The Lenape, or Delaware, are an Eastern Algonquian people who
originally lived in what is now the greater New York and
Philadelphia metropolitan region and have since been dispersed
across North America. While the Lenape have long attracted the
attention of historians, ethnographers, and linguists, their oral
literature has remained unexamined, and Lenape stories have been
scattered and largely unpublished.This catalog of Lenape mythology,
featuring synopses of all known Lenape tales, was assembled by
folklorist John Bierhorst from historical sources and from material
collected by linguists and ethnographers?a difficult task in light
of both the paucity of research done on Lenape mythology and the
fragmentation of traditional Lenape culture over the past three
centuries.Bierhorst here offers an unprecedented guide to the
Lenape corpus with supporting texts. Part one of the
"Guide" presents a thematic summary of the folkloric tale
types and motifs found throughout the texts; part two presents a
synopsis of each of the 218 Lenape narratives on record; part three
lists stories of uncertain origin; and part four compares types and
motifs occurring in Lenape myths with those found in myths of
neighboring Algonquian and Iroquoian cultures.
