Parcourir

The three registers this corpus never blends, what the confidence markers mean, and why initiate-held knowledge is left as a marked gap instead of being filled in.

The kinds of evidence historians use to reconstruct the Yoruba past, what each kind can and cannot prove, and how one 1921 book shaped everything written since.

Which books matter, which editions to get, what is legitimately available online, what to read in what order, and how to judge the sources you will meet.

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.

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.

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.

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.