Index of Catalan Folktales (review)

As with Isabel Cardigos's recent Catalogue of Portuguese Folktales, Carme Oriol and Josep M. Pujol's Index of Catalan Folktales illuminates the contours of an Iberian folkloristic landscape first mapped in 1930 by Ralph Steel Boggs. Boggs, who observed astutely that "political boundaries are very little related to folkloristic boundaries," chose to limit his own Iberian index along linguistic lines, confining his efforts exclusively to Spanish (Index of Spanish Folktales 6). Oriol and Pujol do much the same, limiting their index to Catalan. As such, their index is not regional strictly in terms of physical or political geography. The folktales of Catalonia proper fall within its scope, but so do narratives from Aragon, Valencia, el Carxe, and the Baleric Islands in Spain; so, too, do narratives of the sovereign nation of Andorra, of the Department des Pyrenées Orientales in Southern France, and of L'Alguer in Italy (10). These regions, as they write, once "formed a confederation of states governed by the . . . Crown of Aragon" (10). And today, while Catalonia is the only region in which Catalan is an official language, all share a common cultural, as well as linguistic, heritage.

Neither author of this volume is new to writing tale-type indexes. Pujol and Oriol each compiled Catalan indexes, relatively well known but never published, as their doctoral dissertations at the University of Barcelona, Terragona (in 1982 and 1999 respectively). Moreover, this is not their first edition of this index. The Index of Catalan Folktales is a revision of their 2003 volume, the Índex tipològic de la rondalla catalana—a public folklore project, commissioned by the autonomous government of Catalonia as a resource for "teachers, cultural animators, writers, illustrators, professional tale tellers, etc." (15). As the authors write in their introduction, the current iteration is in fact mostly revision. It has been expanded by about one quarter, but it is primarily a translation and correction of their original text, redirected toward a scholarly audience.

As that is the case, we would expect this index to be a mature scholarly resource. And in many respects it is. Structurally, it mirrors The Types of International Folktales, Hans-Jörg Uther's 2004 revision of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson's The Types of Folktale (2nd rev., 1961). It contains the customary divisions into Animal Tales, Tales of Magic, Religious Tales, and so on. Entries are titled and numbered in accordance with Uther's revised system. And though it omits references to entries within Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1955-1958), it includes illustrative plot summaries.

Further, in no small part because of its limited scope, the volume offers some useful innovations on the form. Each entry includes full bibliographic listings, broken down by region, for each version available in print. And each includes a listing of which other Catalan catalogs include the tale, as well as where they appear in those volumes. The entry for type 300, The Dragon-Slayer, for instance, includes bibliographic listings for twenty-six versions in seven Catalan-speaking regions, as well as page numbers for two separate entries in Josefina Roma's 2006 edition of Sara Llorens's Rondallari de Pineda (60-61). The entry for type 882, The Wager on the Wife's Chastity, includes eight listings in four regions, four listings for Catalan versions of unknown origin, and references to entries in two additional catalogs (173-74). The overall result is a resource with better usability than Uther's international index, or even many of its older, regional companions. The changes that Oriol and Pujol institute would be difficult to propagate on a larger scale. But in this context they make the sometimes-esoteric conventions of tale-type indexes significantly more user-friendly.

That said, although the scope of the index allows for better accessibility, it is also the volume's single most disturbing weakness. Oriol and Pujol, in the course of their research for this index, claim to have discovered a body of well...