Fables & Folk-Tales from an Eastern Forest – Walter Skeat (1901) (1st ed)

S$118.00

Fables & Folk-Tales from an Eastern Forest – Walter Skeat (1901) (1st ed)

S$118.00

Title: Fables & Folk-Tales from an Eastern Forest

Author: Walter Skeat, F. H. Townsend (illus.)

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1901.

Condition: Hardcover. Good. Some soiling to cover and some foxing to edges and endpapers. Text clean, binding tight. With tissue-guarded frontispiece and lovely black and white illustrated plates.

About the book:

A collection of Malay folk-tales gathered from Walter Skeat’s conversations of Malay peasants. Stories include “The Mouse-deer’s shipwreck”, “The Tiger’s Mistake”, “The Legend of Patani”, “A Malayan Deluge”, and “King Solomon and the Birds”.

About the author (from Wiki):

Walter William Skeat ( 14 October 1866 – 24 July 1953) was an English anthropologist. He made a name for himself mainly with his pioneering investigations into, and writings on, the ethnography of the Malay Peninsula.

He began to study the way of life of both the urbanised Malays near the coast and the aborigines dwelling inland. He prepared his first book in the years leading up to 1899, when he began to mount expeditions to the interior to study the anthropology and ethnography of Malays in areas beyond any marked European influence. His friend and associate Charles Otto Blagden saw the book through publication; it dealt with Malay magic and appeared in 1900.

In association with Blagden, Skeat subsequently produced his major work, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula in 1906.

Through his travels into the interior he became too seriously ill to remain in the British Colonial Service, so he retired to London. In 1914 he became a lecturer at the British Museum.