THE JOURNAL OF
AMERICAN FOLK-LORE.
Vol. 31.— JULY-SEPTEMBER, 1918.— No. 121.
PORTO-RICAN FOLK-LORE.
DÉCIMAS, CHRISTMAS CAROLS, NURSERY RHYMES, AND OTHER SONGS.
BY J. ALDEN MASON.
EDITED BY AURELIO M. ESPINOSA.
In the last Hispanic number of this Journal[1] we gave a brief account of the abundant collection of Spanish folk-lore brought together through the efforts of Dr. J. Alden Mason, of the Field Museum of Natural History of Chicago, as part of the survey of Porto Rico undertaken by the New York Academy of Sciences. The folk-tales, which constitute the most important and abundant part of the collection, are now being prepared for publication with the co-operation of the New York Academy of Sciences. The riddles, which made the second best collection of its kind in Spanish America, were published in the Hispanic number of this Journal above mentioned. There remain two more important branches of folk-lore in the Mason collection, — the popular coplas, which number some six hundred or more, and the material which we are now publishing under the title "Décimas, Christmas Carols," etc.[2]
The poetic material now published has extraordinary importance and interest. Its importance lies in the fact that such an abundant number of compositions of this nature exist in Porto Rico, showing the great vitality and vigor of that class of poetical compositions among
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- ↑ 29: 423-425.
- ↑ A fifth important part of the material, the traditional ballads, has already been prepared for publication, and will appear shortly in the Revue Hispanique. There are some twenty traditional ballads in thirty-five versions. The collection is in all respects one of the best from Spanish America, and is a very valuable addition to the Spanish-American collections of traditional ballads already made in Chile (Vicuña Cifuentes, Romances Populares y Vulgares [Santiago, 1912]), Cuba (Chacón y Calvo, Romances tradicionales en Cuba [Habana, 1914]; and Carolina Poncet, El Romance en Cuba [Habana, 1914]), Santo Domingo (Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Romances de América, Cuba Contemporánea [December, 1913, Habana]), and New Mexico (Espinosa, "Romancero Nuevomejicano" [Revue Hispanique, Paris, 1915]).
