Franz Boas’s “The Development of Folk-Tales and Myths” is a short scholarly essay by the founding figure of American cultural anthropology, written while he was at Columbia University and drawing on his study of Tsimshian mythology for a forthcoming report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. It is an expository work: a compact, closely argued investigation into how folk-tales and myths are built, how their parts travel between peoples, and what that movement reveals about the human imagination. Boas writes as a fieldworker reasoning from recorded stories rather than as a theorist spinning systems, and the essay’s force lies in its patient comparison of versions.
Incidents That Travel, Plots That Stay Home
Boas begins from the sheer accumulation of evidence. Collections of tales from every continent, and especially from North America, had grown rapidly in the preceding decades, and they showed something striking: individual story incidents have an extremely wide distribution, carried from tribe to tribe and even from continent to continent, and so thoroughly assimilated that internal evidence rarely tells us whether a given incident is native or foreign. Yet this wide wandering does not produce sameness everywhere. In restricted territories the incidents acquire characteristic peculiarities, and Boas illustrates the point with tales from the north Pacific coast.
The Bungling Host tale, whose basic idea is a failed attempt to imitate a host’s magical way of procuring food, runs across the whole North American continent—apparently excepting California and the Arctic coast—though its incidents vary from place to place. Confined to the north Pacific coast are such tricks as oil dripping from the hands, fish roe obtained by striking the ankle, and berries ripened by a bird’s song. The widespread trick of cutting or digging meat from the host’s own body is practically unknown there. The host’s trick of killing his children, who then revive—part of the tale in Washington and on the Plateaus—is well known on the north Pacific coast, but never as part of this story; there it belongs to tales of visits to the countries of supernatural beings.
The same pattern holds for what Boas calls the prolific test theme. The dangerous entrance to a supernatural being’s house is a closing cave or a closing horizon among the northern tribes of the coast, a snapping door farther south, and watching animals on the western plateaus. Heat tests are frequent everywhere but take different forms: baking the youth in an oven or boiling him in a kettle in some regions, an overheated sweat-lodge or proximity to a great fire in others. The larger setting diverges too—tests of the son-in-law in some areas, contests between a village’s inhabitants and their visitors in others. Smaller details shift with geography as well: in the north Pacific coast story of Raven killing the deer, the Alaskan version has him strike the deer with a hammer, while the more southern form pushes him over a precipice; in a tale of a rejected lover made beautiful by a supernatural being, northern versions bathe the youth in the being’s bathtub, while in the south he is given a new head.
Geographical differentiation is sometimes muddied because different story types overlap. In the widely spread deserted child story, tales in which a youth gives offense by laziness or wasting food belong to Alaska, while the type in which a girl is deserted because she married a dog belongs to British Columbia—and the two overlap in distribution. The theme itself reaches across a much wider area of the continent, and other types can be recognized in the stories of the Plains Indians. Tales of marriage with supernatural beings or animals often take the form of a girl’s abduction after she has unwittingly offended an animal; that type seems primarily Alaskan, while the theme of helpful animals succoring the unfortunate and innocent is far more frequent among the tribes of British Columbia.
From this survey Boas draws a first conclusion: these are a number of simple plots with wide distribution, elaborated by incidents that function as literary devices peculiar to each area, and the incidents gain their peculiar significance by being worked into different plots. Certain incidents are very widely distributed and turn up in a variety of plots. The local character of folk-tales, then, is largely determined by typical associations between incidents and definite plots. And because in most of the cases discussed the plot has a general human character, the invention and diffusion of plots must be viewed differently from the invention and diffusion of incidents. Incidents are on the whole fantastic modifications of everyday experience, unlikely to arise independently often enough to explain their many appearances over vast areas. But stories of a deserted child, contests between two villages, a rejected lover, and the like are so closely related and conform so strictly to everyday experience that the conditions for such frameworks of literary composition are readily given. Even so, Boas insists, the plots characteristic of various areas should be studied for their literary qualities and their relation to the actual life of the people.
Dr. John K. Swanton had attempted exactly this, enumerating the formulas of north Pacific coast tales, where a handful of plots recur again and again: a woman marries an animal, is maltreated by it, and escapes; a woman marries an animal who pities and helps her, and she returns with gifts; men or women marry animals and receive gifts, which become crest stories; men obtain crests through adventures in hunting or traveling; parents lose their children and a new child is born with the help of a supernatural being, whose adventures follow; a man maltreats his wife, who receives help from supernatural beings; hunters meet dangers that the youngest or oldest among them overcomes; and war breaks out between two tribes over the seduction of a woman and the murder of her lover.
How Loose Adventures Become One Story
Boas then turns to structure. Some stories share a unity of underlying idea, built on a simple event characteristic of social life that stirs the hearer’s emotion, and some of these are elaborated in such detail that they conform to “our own literary standards.” He offers the tale of a deserted prince who fed eagles instead of catching salmon; when food grew scarce in winter his relatives abandoned him, but the eagles helped him, sending larger and larger animals with food. Once rich, the prince sent food to the only person who had pitied him; by chance his good fortune was discovered, he rescued the starving tribe, and married the chief’s daughter. A second example, “Growing-up-like-one-who-has-a-grandmother,” tells of another poor boy helped by a supernatural being who defeats all the young men of the village in various contests and so earns the right to marry the chief’s daughter; the humiliated chief deserts him, the youth kills a lake monster, and wearing its skin he can kill sea game—until he cannot remove the skin and must remain in the sea.
Beyond these unified tales stand numerous complex stories of fixed form but loose construction, lacking unity of plot and consisting instead of the adventures of a single person. These are not the disconnected anecdotes told of a favorite hero, as in the Raven legend or the Transformer tales, but adventures forming a fixed sequence always told as one story. Only a few such complex tales are known to several tribes: versions show that within each area the connection between the component parts is firm, yet the whole complex does not migrate far, while the parts tend to reappear in different connections. The story of a man deserted on a sea-lion rock, taken into the house of wounded sea-lions whom he cures, turns up in quite different connections in various regions.
The literary device holding such a tale together is the interest in the hero created by the introductory story, which makes the audience want to know his further deeds; the greater the personal interest in the hero, the stronger the desire to attach favorite exploits to his name. This, Boas proposes, explains why introductory tales differ enormously while adventures and exploits show greater uniformity—particularly in tales of culture heroes. When many of the same exploits are ascribed to heroes of different tribes, the heroes are easily identified. Boas imagines the steps by which a culture-hero myth may develop: an interesting story is told of some personage; striking and important exploits are ascribed to him; similar tales of such personages occur among various tribes; and the heroes of different tribes are identified with one another. He does not claim this happened every single time—other associations may have arisen otherwise—but he holds it proved that introduction and adventures do not belong together by origin; they result from later association, and the great diversity of associations compels this view.
In many forms of primitive literature, interest in the hero’s personality is enough to establish and maintain these connections. In a few cases, though, the adventures conform to a definite character: in northwestern America the Raven, Mink, and Coyote tales turn on greed, amorousness, and vaingloriousness respectively, while in tales with a more human background these tendencies are hardly ever developed. The recorded material shows primitive imagination reveling in themes determined by the hero’s character or otherwise lending themselves to variation. In Alaskan tales Raven’s voraciousness drives him to cheat people and steal provisions, the recurring point being the attempt to make people run away and leave their property; Mink’s amorousness has produced a long series of tales of his marriages, all of the same type. Tales of marriages between animals and men or women illustrate the same influence of a pattern of thought.
Artistic impulse, however, is not always satisfied with the loose connections supplied by the hero’s individuality or strengthened by selected character traits. In a number of cases a psychological connection between elements is sought. The Raven legend of British Columbia welds unrelated incidents into an articulate whole: the adventures of the Steelhead Salmon, the Grizzly Bear, and the Cormorant are worked into a connected series. Raven kills the Steelhead Salmon to deceive the Grizzly Bear, holding part of the fish against his body so the Bear believes he has cut himself, and so induces the Bear to imitate him and kill himself; finally Raven tears out the tongue of the Cormorant, who had witnessed the procedure, so that he cannot tell. Another excellent case from the same region is the story of Raven’s son and the Thunderbird: Raven seduces a girl, their son is stolen by the Thunderbird, and to take revenge Raven makes a whale of wood, kills Pitch to caulk it, and by its means drowns the Thunderbird. Among other tribes the same tale occurs in another connection: the animals hold a game, the Thunderbird wins, the defeated guests are invited and the host’s wife produces berries by her song, the Thunderbird abducts her, and the animals’ revenge by means of the whale follows. In the first group the incident describing the death of Pitch is brought in—an incident that ordinarily occurs as an independent story. Since the same incidents appear in various connections, it would be arbitrary to assume that an incident developed as part of one story and was later transferred to another; the elements must have been independent and combined in various ways, and nothing proves that the connection in which an incident occurs in one story is older or nearer the original form than in another.
The European Contrast and the Fading of the Supernatural
Boas next sets North America against Europe. European tales show remarkable uniformity of contents, incidents, plots, and arrangement across wide territories, despite differences in diction and local coloring. American lore distributes incidents widely, but the make-up of stories diverges far more, corresponding to the greater diversification of cultural types. Boas infers that European cultural types integrated further over the last two or three thousand years than American types did; contrasts like Northwest coast versus Plateaus, or Great Plains versus arid Southwest, are not easily found in Europe, where an underlying uniformity in material culture, social organization, and beliefs permeates the continent and finds expression in uniform folk-tales. European folklore therefore creates the impression that whole stories are units, strongly cohesive and very old. Analysis of American material demonstrates the opposite: complex stories are new, with little cohesion between their components, and the genuinely old parts are the incidents and a few simple plots. The exception is the Magic Flight or Obstacle myth—complex in itself, with parts having no inner connection, yet widely distributed.
Boas concludes that native imagination played with a few plots expanded by widely distributed motifs, with little material that is exclusively regional; each region’s character lies in its selection of preponderant themes, its style of plots, and its literary development.
The supernatural element varies in a peculiar way. On the north Pacific coast, in Raven’s battle with the South Wind, most versions have an animal fly into the enemy’s stomach and start a fire, forcing him to cough it out; in the Tsimshian version Raven simply starts a smudge in his house. In most tales of the liberation of the Sun, Raven’s magical birth matters, but among the Eskimo he invades the house by force or ordinary fraud. In the Tsimshian tale of Raven’s origin a dead woman’s child flies to the sky, while the Tlingit tell it without any supernatural element. In the wedge test among the Lower Thompson Indians, most versions have a boy sent into a crack in a tree, his enemy knocking out the spreading-sticks, and his miraculous escape when the tree closes; in the more rationalistic form he finds a hollow kept open by supports. Boas’s impression is that loss of supernatural elements occurs near the border of the area where the tales are known, possibly along with their fragmentary character—clear from the Masset and Tlingit tales recorded by Swanton. In some Tlingit tales supernatural elements are omitted or weakened by saying the person was out of his head; in the Masset series many are simply omitted. Whether this stems from conflict with Christian teaching or from a break with the past, Boas cannot say, but the stories lost their supernatural character in a new environment. He warns against generalizing that such loss is always the fate of tales, since explanatory tales show it counterbalanced by tales taking on new supernatural significance.
What Myth Is Made Of
On the general theory of mythology, Boas expects to be accused of lacking imagination for insisting that reading mythology as a direct reflex of contemplation of nature is unsustained by facts. Students inquire into the origin of myth without regard to the modern history of myth, yet there is no reason to believe the myth-forming processes of the last ten thousand years differed from modern ones; artifacts from the end of the glacial period are entirely of the same character as those of modern races, so no change of mentality need be supposed, nor any different kind of contact between tribes. It is reasonable, then, to base opinions about the origin of mythology on studying its growth under our own eyes.
From careful analysis of the myths and folk-tales of an area like the northwest coast, the clearest facts emerge: the contents of folk-tales and myths are largely the same; material flows continually from mythology to folk-tale and back; neither group can claim priority. Contents and form are determined by the conditions that determine early literary art. Setting particular incidents aside, the formulas of myths and folk-tales are almost exclusively events reflecting human life, especially those that stir people’s emotions. Once mythology has no claim to priority over novelistic folklore, the origin of tales can be explained as imagination playing with the events of human life.
The incidents that give tales their imaginative character are not taken directly from everyday experience but contradict it. Revival of the dead, the disappearance of wounds, magical treasures, plentiful food without labor—these are not everyday occurrences but everyday wishes, and imagination gives reality to wishes. Others are exaggerations of experience: speech given to animals, enormous giants, diminutive dwarfs. Others materialize objects of fear: the imagined difficulties and dangers of war and the hunt, monsters besetting the unwary traveler. Still others represent ideas contrary to daily experience: stories dealing with the absence of fire or water, or with birth or death brought about by unusual means. Practically all the supernatural occurrences of mythology can be interpreted as such exaggerations of imagination. And so far as our knowledge of the mythology and folklore of modern peoples goes, Boas holds we are justified in concluding that man’s power of imagination is rather limited—people operate with the old stock of imaginative happenings rather than inventing new ones.
The Argument’s Afterlife
The essay matters less for any single tale it examines than for the method it demonstrates. Boas takes the romantic notion of myth as nature allegory or as the spontaneous poetry of a primitive mind and replaces it with a working hypothesis: stories are made of traveling incidents, simple human plots, and the associative habits of particular regions, and their history can be reconstructed by comparing versions the way a philologist compares manuscripts. The warning that nothing proves one connection of an incident older than another, and the insistence that myth and folktale share a single pool of material with no priority between them, cut against the evolutionary schemes popular in his day. His conclusion that the imagination works with a limited stock of inherited motifs rather than inventing freely remains a bracing corrective, and the essay stands as an early statement of the comparative, distribution-minded study of narrative that shaped folklore studies and cultural anthropology for generations after him.
