Leaning towards the Digital this Summer for Myth and Folklore

Early to mid-October is the time when faculty at my institution are faced with deciding on textbooks for the Spring and Summer terms. This of course means at least partially planning courses, or objectives at minimum, in order to determine the sort of book required, and then finding what’s available that mostly closely resembles the need. I find myself faced with an interesting challenge and an opportunity to really start designing a course with a strong digital component.

I will be teaching for the first time this summer “Myth and Folklore for Literary Studies” in a 5-week half-term hybrid format.

The two main base textbooks for such a course would have to be either Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, or Bulfinch’s collected text of the same title. In either case, digital sources are necessary for more story and character and context, especially beyond the basic Greek and Roman stories. Hamilton only briefly covers Norse mythology, and includes nothing outside of Europe. Bulfinch covers more range but less depth of story, although he does include later references or allusions in major works of literature which is the main reason why I chose his anthology over Hamilton’s.

Given that the course is a major-level elective, an anthology with some theory would be ideal. I’ve encountered 2 issues. First, I don’t want to only use Jung (ie-Campbell), so those paperbacks won’t work as supplements to something like Bulfinch. Ideally, I want at least some Structuralism to add to the psychologically based ideas, and some approaches to folk and fairy tales including feminism and YA backgrounds. Second, I found a promising textbook of stories and theory but, being from OUP, it was too expensive ($100+) to reasonably ask for a 5 week summer course even as the sole textbook. My options are either pillage short segments from various textbooks as pdfs and course reserves or/and find quality articles online. As of right now, it’s looking like a mix of all of the above.

The Bulfinch paperback covers most major myths but I still need folktales. For these, I think the Internet will work fine because these were originally popular tales and not scholarly material, so finding a variety of versions and stories online will actually be more faithful to the spirit of the folktale anyways. For the Greek, it’ll be the likes of:

https://books.google.com/books?id=fHt6Jqnmkv0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://fairytalez.com/author/gianakoulis-and-macpherson/

http://fairytalez.com/region/greek/

and for the Roman: https://www.worldoftales.com/Italian_folktales.html

Concerning Norse myth, neither of the standard myth anthologies go into as much depth as I’d like, so I’ll be supplementing the range of the stories with online sources. Again, like the folktales, the sites may not be scholarly but they have the stories and since the material was not originally inherently scholarly, the sites need not be either. So for now:

http://norse-mythology.net/

https://norse-mythology.org/

For the Celtic traditions, both myth and folklore are needed. Bullfinch covers some Arthurian stories and excerpts from the Mabinogeon, but again I feel that’s not enough. I’m planning to add Yeats for folklore, and the Tain for myth. Thankfully there’s some decent online sources for both of these texts. See:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/yeats/fip/

http://www.csun.edu/~hceng029/yeats/funaro.html

http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/tain_faraday.pdf

The situation is much the same with European folktales. Bulfinch covers some Robin Hood, but very little of the fairytale collections that make up most literary knowledge of folktales such as Perrault, Grimm, and Anderson. Again, those are located online in a variety of forms, including:

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault.html

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/

http://hca.gilead.org.il/

http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/myths-legends/

 

Particularly for more contemporary literature in English, I want to spend a little time with Africa, India-Middle East and Asia. These days will have sources almost entirely online for all with the exception of one short chapter on India in Bulfinch. So, this means places like:

http://www.aaronshep.com/stories/036.html

http://africa.mrdonn.org/anansi.html

http://www.yesterdaysclassics.com/previews/barker_folktales_preview.pdf

http://www.thisafropolitanlife.com/2015/10/19/african-folktales-introducing-anansi-stories/

 

Thankfully the course doesn’t start until the end of May, so there’s time to work on the details, and it’ll be interesting to see how a more digital-text-based course goes.

Suggestions would be welcome.