A guide to B.C. Indian myth and legend : a short history of myth-collecting and a survey of published texts

Summary: This book is a popular guide with an academic format. It also has an academic theme, i.e., that in the written presentation of myth, both in scholarly and popular contexts, much of the character of the original performance has been lost. In surveying works belonging to four genres of myth presentation — scholarly collections published by ethnologists, popular anthologies compiled by laymen, anthologies and other works authored or co-authored by Indian people, and text analyses presented by linguists — Maud looks for "reliable texts which are interesting in themselves" (p. 16; Maud's emphasis). It is a very complex act of translation which is required to bring a myth from oral performance to written text, from one language to another, and from one aesthetic tradition to another.