Acadian Legends, Folktales & Songs from Prince Edward Island

Historian and folklorist Georges Arsenault has been collecting songs and stories from Acadian Prince Edward Island since his student days in the 1970s. He published a selection in Contes, legendes et chansons de l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard, and now Sally Ross has made Arsenault’s groundbreaking work available in English. For Acadian Legends, Folktales and Songs from Prince Edward Island, Arsenault gathered songs and stories from 17 people, most of them hard-working parents of very large families, some well-educated and some not. They repeated to him the words they had gathered by lamplight in the early part of the 20th century, when singing and storytelling were the main entertainment, and men and women passed on what they’d learned from elders long gone. Included in this collection are eight stories, 13 legends, and 23 songs with lyrics and musical notation. Most of this material is transcribed from taped interviews.