Customer Reviews

Legends and Tales of the American West (Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library)

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Our old buddy Richard Erdoes has done a magnificent job of researching and weaving together an impressive body of frontier lore. I was astonished to learn that such considerable corpora of tales had been whipped up around such personalities as Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, etc.--characters of whom I had thitherto thought as one-dimensional, perhaps associated with a brief anecdote or, at most, two.

I was surprised not to encounter Johnny Appleseed in this collection, though I haven't finished the whole book. The absence of an index encumbers one's search for tales pertaining to a given folkloric character. Also, the chapters are organized by general thematic motif (not to be confused with Aarne-Thomson motifs) rather than by protagonist: I would have opted for the latter taxonomy had I authored the book. But these are picky points that do not detract from the overall excellence of the opus. Bravo, Mr. Erdoes!