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A collection of Jamaican folktales gathers short animal and trickster narratives centered on the spider Anansi alongside tales about tigers, monkeys, goats, and birds. Stories account for curious animal traits, stage comic reversals, and probe themes of cunning, justice, and social order through episodic plots and origin motifs. The volume also presents riddles, dance and song materials, and field-recorded music, arranged in thematic sections that compile variants, brief notes, and folkloric context for each tale.
Mrs. W. E. Wilson (Wona) thinks that the second version of the story, told by Jekyll, 70–72, is not a true negro form, because of the great respect in which Jamaica negroes hold the rites of the established church.
Compare Cronise and Ward, 133–145; Fortier, 24–27.
As a device for getting victims cooked and eaten, the story is related to numbers 16 and 38 in this collection.