Some mouse-deer tales
R.O. Winstedt published this collection of Malay mouse-deer (kancil) folktales in 1906, presenting them as transcribed almost verbatim from the oral recitation of a Malaccan Malay man in Perak who had himself heard them from a Javanese settler translating from an old Javanese manuscript. The article serves as both a linguistic-ethnographic record of oral tradition and a comparative note on the circulation of animal-trickster tales across the Malay and Javanese worlds.
Summary
Winstedt’s introduction establishes the provenance of the tales with unusual care for a short folklore piece. The narrator was a man of about thirty, encountered casually in Perak, who claimed to have heard the stories as a boy from a Javanese settler in Malacca. That settler had translated them from a thick Javanese manuscript book, described as old. The recitation was “racy and colloquial” and lacked the literary polish of professional rhapsodists, which Winstedt notes as a feature rather than a defect (p. 61).
The body of the article comprises nine linked episodes in which the mouse-deer (Si Kancil or Si Plandok) outwits larger, stronger adversaries through cunning. The tales follow a consistent structural logic: the mouse-deer is threatened by a predator (crocodile, tiger, sambur deer, sea-snail), feigns ignorance or invokes the authority of the prophet Solomon (Nabi Sleyman) to manipulate the predator into a self-destructive act, and escapes. The episodes include the crocodile pinned under a fallen tree, the crossing of a river by commanding crocodiles to float, the luring of a tiger into a pit under the pretext of a falling sky, the wasp-nest “gong” and bamboo “viol” episodes that maim the tiger, the snake “turban” that kills it, the jack-fruit gutta scarecrow, the watch-dog substitution, and the sea-snail race won by a relay of snails (pp. 62–69).
Winstedt situates the collection within a broader comparative framework. He notes that the first tale shares its moral with a Perak river-boatmen’s variant in which a man releases a tiger from a trap, and that the mouse-deer-and-lion-in-a-well tale appears in both the Hikayat Gelila Demina and in Skeat’s folklore collection in slightly different forms (p. 61). He also acknowledges, on the prompting of George Maxwell and others, that one of his tales bears “an extraordinary resemblance” to the African-American Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby story (p. 62). These cross-references position the Malay mouse-deer cycle within the international Aesop/Trickster tradition while underscoring the local Javanese-Malay transmission route.
Key Findings
- The tales were transmitted from a Javanese manuscript to Malay oral performance via a Javanese settler in Malacca, establishing a concrete Javanese-to-Malay transmission chain for at least this subset of the kancil cycle (p. 61).
- The narrator’s recitation was colloquial and unpolished, deliberately contrasted with the “artifice and literary graces of the professional rhapsodists,” suggesting Winstedt valued the vernacular register as a marker of authentic oral tradition (p. 61).
- The Perak boatmen variant substituted “Nabi Sleyman’s belt, tali pinggang” for “Nabi Sleyman’s turban,” demonstrating active local variation in the same tale-type (p. 61).
- The mouse-deer-and-lion-in-a-well episode appears in both the Hikayat Gelila Demina and in Skeat’s folklore collection in “a slightly different shape,” confirming multiple independent textual witnesses (p. 61).
- Winstedt identifies a close parallel between one of his tales and the Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby story, linking the Malay kancil cycle to the wider international trickster-tale tradition (p. 62).
- Only one tale was abbreviated and altered by Winstedt in translation: the “rather indelicate anecdote” of the mouse-deer leaping into the tiger’s maw (p. 62).
Conclusion
Winstedt’s definitive takeaway is that the mouse-deer tales constitute a living, mutable oral tradition whose variants proliferate through casual lip-to-lip circulation, and whose Javanese manuscript origin provides a traceable textual anchor for what is otherwise a fluid, multi-regional narrative complex. The article’s value lies less in any single tale than in documenting the transmission chain—Javanese manuscript to Javanese settler to Malay boy to Malay man in Perak—and in demonstrating how the same core plot-motifs (ingratitude, the Solomon authority, the self-destructive trap) persist across languages, media, and even continents.
Context
- The primary source is a single oral informant in Perak, with secondary references to the Hikayat Gelila Demina, Skeat’s folklore collection, and the Brer Rabbit tradition; no archival manuscript was consulted directly.
- Winstedt was a senior colonial administrator and linguist in the Straits Settlements and Perak; his position gave him access to Malay and Javanese informants in the field, and his framing as a casual encounter (“met casually in Perak”) reflects the ethnographic conventions of early colonial-era folklore collection.