"Rethinking the "Star Husbands

IN HIS Morphology of North American Indian Folktales,' Alan Dundes uses the Star Husband tale as a brief illustration of his methodology, while elsewhere he presents Stith Thompson's classic Star Husband Tale, commenting on Thompson's care in handling the various versions of the tale while ascertaining their relatedness to his suggested Star Husband archetypes.2 A critical evaluation of both approaches, with reference to the original sources cited by Thompson, shows two things: that Dundes might well re-examine his generosity in using as a characterization of Thompson's methodology, and that, in fact, Dundes' morphological approach is better suited to handling the wide variations among Star Husband versions and deals with variables that are more reliable for statistical manipulation and typology building as well. In constructing his hypothetical grand archetype and the various subarchetypes of the Star Husband tale, Thompson determines the frequency distribution of the various narrative elements peculiar to some eighty-six versions. Those with the greatest frequency distribution are considered the principal tale elements and are collated into the archetype and subarchetypes. The archetype is then considered an original or complete tale, and the relatedness of each of the eightysix Star Husband versions to the original, complete tale is subsequently to be measured according to the degree to which it approaches the archetype's composite form. The basic assumption the reader of Thompson's analysis is led to make is that each of the fourteen traits used by Thompson (or given equivalent variations) is always associated with any one or all of the basic tale types, and that each trait is made up of narrative elements that are empirically observable. To the contrary, though, a careful reading of the original tales cited by Thompson, and a comparison of each with its abstracted description in Thompson's study, reveals that many of the traits cited by Thompson as part of several given tales do not exist in those tales

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• A New Look at Freud on Myth

  Open Access•Michael P Carroll•Ethos•1979

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