Article

Folklore

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Folklore

Folklore in the Malay Peninsula and Borneo constitutes a vast and diverse body of oral tradition encompassing origin myths, animal-trickster narratives, ritual prayers, fairy tales, and comic cycles, preserved across Malay, Dayak, Murut, Dusun, and other indigenous communities. The literature documented in the Society’s journals reveals a tradition of considerable antiquity, with genealogical counts suggesting settlement periods of at least 650 years in Sarawak alone [1, p. 58], and with narrative motifs distributed across the Malay Archipelago, Indo-China, and as far afield as the Indian subcontinent and West Africa [2, pp. 119–126]. The study of this material has shifted over the decades from colonial-era transcription and philological curiosity toward systematic fieldwork, comparative structural analysis, and the historicisation of mythological narratives against written and material evidence.

Scope and Historical Definition

The earliest contributions to the Society’s folklore literature were straightforward transcriptions of oral narratives, typically collected by colonial administrators or missionaries from single informants and published with minimal analytical commentary. G. M. Laidlaw’s 1906 publications in the JSBRAS exemplify this approach: his “A Pelandok Tale” presents a Perak Malay trickster narrative collected from the penghulu of Pulau Tiga, Haji Mahomed Ali bin Haji Mahomed Perak, a man described as of “pure Perak extraction” for several generations, and his companion piece “The Baboon Pa Si Bagok and the Girl” records an abduction-and-escape tale with no further provenance details beyond the teller’s inability to supply a history of the tale’s origin [3, p. 72], [4, p. 65]. Laidlaw explicitly acknowledged the limitation of a single source in the prefatory note to the pelandok tale: “No details of the source can be obtained” [3, p. 72].

R. O. Winstedt’s 1906 collection of mouse-deer (kancil) tales represents a slightly more sophisticated approach, establishing a concrete transmission chain from a Javanese manuscript through a Javanese settler in Malacca to a Malaccan Malay narrator in Perak [5, p. 61]. Winstedt valued the narrator’s colloquial, unpolished recitation as a marker of authentic oral tradition, deliberately contrasting it with the “artifice and literary graces of the professional rhapsodists” [5, p. 61]. This early period established the foundational corpus against which later comparative and structural studies would be measured.

The scope of the folklore documented in the Society’s literature extends well beyond the Malay Peninsula. In Borneo, Fr. J. Staal’s 1940 account of Sadong Dayak oral traditions presents origin myths, migration narratives, and two complete ritual prayers collected from headmen in the 1930s, arguing that the Sadong Dayaks are the oldest inhabitants of western Borneo and that their folklore preserves a coherent cosmology centred on the supreme spirit Tampa [1, pp. 55–56]. G. C. Woolley’s 1947 “A Murut Fairy Tale” records a Tambunan Dusun animal-helper narrative from Keningau, British North Borneo, collected from Angkas bin Dabus [6, p. 145]. In the Malay Peninsula, A. Sweeney’s 1976 monograph-length study of the Pak Pandir cycle, based on fieldwork across all states of Peninsular Malaysia and Patani between 1971 and 1973, represents the most extensive single investigation of any one folklore cycle in the Society’s literature [7, pp. 15–88].

Comparative Distribution and Cross-Cultural Parallels

A central preoccupation of the Society’s folklore literature has been the question of how identical or near-identical tales circulate across linguistic and geographic boundaries. Winstedt’s 1917 comparative study “The Folk-tales of Indonesia and Indo-China” argues that the extensive distribution of specific tale-episodes across Malayo-Polynesian and Austroasiatic language groups points to a shared cultural heritage rather than casual borrowing [2, pp. 119–126]. Writing against the backdrop of Schmidt’s proposed Austroasiatic–Malayo-Polynesian linguistic synthesis and Kern’s hypothesis that Indo-China was the ancestral homeland of the Malay peoples, Winstedt treats folk-tale distribution as a proxy for deep historical contact [2, p. 119].

The most extensively treated example in that study is the mouse-deer (or hare) versus tiger deception cycle, in which the small animal outwits the predator through a series of deceptions involving a wasp’s nest passed off as a drum, a slit bamboo passed off as a musical instrument, and dung passed off as rice. Winstedt demonstrates that this cycle appears in Malay, Dayak, Javanese, Sundanese, Cham, Cambodian, and Annamite versions, with the Cham text preserving the additional detail of the hare goring the elephant with a horn, a motif absent from the Malay mouse-deer tales [2, p. 119]. The “judgment” tale, in which a man who releases a tiger from a trap consults a tree, a bridge, and a small animal on whether the tiger may eat him, occurs in Malay, Mon, Indian, and Tibetan versions [2, p. 122]. The “clock” chain-riddle, in which one creature’s complaint triggers the next in a causal chain, appears in Malay, Cham, Mon, and Bengali tales [2, pp. 123–124].

Winstedt’s 1921 article “Indian and Malay Beliefs” extends the comparative argument to the domain of magical practice and domestic ritual, marshalling evidence from Vedic, Javanese, and Malay sources to demonstrate that a substantial body of Malay magical practice, wedding ritual, and popular belief is of Indian origin [8, pp. 88–93]. The identification of the Malay Spectre Huntsman with Batara Guru (Siva/Rudra), the Vedic storm-god, parallels the German Wodan/Odin and supports the Indo-Germanic storm-god hypothesis [8, pp. 88–89]. Malay magical charms correspond in structure and function to the Vedic mantra: the syllable om (rendered hong) opens the charm, a single incorrect syllable voids it, and the formula must be kept secret [8, p. 89]. Occupational and bodily taboos, dietary prohibitions, and wedding customs all find precise parallels in the Dharmasūtras and the code of Manu [8, pp. 90–91].

A different mode of cross-cultural comparison is exemplified by W. G. Maxwell’s 1908 philological note on the “Old Man of the Sea” in Sindbad’s fifth voyage, which argues that the creature is an orang utan and that the epithet “of the Sea” is a Malay-language conflation of orang laut (sea people) with orang utan (forest people, or the ape itself) [9, pp. 91–95]. Maxwell bolsters his linguistic argument with ethnographic parallels from Dyak oral tradition, as recorded by Hugh Clifford in Story of Chaling, the Dyak, which recounts a near-identical captivity by a female orang utan [9, p. 93].

Origin Myths, Founders, and Historical Narratives

A distinct strand of the Society’s folklore literature concerns origin myths and founder narratives that claim historical referents. Staal’s 1940 account of Sadong Dayak tradition presents a creation narrative in which a crow (nkak) flew from Java carrying gravel that became the island of Mt. Sungkung, the “navel of Borneo” (Pasid Binua), from which the Bidayoh dispersed [1, pp. 56–57]. The migration narrative centres on a common ancestor, Padat, who led a band of Bidayoh from the Netherlands India Territory into Sarawak; his siblings dispersed to found other groups, and genealogical counts to Padat range from 19 to 37 generations, yielding an estimated minimum settlement period of approximately 650 years [1, p. 58]. The fire-and-deluge myth of Tirigu and Traoud, in which two orphaned children survive a conflagration and a crow brings back seeds from Java that become the region’s fruit trees, is unique among the Kelamantan groups Staal surveyed [1, p. 59].

In Borneo, the Manggeng and Datu Merpati legends occupy a similar position as origin narratives with claimed historical cores. A. H. Hill’s 1955 article examines both legends and argues that they contain “a great measure of historical truth” despite their mythological embellishments [10, p. 154]. The Manggeng legend, known with only minor variations across a small, racially homogeneous area of western Borneo, describes a Land Dayak ancestor who flees his home, reaches Java, rids a village of marauding tigers, passes trials of strength imposed by the local Rajah, and assumes the throne [10, pp. 148–150]. Hill notes that no close parallels exist in the folk-tales of neighbouring countries, a point he considers significant for the narrative’s historicity [10, p. 152]. Generation counts place Manggeng at approximately 16 generations before 1955, corresponding to c. 1500–1550, and Datu Merpati at 14–16 generations back, c. 1450–1475 [10, pp. 154].

Revd. Peter Howes’s companion article in the same issue records the Padawan Land Dayak version of the Manggeng tradition, providing a genealogy of some thirty-five generations from Manggeng to an ancestor named Truud, and describing the surviving pesaka (heirlooms) that the Padawan people still possess: two gold ear clasps, the remnants of a gold necklace, and an unglazed earthenware jar of probable Indian provenance [11, pp. 144–147]. Hill cross-references this material evidence with gold ornaments bearing Majapahit-period patterns found across Malaysia, including flexible gold armlets excavated at Fort Canning Hill, Singapore, in 1928 [10, p. 157].

C. O. Blagden’s 1920 article on the Palembang maritime empire contributes a further dimension by identifying the dynastic epithet “king of the mountains,” attested in both the Vieng Sa inscription of 775 and the Chola records, as the source of the Malay legend of the three princes descending from Mount Siguntang Mahameru in the Sejarah Melayu [12, pp. 23–28]. This reframes that myth as a dynastic memory of the Palembang royal house rather than a purely national Malay tradition, linking the legendary ancestry of the Singapore dynasty directly to the political geography of pre-14th-century maritime Southeast Asia [12, p. 26].

The Comic Cycle and Oral Performance

The study of Malay comic folklore underwent a decisive methodological transformation with A. Sweeney’s 1976 article on the Pak Pandir cycle, which directly challenges the long-dominant scholarly reliance on the 1908 published Cherita Jenaka and the conclusions R. O. Winstedt drew from it [7, pp. 15–88]. Sweeney demonstrates that Winstedt’s classification of five comic characters into three types, and his distinction between “indigenous” and “foreign” characters, collapses when confronted with the actual oral material [7, p. 12]. A 1972 survey of 680 tales collected by 150 students revealed that Pak Pandir dominates the comic tradition with 100 tales (14.7%), while the other four Cherita Jenaka characters each yielded only 5–8 tales, almost all of which were uniform versions closely matching the published text [7, p. 13].

Sweeney’s methodological core involves classifying the 82 distinct Pak Pandir tales according to plot structure rather than character type, identifying six major plot types: misinterpretation of an order, misinterpretation of a situation, simple misinterpretation without conventional framework, misinterpretation arising from another character’s action, deceit-deception, and bizarre reaction or result [7, pp. 15–88]. He explicitly critiques both the Aarne-Thompson tale-type index and Propp’s morphological method as theoretically inadequate for this material, while still employing tale-type numbers where relevant to trace the spread of individual tales [7, p. 15]. The article provides extensive comparative evidence linking Pak Pandir tales to parallel cycles in Sundanese (Kabayan), Batak (Ama ni Pandir, Si Tagan Dori), Achinese (Pa’ Pande / Si Meusekin), Khoja Nasruddin, and the Panchatantra, demonstrating that many tales in the cycle are not translations but independent adaptations of shared motifs [7, pp. 15–88].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s folklore literature traces a clear trajectory from colonial-era transcription toward systematic fieldwork and structural analysis. The early period, exemplified by Laidlaw’s 1906 tales and Winstedt’s 1906 mouse-deer collection, was characterised by single-informant recordings published with minimal analytical apparatus, reflecting the broader late-Victorian project of recording indigenous oral traditions before they were perceived to be disappearing under modernisation [3, p. 72], [4, p. 65], [5, p. 61]. Winstedt’s 1917 comparative study and his 1921 article on Indian and Malay beliefs marked a shift toward using folklore as evidence for deep historical contact and cultural diffusion, operating at the intersection of linguistics and folkloristics [2, p. 119], [8, pp. 88–93].

The mid-century period saw the emergence of the historicisation method, in which oral traditions were cross-referenced with written and material evidence to date and contextualise mythological narratives. Hill’s 1955 study of Manggeng and Datu Merpati, drawing on Javanese texts, Portuguese accounts, and archaeological finds, and Howes’s companion ethnographic note documenting genealogies and pesaka, represent this approach [10, pp. 148–158], [11, pp. 144–147]. Staal’s 1940 Sadong Dayak account, while still essentially a transcription, introduced the complete ritual prayer with interlinear translation and glossary, setting a standard for the documentation of Dayak oral tradition [1, pp. 61–75].

The most significant methodological break came with Sweeney’s 1976 study, which established the fieldwork-driven, plot-structural analysis of Malay oral literature as the dominant paradigm, documenting 156 informants with district, sex, and age group recorded for each [7, pp. 85–88]. His demonstration that the oral tradition is far richer and more varied than the literary adaptation, and that the Cherita Jenaka represents a sanitised and truncated version of a living cycle, effectively closed the Winstedt school’s approach and set the template for subsequent studies of Malay comic and numskull tale cycles [7, pp. 12–14]. The cumulative effect of these successive methodological shifts is a body of literature that has moved from the preservation of individual texts toward the systematic analysis of narrative structure, transmission, and historical context across the entire region.

Orang Asli

For Orang Asli folklore, see Orang Asli.

Animals

Princes, founders, and myths of origin

Malay Villages

Malay Commentaries

MBRAS Sources

Borneo

China, Indo-China, and Indonesia

Animals

Princes, founders, and myths of origin

Malay Villages

Malay Commentaries

References

  1. J. Staal (1940). Folklore of Sadong Dyaks JMBRAS 18(2): 55–82. Read on JSTOR
  2. R.O. Winstedt (1917). The folk-tales of Indonesia and Indo-China JSBRAS 76: 119–126.
  3. G.M. Laidlaw (1906). A pelandok tale JSBRAS 46: 73–102.
  4. G.M. Laidlaw (1906). The baboon Pa Si Bagok and the girl JSBRAS 46: 65–71. Read on JSTOR
  5. R.O. Winstedt (1906). Some mouse-deer tales JSBRAS 45: 61–69.
  6. G.C. Woolley (1947). A Murut fairy tale JMBRAS 20(1): 145–152.
  7. A. Sweeney (1976). The Pak Pandir cycle of tales JMBRAS 49(1): 15–88. Read on JSTOR
  8. R.O. Winstedt (1921). Indian and Malay beliefs JSBRAS 83: 88–93.
  9. W.G. Maxwell (1908). Sindbad’s old man of the sea JSBRAS 50: 91–95. Read on JSTOR
  10. A.H. Hill (1955). Manggeng and Datu Merpati JMBRAS 28(1): 148–158.
  11. P. Howes (1955). Raja Manggeng JMBRAS 28(1): 144–147.
  12. C.O. Blagden (1920). The empire of the Maharaja, King of the Mountains and Lord of the Isles JSBRAS 81: 23–28. Read on JSTOR