The Hasluck Collection of Albanian Folktales - Paperback

by Robert Elsie (Editor), Margaret Hasluck (Author)

The folktales of this collection were gathered and translated into English by the noted Scottish anthropologist Margaret Hasluck (1885-1948) in the late 1920s and 1930s. She collected them, for the most part, not from experienced storytellers, but directly from the children, young people and elementary school teachers she met during her long years of stay in Albania. The narratives are accordingly simple, taken, so to speak, from the mouths of babes. The Hasluck Collection of Albanian Folktales comprising 115 tales, is by far the largest ever to appear in English.

Author Biography

The Scottish scholar and anthropologist, Margaret Masson Hasluck, née Hardie, also known as Peggy Hasluck (1885-1948), lived in Albania from 1923 to 1939. Of Margaret Hasluck's scholarly publications, mention may be made of the now rather outdated "Këndime Englisht-Shqip or Albanian-English Reader: Sixteen Albanian Folk-stories, Collected and Translated, with Two Grammars and Vocabularies," Cambridge 1931; and the rare "Albanian Phrase Book," London 1944. She published numerous articles on Albanian folk culture in Man: the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society and elsewhere. Hasluck is remembered primarily for her "The Unwritten Law in Albania: a Record of the Customary Law of the Albanian Tribes," Cambridge 1954, the first English-language monograph devoted to Albanian customary law and the Kanun. Her archives are kept at the Taylor Institution of Oxford University and her photography collection is preserved at the Royal Geographical Society in London.