Margaret Hasluck
The Hasluck Collection
of Albanian Folktales
Edited by Robert Elsie
Albanian Studies, Vol. 14
ISBN 978-1512002287
Centre for Albanian Studies, London 2015
476 pp.
The 115 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. They
are, however, enough to enthrall the
modern reader, adult or child, and
provide sufficient material to keep
experts and analysts of oral literature
happy, who delve into the deeper
structures behind them.
Margaret Hasluck was in Albania for
the first time in or around 1919 and,
when she returned to Scotland, she
knew that her place was in the Balkans. With a scholarship from Aberdeen University as a
Wilson Travelling Fellow (1921-1923, 1926-1928), she began collecting folklore in western
Macedonia and increasingly in Albania, where she moved definitively in 1923. Her interest
in Albanian folktales continued throughout her years of residence in Albania and, no doubt
with the help of her Albanian friend and scholar, Lef Nosi, she amassed a substantial
collection. Hasluck acquired a good knowledge of Albanian over the years and was therefore
able to translate the material into English. This was a notable achievement in itself since the
folktales, collected from peasant children and adults, were recorded in various dialect forms.
Her material was augmented by a collection of folktales assembled by the Albanian Ministry
of Education, gathered from school teachers throughout Albania, probably some time in the
late 1920s.
With the exception of sixteen minor folktales that appeared as an appendix to her book
“Këndime Englisht-Shqip or Albanian-English Reader” (1931), Margaret Hasluck’s vast folktale
material remained alas unpublished up to now. It is by far the largest collection of Albanian
folktales ever translated into English.
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