Valencian Folktales

Book excerpt: Enric Valor is one of the most important Valencian authors of the 20th century. This selection of his highly popular rondalles (folk tales) will for the first time introduce his work to an English-speaking audience. At a time when Catalan was under threat from the cultural bulldozer of the Franco regime, which condemned the use of anything but Castilian Spanish in public communication, Valor went to great lengths to disseminate knowledge of the language, through writing grammars and linguistic studies, as well as teaching it to fellow inmates when he was imprisoned by the regime for his cultural activities. These tales, collected over a number of years in small villages in the province of Alacant, were a significant part of his ongoing efforts to safeguard the Valencian language and the culture and history of the region. The Rondalles Valencianes have been compared to Italo Calvino’s Italian Folk Tales and Henri Pourrat’s Treasury of French Folk Tales. Like them, Valor aimed in rewriting the oral material to establish a common national body of folk narratives and to make the stories more appealing to Valencian readers, young and old alike. The critical Introduction provides an outline of the author’s life and an overview of his work as novelist, grammarian and folklorist, as well as an assessment of the tales which identifies their place within the broader European folklore tradition.