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Folklorist Thomas A. Green of Texas A&M University has edited the new Greenwood Library of American Folktales (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007). This edition compiles over three hundred folktales into four volumes, titled to encompass all of “America”—evidently meaning the United States. While folktales from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Antigua, Barbados, and Haiti are included, those of Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Canada are not. The folktales and narratives in the four volumes are drawn from three principal sources: republished Journal of American Folklore articles of the 1880s and 1890s, works of Native American ethnology from the first two decades of the twentieth century, and rural narratives recorded by Federal Writers’ Project field-workers in the 1930s. The work aims to present a wide range of folktales grouped along broad geographic lines and secondarily by theme and narrative genre. The volumes are divided as follows: Volume 1: The Northeast, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic; Volume 2: The South and the Caribbean; Volume 3: The Southwest, the Great Plains, and the West; and Volume 4: The Northwest and (curiously enough for a work centered on geographic regions) Cyberspace. Into each geographic area, the work shoehorns a disparate variety of folktales, personal stories, and myths under the editor’s broad categories of “Origins”; “Heroes, Heroines, Tricksters, and Fools”; and sacred and secular “Powers that Be.” Each tale is prefaced by notes that identify, where possible, the tradition bearer, the date the tale was collected, and the regional and ethnic background of the bearer. Also included are the motifs of the tales using standard folklore classifications and other background information. Each volume contains a bibliography, a glossary, and a cumulative index of all of the folktales in the four volumes. The collection offers a significant resource in both volume and scope, and as a reference for looking up a given tale, gathers much material in one source. As an ethnographic work, however, it leaves much to be desired. The compilation deliberately avoids any systematic grouping along coherent ethnic or cultural lines and meanders across historical periods. Folktales in some sequences have continuity with those that precede or follow them, but others have none. Native creation stories are grouped with African American animal legends and Euro-American personal narratives of migration and struggle. The volumes include folktales of specific cultures and ethnic groups based on predominant populations present in geographical areas during the peak period of collecting from 1880 to 1950, rather than featuring cultures that were deeply rooted in each place. Thus the Native American representation is strongest in the Northeast and Northwest, but most of the Euro-American tales of the Northeast are derived from transplanted European folk traditions. African American and Cajun tales predominate in the volume on the South, with only a few tall tales representing Euro-American culture. The volume on the Northwest omits virtually every immigrant population found there. As a historian, ethnomusicologist, and folklorist, I have some trouble with the method used to organize cultural material in these volumes, because it seems to disregard the importance of the history and geography in the creation of the folktale, even as the editor reminds us that folklore is a product of its setting. In his introduction, Green suggests that folktales “provide crucial evidence for gauging the importance of region to the human experience” (xi). And yet, reading across the four volumes, one is struck by an apparently arbitrary grouping that puts Native American creation stories next to a gold rush legend and personal narratives of the wagon train journeys of their enemies—all under the heading of “Origins.” Even within the tales selected for the volumes, readers can find ample evidence of the migration of whole cultures and their perspectives, in some case entirely independent of the place where their stories happened to be collected. In other cases, entire cultures are almost omitted. Among the four volumes, fewer than twenty pages are devoted to Spanish culture. Chicano culture is barely noted in the Southwest and on the West Coast. Likewise, Chinese and Japanese contributions to the folk culture of the West and Hawaii are not found in these volumes. It would also appear that folk culture simply ended around 1900, and only residual evidence of it mattered in the first half of the twentieth century, until the children and grandchildren of the last bearers died off. And then, for some reason, Green chooses to devote one half of the last volume to cyberspace, opening a veritable oil barrel of worms by designating spam and cyber rumor as folklore. In this section, numerous carjacking methods are included, as well as a litany of innuendo and derision, not the least of which are mass e-mails deriding Jane Fonda and the anti-Kerry swift boat campaign of 2004. The problems with this subject fall into two large categories. One is of place. Cyberspace is a product of a contemporary quasi–urban and suburban “place,” where computer literacy and English—but not much else—are held in common. The other is the lack of authorship: not in the individual, but in the experiential, sense. There is no there there. An e-mail rumor or ruse—we never quite know which is which—could just as well be the product of a coordinated political campaign as a too-often repeated folk legend. Perhaps all this is folklore, but if it is, then four more volumes could be added to include the seventy-five missing years of popular folk culture preceding the Internet.

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