman numeral and preceding a colon). In addition, tales are cited by title. Only tales drawn from the Arabic tradition are cited as parallels as such, or as variants. We do draw attention, however, to parallels deriving from other countries in the Middle East (notably Israel, Iran, and Turkey ) and from areas on its periphery (Greece, Italy, Central Asia, India). References from culturally more remote areas are occasionally cited when particularly appropriate. Except for the Palestinian references, we cannot claim that our survey of Arabic parallels is exhaustive, although we did search the accessible major resources thoroughly (including No327 328 Folkloristic Analysis wak's comprehensive—-though with regard to AT typology occasionally spotty—Beitrdge) and feel confident that it is fairly broad. We have tried, in our survey of motifs, to be as thorough as possible. One difficulty we did encounter, however, was the absence of motif numbers for many narrative details encountered in the Palestinian and Arabic traditions. Motifs are arranged alphabetically. Although this book, we believe, fills a gap in the scientific study of the Palestinian folktale, we must acknowledge other significant contributions to the field. The most important (and the most frequently cited) is the excellent collection by Schmidt and Kahle, Volkserzdhlungen aus PaIdstina , set down in the village of Birzeit in the early part of this century. Considering that their work was done before the availability of portable recording equipment, we can only marvel at the size of their collection— 132 items, all transliterated—and the degree of accuracy in the transcription of the village dialect in which the tales were narrated. The primary interest of the authors, however, was linguistic and religious, and so these areas receive the greatest emphasis in their scholarly paraphernalia. Thus the authors provide in their introduction a fairly complete grammar of the Palestinian dialect, as well as a sizable glossary at the end; and the footnotes tend to emphasize biblical parallels. The importance of this work cannot be overestimated, particularly because it makes the Arabic tales accessible to Western readers through facing-page translations into German. Another valuable work is Hanauer's 1935 Folklore of the Holy Land (which is still in print), a charming collection of folk narrative material dealing with beliefs about cosmology, the jinn, plants, and animals. It also contains folktales, saints' legends, Juha tales, and tales illustrating proverbs. Although this work describes the wealth of the Palestinian tradition well, including the Palestinian Jewish tradition, we suspect that the author tampered with the material somewhat by embellishing it for effect. More recently, particularly since the founding of TM and TS, the Palestinian folktale has received much serious attention from Palestinian and other Arab scholars and writers, most notably al-Sarisi, Sirhan, and alKhalili . These writers do show an awareness of the importance of dialect in setting down the tale, but only Sirrian does so consistently. Al-Sarisi's first book (1980), which contains only a sampling of folktales, is adapted from his master's thesis in the Department of Arabic at the University of Cairo, and with his training in folkloristics, his approach is the most scholarly of the three. Although some of his material on methodology, which...

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