SPECIMENS OF BUSHMAN FOLKLORE - W.H.I. BLEEK & L.C. LLOYD (1911)

"SPECIMENS OF BUSHMAN FOLKLORE - COLLECTED BY W.H.I. BLEEK & L.C. LLOYD (EDITED BY THE LATTER). WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE MCCALL THEAL."

FIRST EDITION PUBLISHED BY GEORGE ALLEN, LONDON, 1911.

PUBLISHER'S GREEN CLOTH BINDING WITH EMBOSSED GILT VIGNETTE AND TITLES ON FRONT PANEL AND SPINE.

40PP [INTRODUCTION] + 468PP + [8]PP PUBLISHER'S CATALOGUE.

SOME AGE-ASSOCIATED MARKINGS. BINDING SOUND. PRELIMS WITH MODERATE FOXING. INTERNALLY CLEAN.

Specimens of Bushman Folklore is a book by the linguist Wilhelm Bleek and ucy C. Lloyd, which was published in 1911. The book records eighty-seven legends, myths and other traditional stories of the IXam Bushmen in their now-extinct language. The stories were collected through interviews with various narrators, chief among them ǀA!kunta,IlKabbo, Diäǃkwain, !Kweiten-ta-IIKen and ǀHanǂkasso.

These tales were written down and translated by Bleek and his sister-in-law Lloyd. Bleek died in 1875, but Lloyd continued transcribing ǀXam narratives after his death. It is thanks to her efforts that some of the narratives were eventually published in this book, which also includes sketches of rock art attributed to the Bushmen people and some !Xun narratives.

Specimens of Bushman Folklore has been considered the cornerstone of study of the Bushmen and their religious beliefs. Laurens van der Post describes the book (and Dorothea Bleek's Mantis and His Friend) as "a sort of Stone Age Bible" in the introduction to The Heart of the Hunter (1961), a follow-up to The Lost World of the Kalahari. (Wikipedia)