The Doe and the She-bear: A little-known folklore tale

Abstract

Folk narratives about two women who practice gathering, one of whom treacherously murders the other, and about the victim’s children who kill the murderer’s children and run away, are recorded in the Pacific region of the United States, in Chaco, in Eastern Indonesia, in Tibet, in East Africa (only one text) and (without the motif of killing children) in Western Siberia. The characters are mostly animal characters who behave like humans. There is no doubt that specialists who study cultures of particular regions are familiar with the relevant publications, but the transcontinental parallels for such stories have never been researched. The American versions demonstrate an area correlation with the Western Stemmed Tradition that is considered now to be as old as the Clovis tradition (13,250–12,800 cal BP) if not earlier. If so, the spread of the tale in question should be dated to the time of the initial settlement of America. The sets of motifs in the Indonesian versions are slightly closer to the American ones, while the Tibetan sets share more motifs with the Siberian tradition and have American parallels as well. In addition to the presented materials in the light of data on the settlement of the world by modern man, the author addresses questions of the genres of traditional narratives.