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Guide to the thirty-six files in the alọ́ section, covering Yorùbá folktales, trickster cycles, cautionary narratives, etiological myths, and source criticism.
A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá rescues a drowning hunter's son on condition of enslaving him, hides him inside a drum that appears to sing by itself, and loses him when he drinks himself unconscious at a dance.
A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá wins half a palace by provoking a mute king's daughter into speech through a false accusation of theft, recorded by Ellis in 1894.
A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá wins a wager by goading Erin the elephant into carrying him into town, then escapes execution by persuading the elephant that mud is more lethal than stone.
A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá delivers an elephant for sacrifice by promising him a kingship, with the Yorùbá text of the riding song as printed by Omolaye from a named informant.
A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá tastes a fertility medicine prepared for his wife three times and dies of it, with the Yorùbá text of the Alugbinrin pleading song from a named informant.
A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá abandons his market stall to judge a fight between a shrew rat and a squirrel, takes a side, and loses his nose for it, with the Yorùbá text of the Jómijó song.
A famine tale in which Ìjàpá wheedles the secret of a magic yam-store out of the lizard, loads himself too heavily to leave, forgets the opening words, and is smashed and mended by insects.
An Ọ̀yọ́ variant of the magic yam-rock tale in which the rock opens to a song rather than a command, and Ìjàpá betrays his friend by bringing the whole country to empty the store.
A tale in which Ajá the dog plants the leaves Ìjàpá threw in his face, grows a tree that bears agidi, and repays the insult exactly, with the tortoise killed by a falling stone when he tries the same song.
A drought tale in which every large animal fails to reach the water and the despised tortoise solves it by asking one question, then is trampled by the animals coming to thank him.
The Yorùbá tradition holds no single account of the marks on the tortoise's shell, and this file sets the four sourced narratives side by side to show what varies and what does not.
A tale in which Ìjàpá roasts a pig in a covered fire-trench and loses the whole carcass to a dog blacksmith who stalls him over a seventh knife, explaining why dogs keep away from tortoises.
A cautionary tale in which a beautiful woman who refuses every suitor marries a stranger assembled from borrowed limbs, and escapes his house by stuffing the watchman's alarm horn with oiled bean cakes.
An aetiological tale of the buje dye-shrub, in which a woman who refused every suitor is assaulted by the tortoise and flees into the bush, and which Ellis used to adjudicate a competing published version.
The borrowed-feathers tale in which Ìjàpá flies to the birds' festival disguised as a bird, is stripped of his wings, and falls onto stones laid by an enemy imitating his wife's voice.
What A. B. Ellis's 1894 collection contains, why its tale texts are usable, and exactly where its colonial framing has to be refused.
What John Parkinson's Ọ̀yọ́ tale collection contains, why its stated provenance is unusually candid for its period, and how to read its editor's comparative footnotes.
An Ọ̀yọ́ aetiological tale in which a tiny rat's three enormous sons are each driven off by a farm-robbing bird, until the ram fights him into the ground and the noise of that fight becomes thunder.
A co-wives tale in which a girl short-changed by an ìwin follows him to the land of the dead, passes tests of humility and obedience, and returns rich, while the head wife's daughter repeats the journey dishonestly and is killed.
A co-wives tale in which a bird of prey takes a poor woman's baby and returns it with a fortune, and kills the child the head wife brings to repeat the trick, ending with the head wife executed by the king.
A very short aetiological tale in which the birds and the rats each disown a dead bat because he lacks their distinguishing feature, so he is left without relatives and without a funeral.
A tale in which a bird left off the king's invitation list sings the cleared bush back into growth three times, and the king's son, who lost an ear over the bird's escape, recaptures him by drumming him into a dance.
The extended Àlọ́ Ìjàpá opening formula in Yorùbá with interlinear glossing, the praise-name run for the tortoise embedded in it, and what the collectors record about the apàlọ̀ and his drum.
What M. I. Ogumefu's 1929 collection offers, and the disqualifying caveat she states in her own preface: the songs of these tales have been deliberately left out.
A cautionary tale in which a maiden follows a silent handsome stranger into the forest despite three warnings, and he turns out to be a leopard who hunts her back to the village.
Two competing aetiologies of the leopard's markings printed consecutively by one collector, one in which Akiti the hunter's arrows leave dark marks on an invulnerable leopard, and one in which a bathing woman throws her soapy loofah at him.
The tale of a woman who promises her first child to the spirit of the ìrókò tree in exchange for fertility, cannot pay, and is turned into a bird until her husband carves a wooden child to deceive the tree.
The one modern peer-reviewed source in this section that names its informants and prints Yorùbá song text, and the one defect in it that governs how every song from it is reproduced.
A tale from a country where the inhabitants are heads without bodies, in which one Head borrows a body, arms and legs to win a bride, and loses her when he returns them on the way home.
A tale of royal twins hidden from a law requiring their death, one of whom drowns the other for the throne and is exposed when first a fish and then the river itself sing what lies in the water.
An aetiological tale in which a jealous magician talks a grove of plain brown songbirds into trading their voices for bright feathers, explaining why the most beautiful birds cannot sing.
A childless queen who has been refused by every god steals a newborn from a sleeping woman by the roadside, and is exposed when the hungry baby quiets instantly at its real mother's breast.
An Ọ̀yọ́ tale in which a hunter stakes his life against a village head's on the existence of a sixteen-tailed ape, plays dead to kill it, and wins a bet the community afterwards condemns.
The tale types this section searched for and could not source, the collections it could not obtain, and why there is no monkey-trickster cycle and no Yorùbá origin-of-death tale in this corpus.
An aetiological comedy in which a woman digs a pit to trap her enemy, falls into it herself, is pulled out by hair that stretches as they pull, and is envied into starting a fashion.
What the cautionary àlọ́ in this section actually warn against, how severe their endings are, and the pattern that public exposure rather than private harm is the punishment they most often reach for.