Any visitor or passerby of the U.P. Press Bookstore Cebu at the lobby of the AS Building of UP Cebu is right away drawn to the thick seven of the eight volume Philippine Folk Literature Series namely: An Anthology, The Myths. The Legends, The Folk Tales, The Riddles, The Proverbs, The Folk Songs, and The Epics. Only the volume on Folk Songs are not available. They are the best sellers that only very few copies are left with four of the seven volumes available.
This monumental work was compiled and edited by Dr. Damian L. Eugenio, Prof. Emeritus of the Department of English, College of Arts and Letters of U.P. Diliman. Dr. Eugenio’s students in Folk Literature collected the stories from the different part of the country in the 1960’s.
The volume on The Myths is meant to be a collection of representative myths of the Philippines, therefore, care was taken to make the collections truly representative both of the different types of myths and of the different ethnolinguistic groups in the country. In this volume, the eight major languages are represented. There are, in addition, a few tales with no regional language labels. When the ethnic language could not be determined, the name of the province was given, if known; e.g. “Mountain Province.” The selections are given in English translation in order to make them accessible to an international readership.
The myths in this collection are arranged according to the eight categories in the system of classification of mythological motifs in Stith Thompsons’s Motif Index of Folk Literature.: (1) The Gods: their Activities and Relationships; (2) Cosmology and Cosmogony; (3) Topographical Features of the Earth (earth and land features); (4) World Calamities (The Great Flood); (5) Establishment of the Natural Order; (6) Creation and Ordering of Human Life; (7) Origin of Animal Life and Characteristics; and (8) Origin of Plant Life and Characteristics. Within each category, the myths are arranged according to region. Exception was made in the myths on the origin of animals and plants, which are arranged alphabetically.
Myths form an important genre of folk literature. Together with legends and folktales, they constitute the large group of folk narratives in prose. Simply defined, a myth is “a sacred narrative explaining how the world and man came to be in their present form.” Dundes 1984:1). Myths are prose narratives which are considered to be truthful accounts of what happened in the remote past. They are accepted on faith; taught to be believed, and can be cited as authority in answer to ignorance, doubt or disbelief. Myths are usually sacred and their main characters are not usually human beings, but they often have human attributes. They are animals, deities or culture heroes whose actions are set in an earlier world.
Legends are prose narratives which, like myths, are regarded as true by the narrator and his audience, but they are set in a period less remote, when the world as such as it is today. Legends are more often secular than sacred and their principal characters are human. They tell of migrations, wars, and victories, deeds of past heroes, chiefs, and kings,, and succession in ruling dynasties. In this they are often the counterparts in verbal tradition of written history (Bascom 1965).
The collection of Philippine myths and its companion volume, Philippine legends are meant to answer what anthropologist F. Landa Jocano said, “ The value of myth and legends is basic to our social tradition; they constitute part of our social heritage. Yet the study of Filipino mythology has not apparently attracted the attention of many educators and students.”
The study of these stories is valuable for a proper understanding of the Filipino — his beliefs and value systems. They reveal his innermost thoughts about himself in relation to his god and the world around him; that is, his world view. Together with data that science can give us, these stories may give us valuable insights into our past as a people that will enable us to better understand ourselves today.