Motif: Measuring the Snake

Today's story — "How We Got the Name 'Spider Tales'" — is from West African Folk Tales by William Barker and Cecilia Sinclair, published in 1917 (for more stories, see the index). You can listen to today's story via LibriVox and which you can read online at the Internet Archive. The story is item 1 in the audiobook playlist:

William Barker and Cecilia Sinclair collected these stories from African students at a teacher training center in Accra, the capital of Ghana. The students wrote down the stories in English, and the authors then selected  stories to include in the book, sometimes combining multiple versions of the same story into a single version.

The book is illustrated by Cecilia Sinclair, and here is her illustration for this story. Sinclair depicts Anansi in human form, and here you can see him tricking the bees to go into the jar:

One of the folktale motifs in this story is Measuring the Snake. This is the "trickster seeks endowments" tale type, with spider seeking to have stories be his. To get his request, the trickster must complete a series of tasks, and one of the tasks in this story is to bring back a live snake. To do this, Anansi tricks the snake by making the snake prove he is as long as a stick Anansi is carrying, and when the snake stretches out next to the stick, Anansi ties him up and carries him away.

To see this motif in another story, take a look here:

"Brother Rabbit Submits to a Test" in Nights with Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris. In this story, the trickster is Brer Rabbit who is seeking to get wisdom from the Witch-Rabbit, and "measuring the snake" is one of the tricks he uses. In this story, the snake is a rattlesnake!