70 Cirilo F.

Bautista
The Persona in Philippine Folk Literature
Florentino H. Hornedo
Erickson, Carolly. Mistress Anne--The Exceptional Life of Anne Boleyn. New
York: Summit Books, 1984. Feinstein, Elaine. A Captive Lion—The Life of Marina
Tsvetayeva. New York:
E.P. Dutton, 1987. Flanner, Janet. Paris Was Yesterday-1925-1939. New York: Popular
Library,
1968. Hetchner, A.E. Papa Hemingway. New York; Bantam Books, 1967. Matute,
Genoveva Edroza. “Ako Bilang Manunulat,” Lecture in Living Artists
Series, 18 November 1987, De La Salle University. Mauriac, François. Memories Interveurs.
Trans. Gerard Hopkins. London: Eyre
and Spottiswoode, 1960. Medina, B.S. Jr. “Rizal's Tagalog: A Prologue To Martyrdom”
Archipelago.
October-December 1979. Osborne, Charles. W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet. London:
Papermac, 1982. Peissel, Michel. Zanskar, the Hidden Kingdom. Devon: Readers' Union,
Ltd.,
1980. Rizal, Jose. El Filibusterismo. Trans. Leon Ma. Guerrero. Hong Kong:
Longman
Group Limited, 1983. Rizal, Jose. Noli me tangere. Trans. Leon Ma. Guerrero. Hong Kong:
Longman Group Limited, 1983. Roeder, Ralph. The Man of the Renaissance. New York:
Times, Inc., 1961. Rowse, A.L.. Shakespeare's Sonnets. New York: Harper and Row, 1964.
Ruas, Charles. Conversations with American Writers. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1985. Seth, Vikram. The Golden Gate. New York: Random House, 1986. Steiner,
George. On Difficulty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1980. York, R.A. The Poem as Utterance. London: Methuen, 1956.
CC T n literary criticism, persona is sometimes used to refer to a person
figuring in, for example, a poem, someone who may or may
Inot represent the author himself.” It is the assumed intellec tual and emotional
center who speaks, as it were, to the reader or audience. It is the speaker through
whom the author may speak in its own name, whose words and ideas may also be fictive so as
to produce a consistency between the fictional character and the ideas and speech
he expresses.
In Manuel Arguilla’s “How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife,” Baldo is
the person through whose eyes the homecoming events are perceived. He
is the “I” of the story. The language of the story has been crafted to be
consistent with him. He is the perspective, the “I” and the assumed storyteller.
He is the persona.
In literature of known authorship and whose poetics are identifiable, the identification of the
literary persona is a matter of course. But folk literature is different. It is not only anonymous, but
its historical social origin is also difficult to determine. Thus, identifying the persona in folk
literature is difficult. What is even more difficult is the determination of what kind of people
he was addressing at the time of composition, and what cultural conditions
he merely presupposed and did not even bother to reflect in the text of
his work. In effect, folk literature leaves many things unsaid, and yet
expects the listener/reader to know what it does not say. Identifying the
speaker or persona of folk literature helps in the reconstruction of the social
milieu that produced the folk material, and hopefully enlarges the reader's
understanding of the attitudes and social contexts of the literary constructs.
An attempt to identify the persona of folk literature, therefore, is both a
critical need and a pedagogical prerequisite to fully appreciate what folk
literature is saying.
72 Florentino H. Hornedo
The Persona in Philippine Folk Literature 73
To do what I have proposed to do, I shall attempt to show from historical
evidence that Philippine society's stratification along lines of power and wealth
created a plurality of social interest and, therefore, of social perspectives.
This means that the folk poet (understood as a creative artist) was
addressing himself to a particular society audience using the characters
suited to his purpose of presenting life around him as he saw it. In the process,
he saw his contemporary world, and from that vantage point, he spoke through his
key characters, or created characters whom he tried to make speak for
themselves. In this way, the persona was born.
Although much can be said on the logic, it will be sufficient for the present purpose that
we identify a classic persona. Moreover, such is the nature of folk literature--as the
cumulative creation of generations of people in one or more societies that the persona
may be more of a class representative rather than a specific individual. To begin with, let
me trace briefly the relationship between literature and society.
even if the history of the society of its origin is known, and that it indeed
had segments at one time or other, it is difficult to ascertain how much textual change it
has undergone over time, and how much conflicting elements may have been
incorporated into the artifact as it was handed down the generations.
It is known, however, that at least a large part of the Philippines the
Tagalog and the Visayan regions—prior to the arrival of Spain, and as
 recorded at the time of Spanish contact, was socially stratified. A
similar stratification has also been noted among the unhispanized Filipinos
who, one may imagine, have carried into the twentieth century some
reflection of what they were before and during the colonization of much of the
country by Spain, and later by the United States of America.2
Instead of losing their stratification and becoming a homogeneous society,
and despite a concerted effort to create a homogeneously Christian society,
the colonized parts of the country became more clearly stratified, both
economically and politically.3 The United States of America came
after the Spaniards with the promise of egalitarian democracy. But
while Spain culturally segmented Filipinos by religion, the Americans
resegmented the country by education. If at the inception, of Hispanization,
the conversion to Christianity paved the way for certain political and social
privileges, during the American period, the fast absorption of American
cultural ideals became the key to political and social position. It is clear that
Filipinos have always been, in general, socially and culturally stratified, and
consequently have been more or less plagued over time by the consequences of class
disparities and conflict of interests.
11

de mo

Literature and Society Since Salvador Lopez's Literature and Society in

1940, it has become increasingly clearer that literature does not only
have a vital connection with society by being its progeny, mirror, and moral
end, but also that when society is stratified by economic inequality, or
segmented by cultural differences, it also registers the details of internal conflicts.
Thus upon closer look at the tone and texture of the literature of any
period, significant texts appear to be for, about, or against the interests of a
class or group. On the part of the authors, the writings may also
identify the interests they write for, as well as the point of view from which they
look at the world they write about.
Philippine folk literature, which both antedates and coexists with the post-Lopez as
living tradition (because of its being the creation of generations of societies
whose individual structures are now almost impossible
to know) is less easy to
analyze by identifying the class or group for whom, about whom, or against
whom it was created. The difficulty comes from the fact that, unlike the
writing with known authors and time of creation, it is not even known whether the
society
Some Assumptions Given that Philippine society in general, or
Philippine cultural communities in particular, have been segmented by a variety of
historical forces all these centuries down to the present, and given that the literature
produced by such societies mirrors the interest of the segments that produce or
cause it to be produced, it becomes necessary to state some basic
assumptions related to the content of that literature, even if only
.

''
‫ا‬.
‫معمل لمصممممممممممام‬
74 Florentino H. Hornedo
The Persona in Philippine Folk Literature 75
erstwhile ruling classes have become identified as “folk literature” while extolling the virtues
of the ruling classes, as one sees in the ethnoepics.
It is to be assumed, too, that literature pertaining to matters of general concern and
interest across the classes can be created. This can be seen in religious and
mythological as well as wisdom literature, within "certain limits,” for certain
types of literature of this kind have been used to legitimize privileges, even
the crimes of certain classes. This is clearly so in the case of societies where
slaves were killed and buried with their masters in the name of the belief in an afterlife.
But the belief that the sound of a particular bird brings good luck during a trip for whatever
purpose may be held by both the powerful and the powerless.
In view of the foregoing assumptions, it is more appropriate to deal with the
narrative tradition of Filipino folk literature than with lyrical
wn
ones.

A piece of literature reflects the world and the world-view of its author and in the case of
folk literature, the world and the world view of the society that created it or carried it
on by tradition. As reflection of the world of the author or author-society, it contains
characters and reflects interests existing and experienced in some form in the real
world of its origin. As a reflection of the world-view of the author or social
segmental author (particular social class), it reflects the attitudes and values
assumed to be favorable to the author and unfavorable to the people or class the
author considers inimical, or at least prejudicial, to his/its interests. Thus, for
example, it is assumed normal that members of a ruling class would be
interested in legitimizing their rule, in strengthening their hold on their subjects,
and in disdaining whatever puts them in an unfavorable light. By the same token, it is
assumed that a member of the ruled class would normally be interested in upholding
the dignity or praising the abilities of his own kind, even if in doing so, he
does it at the expense of those outside his class, the ruling class, for
example.
It is, of course, also assumed that it is possible for a member of another class to write in
favor of another class either because he is caused to do so, or because by cultural
subjugation, he has come to identify his own interests with those who subjugate him.
In this case, it is clear, from a moral perspective, that the ultimate class origin of the
literature is the one in whose interest it is slanted.
. Because certain societies, as William Henry Scott has noted, have
been “classless,” largely because such societies are too small and poor to
have found either the need or the functional possibility of stratification,
it is also assumed that some societies may not have produced literature of classes but
a communal literature representative of their common interests.
We should also note the changed composition of the “folk” in Philippine
history. In precolonial times, the term folk would have excluded the datu and sultan,
even the maginoo classes; the folk were the timawa and the alipin. But in
colonial times, many of the datus and maginoo fell from power and became
reduced to the status of the common people or folk. Today's folk include the
descendants of these
si l i .....
i
The words “myth,” “legend,” and “folktale” have, in this country, been often used
synonymously. Part of the reason is that there is no specific indigenous
word for “myth.” “Alamat” in Tagalog can mean "folklore," "legend," or even
"tradition.”4 The vague kuwentong-bayan is "folktale” and “folk story.”5 But
because it is “folk story,” it also tends to include, for the careless, the myths.
It is necessary, therefore, to specify the senses in which the terms myth,
legend, and folktale are used.
Myths are stories about the acts of gods or their equivalent in various cultures. Such
acts may be of creation or of establishing sacred custom or belief or behavior. In
general, stories that are thematically centered on events caused by superhuman power,
whether named or unnamed, are myth. For lack of lexical counterpart in Filipino, I will call
it mito.
Legends in European tradition are stories about heroes of one kind or other. These
stories were read for the inspirational or exemplary character of the
 protagonists. Religious legend were read (thus, leyenda) for the edification of the
faithful. Lives of secular heroes were read for the civic edification of citizens.
Legends are stories about the acts of the heroes.
As acts of heroes, the question arises as to the relation of any hero to his
society or sector of his society. There are heroes of the whole society and there are heroes of
sectors of societies. The ruling classes
are

76 Florentino H. Hornedo
The Persona in Philippine Folk Literature 77
have their heroes as do the ruled classes. For the purpose of this paper, legends
will refer to the stories about the heroes of the ruling classes. In this
specific sense, I will
also use the word alamat
The folktale, because of its explicit identification with the “folk” as distinguished from
the elite or ruling classes, is the story of the people. It reflects their attitudes,
world-view, values, and mores. This means that even stories of heroism of the folk hero is a
folk story, or in Filipino, kuwentong-bayan. Thus, folktale refers to the stories about
the acts of the people.
Acts of the gods, acts of the heroes, and acts of the people are the points of
reference in this paper.
Kuwentong-Bayan The kuwentong-bayan has a wide topical and tonal
range, from the outrageous trickster tales to romantic fantasies to solemn victories
over oppressors.
What American and European folkloristics call trickster tales (like Pilandok, Juan Pusong,
Tobido, the Maria tales, Juan Tamad), and less fantastic tales of unusual folk wisdom
(sometimes called “Wisdom of Solomon” tales, with the difference that the
protagonists are not kings but folk) are kuwentong-bayan.
In terms of effect on listeners, the kuwentong-bayan are (1) amusing, (2)
didactic, or (3) both amusing and didactic. In terms of intent, they (1) poke fun at
someone or something, or (2) criticize someone, a group, or situation. As
amusing narratives, kuwentong-bayan are used as entertainment; as didactic
stories, they are used to moralize or legitimize social control. However, many of the
tales entertain and moralize at the same time.
While superficially out of context, tales like Juan Tamad or Pilandok appear
to be nothing but unmitigated inanity or trivia. But a situational consideration of how
the folk use the tales shows that these stories are used for intraclass social criticism.
When a child is given the appellation “Juan Tamad” or “Pilandok,” he is expected to
be unhappy about it and to cease to behave in the manner that makes him
resemble Juan Tamad or Pilandok. Name-calling is a tradition widely
practiced in the r. D
o fthone nomes are for children especially and
for many adults, too, undesirable, and for courtesy's sake may never be
used in the presence of the adults, or in their presence only as an
expression of the speaker's negative feelings. But when, for example,
Pilandok wraps his stove, pretending they are negotiable roasted somethings
and deceives someone he dislikes, and in turn is deceived, he is not merely an object of
fun, but the tool for a moral lesson. In some cases, the telling of such stories is clinched
with a proverb to emphasize the moral.
I have noted “intraclass” criticism because it should not be imagined that
because people
normally would not expose themselves to ridicule by telling nasty stories
about themselves, they are also incapable of speaking against members of
their own class who behave badly.
A recently recorded Ilocano epic, Allusan, is not a folktale by traditional
categorization. It is a narrative about “acts of the people.” In form it is epic,
in content, kuwentong-bayan. The protagonist is a poor young man who
possesses some magical objects such as an instrument by which life can
be sucked out from the body for safekeeping, and then returned when the
occasion is opportune. He falls in love with a woman who promptly
reciprocates his feelings, but being unprepared to wed immediately, he
returns home, with the girl assuring him of her fidelity. But another man,
Agillang, from Kapangan (a town in Benguet), forces the girl to marry him.
Being rich, he is ready to marry right away. Against her will, the girl marries
the man from Kapangan, but not without having had an understanding with
her real love that they would do something to save themselves from the
disgrace.
Before the full rites of marriage are over, Allusan sucks up the girl's soul
and keeps it in a container called kalinyas. Agillang later discovers his
wife's lifeless body. All the wedding guests are again invited to attend the
funeral. The girl's body is placed in a coffin and floated downstream in the river.
Allusan catches the coffin downriver, opens it and blows back into his
beloved the breath of life, and she lives again. Allusan brings her home and
they marry soon after. Agillang is invited to the wedding and recognizes his
former wife. But since all the guests at the wedding were also present at
 the funeral of his wife, they are sure he is mistaken. Allusan's magical stick
and rope beat up Agillang until he is half-dead. Afterward, he stons bothering the
newly-wed counle 6
78 Florentino H. Hornedo
The Persona in Philippine Folk Literature 79
V

Two things conjoin in Agillang's character: he is rich and haughty. The folk
detest that. Allusan is their hero. The tale humilliates Agillang and
vindicates Allusan. During the opening verses, the singer of the tale
indicates that he had taken part in the wedding of Allusan in the village
“near the mouth of the river.” The sympathy for him is undisguised.
In an Ivatan story, Minamina is a cruel tribal chief. Two of his subjects, fed up with his
excesses, assassinate him at sea. And the assassins are seen as heroes of
the liberated people.?
In the Maria stories, a girl is presented as consistently a winner in
contests of wit with the hari. The king is made a fool of by the young
are seen

girl.8
In a tale recorded from the Manobos by Hazel Wrigglesworth, a poor
man is brought to trial before the chief because the hunters of the chieftain have come home
with a flavorless, tasteless roasted venison.' The reason is that a poor man (named “the
Thin One”) inhaled the arorna of the venison while it was being roasted in the field. A wise folk
is called to try the case. The judge, knowing that the chief tried to obtain the
judge's gong, had it brought in for trial, then had it sounded. When
asked whether
the sound was pleasing to him, the chief said, “Yes.” So, the folk judge
said, he had received compensation for the smell of his venison: good
smell paid for with good sound! And the accused is to be bothered no
more. (Wrigglesworth, true to western folkloristic practice, classifies this
as a story of “wisdom worthy of Solomon.” But the difference is that Solomon
was a king, and this folk judge was not even a small village chief.)
attest to royal birth or to the right to political office and power. The Kissa, specifically
called the Parang Sabil of Sulu, strike me as a celebration of folk heroism, although
this deserves further exploration.
In Subanon folk literature, a man is bewitched and turned into a worm. He is thrown into
the forest where he builds a golden house for himself. He is eventually kissed
by a woman who, by doing so, breaks the spell, and he becomes again
the prince that he truly was. By western folkloristics, this is a tale. But for
whatever reason in the original society, the protagonist had to be a “prince.” It is not
difficult to see the reflection of the value-orientation of the author-community: it puts a
premium on being a prince because a prince is rich and handsome. It is the vision of a
society in which much is given to those who already have much, and to those
who have less, less is given or expected. It is possible to imagine this to be the
product of a self-degrading folk; but it can also be seen as a legitimation of the
concentration of wealth and other blessings on power-holders—if such
blessings were theirs by pure right.
Some of the stories in the Agamaniyog Folktales published by the
Mindanao State University in Marawi City appear to be hero legends that
vindicate the right to rule.11
A recently published epic titled Raja of Madayl2 is the story of a
princely hero who, with the help of some talisman and other magical props,
succeeds against all odds to win his lady love. It is the story of a noble
struggle in a world of nobles where even the dreaded naga (dragon) is
himself another prince. It lacks, on the whole, the humor of the folktales. It is serious
about the gravity of the dignity and honor of princedom, as if to laugh a bit
about princes were to make insecure the allegiance of the subjects.
In Hispanic Philippines, literature of legitimation (as contrasted with literature of
criticism) of power seems to have been of two types: (1) those that directly
extolled submission to power by trying to demonstrate the legitimacy
of that power, and (2) those that indirectly induced subservience to
power and subjugation by giving subjugation an other-wordly
incentive for the passive acceptance of suffering and oppression, or
by extolling as honorable the condition of passive suffering or injustice.
13
gh a bit i gravity of whole, the
Ol
er seen

Alamat While it is tempting to gather all the epics together into the category of hero
stories that legitimize the position of the power-holders, it is not possible to do
so because the term "epic” is the name of a literary genre rather than the exclusive name for
a specific form with exclusive content. It is conceivable that a folk story, to serve folk
interests, can be set to poetry and music as an epic. I have already given the example
of Allusan. But the Bantugan of Lanao is an alamat of the ruling class. 10
The same
. ' - farm their historical valuel, which
80 Florentino H. Hornedo
The Persona in Philippine Folk Literature 81
An awit like Florante at Laura belongs to the tradition I am talking about.
The story takes the princely, kingly personages seriously. It admits, of
course, that there are criminal princes. But their royalty has nothing to do
with their crimes, except to magnify their ambit of possible harm. The
theme is not the wickedness of power. On the contrary, it extols royal power.
It tries to show what marks legitimate power—the power before which people
must submit.
I think that even the pasyon (which is about the passion and death of Jesus
Christ) had also been used at some point for the legitimation of unjust power.
My impression of the Filipino pasyon is that the suffering Christ is presented as
dying because it was his romantic will to do so, and the “fatal” will of the Father as well. The
fact of Christ's dying under persecution by an unjust power, the fact that Christ
was prosecuted because of incorrigible resistance against the illegitimate
use of power and privilege, is lost against the fortissimo announcement of
the theme “surrender to authority even when it is unjust,” as long as it is
legally constituted authority.14
The ubiquitous “lives of saints” in Christian Philippines—many of which
have become part of oral tradition-overwhelmingly stress surrendering to
authority rather than resisting injustice. The theme of forgiveness of the
enemy is taught without the necessary context which says that forgiveness
is impossible without the sincere repentance of the offender. So the
offended citizen is expected to forgive the abusive public offical turning away
from his wicked ways (which doctrinally is needed if he is to obtain true forgiveness).
This type of literature is the voice of power seeking to legitimize itself regardless of
who articulates it. The folk have propagated and preserved this type of
literature in oral tradition. Did they know it also strengthened their bondage
even to unjust power? That is part of the trick. They should not know, for “the
truth will make them free.” Every subjugator knows that, and to open the
eyes of the subjugated to his plight is subversive under any era. That is the
irony of ironies of being subjugated. One forges one's own chains and lives with the task
of making the chains more comfortable, rather than casting them off.
The Acts of the Gods The Filipino folks' basic ontology is that the universe
is made up of two types of realities.
Since for them the key epistemological tools are the senses, reality can be classified according
 to its relation to the senses. What I see, I see; what I do not see, I do not see. But since
there are things the other senses tell me about which the eyes cannot see, then the world
is made up of two types of realities: (1) the visible, and (2) the invisible world.
In the consciousness of the folk, the invisible world has powers that the visible
world does not have. And in-between these two worlds are people and things that possess
sensible qualities of the visible world as
well as the magical powers of the invisible
world. The visible worlds are not separately located but compenetrant.
Thus, they constantly and mutually interact. 15 This is the ground of Filipino
mythology. What happens under the influence of the invisible world and the narration of
those events are called, in the paper, “the acts of the gods,” the mito. All of a sudden, a
highly educated multimillionaire family in Forbes Park sells its house. The explanation:
strange things have been happening lately, and the children report sightings of
duwende. A middle-class family gets a modest house and lot in suburbia.
The first thing they do is close a back door because it is directly opposite the front door,
and it means that they will never have any savings. The belief is that good fortune comes in
the front door and goes straight out the back door. A new door has to be opened
elsewhere. A poor family in the slums will not bathe the children on a Friday because
if they do, they would get sick. A split stone in Zamboanga del Sur spouts a
waterfall. Two faithful lovers once died there and the sympathetic gods have memorialized
that love by turning it into a natural wonder. A shapely but fatal volcano in Bicol is but the
memorial to a tragic love. A stone atop a hill in Bontoc is cracked in the middle.
Once upon a time, a god brought that stone from afar. A woman sat upon
that stone—a thing the god found displeasing. To show that displeasure the
stone split in two. Henceforth, women are not allowed to perform certain religious acts.
These are myths, that is, stories upon which forms of human behavior are
based.
ver
11

82 Florentino H. Hornedo
The Persona in Philippine Folk Literature 83
That they satisfactorily explain natural phenomena is the least of the
folk's worries. But that they justify a particular type of behavior because the
gods want it that way is what matters.
Thus, mythology is both a symbolization of historical reality and a primitive folk
science. As science, it explains matters to the satisfaction of the folk. As a
symbolization of history, it presents metaphorical cognates of real people,
places, and events in time. In Philippine oral tradition, the myth of the origin of the
Subanon world and first man and woman has exceptional coherence. 16
Myths are the narrative aspect of ritual, and as Fr. Francisco Demetrio, S.J., has noted,
“myth is vitally linked with ritual; that only myths
thus linked are living myths
because they are still believed in by the people who practice the
rituals and recite the narrations that accompany these rituals."17
mi

The result of this is the identification not only of the persona of the original
folk literature
but also of the literature of the ruling class during precolonial times.
The persona of the narrative literature of the original folk is the
taumbayan. He does not have much reverence for royalty and the nobility.
He appears to think he knows better than the ruling class. While he admires
their power and wealth-even awed by their social position-he nonetheless freely
criticizes and lampoons the ruling-class manners. His humor is outrageous
and, politically, his is an independent mind.
The ruling-class persona is solemn, almost humorless, and is concerned
with legitimizing his claims to power. He is not above enlisting the gods on
his side. He loves to blow up the achievements of his class to proportions
larger than life itself. He produces the legends. The heroic epic tradition we now
know is largely his literature. And although it now falls under "folk” because of the inevitable
cultural downgrading that
resulted from two colonial regimes, it was once the
literature of the ruling class.
The myths are different. It is not possible to define the persona of the
mythology essentially because the mythical tradition appears to be a
common tradition of both the ruling classes and the bayan.
However, insofar as myths are symbolic devices of society, it may be
possible to identify what interest has colored it, and in identifying the
“interest” it may serve, the persona may finally become apparent.
M
.
tern

The Persona in Philippine Folk Literature While it is demonstrable that the

inhabitants of what is now the Philippines prior to the coming of Spain and the
United States of America had stratified societies whose ruling classes were distinguished
clearly enough from the timawa and the alipin, when the western colonizers had
done their job, the erstwhile social classes were generally swept into a subject
people that have become the folk of this country. Folk literature, therefore, by the
fact of its distinguishing between the folk and (implied) nonfolk, suggests
the notion of (at least) cultural stratification.
In the present Philippine case, folk literature is that literature preserved,
modified, created, and transmitted by the new “folk” class created by
colonization. In their social degradation, datus and other members of
the ancient ruling classes brought with them the stories of their past. These
have simply passed into the mainstream of lore, except in those places that
were never colonized, where aboriginal social classes have remained to
this day. This means that what we call “folk literature” today encompasses
the literature of the precolonial ruling classes. However, to the extent that it
is possible to identify their class origins, ruling-class literature has to be
referred back to the ruling classes before
mm. r *. ...condamntanding of what we all the nercana
Notes
'Harry Shaw, Dictionary of Literary Terms (New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Co., 1972), p.283.
2See for example F. Landa Jocano, The Philippines at the Time of Spanish Contact
(Manila: MCS Enterprises, Inc., 1975); William Henry Scott, “Filipino Class Structure in the
Sixteenth Century” and “Class Structure in the Unhispanized Philippines,” both in Scott's Cracks
in the Parchment Curtain and Other Essays in Philippine History (Quezon City: New Day
Publishers, 1982). The former earlier appeared as Third World Studies Paper No. 13, University
of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon, 1978; the latter in Philippine
84 Florentino H. Hornedo
The Persona in Philippine Folk Literature 85
tut

14 Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University
Press, 1979). This work says that the Pasyon literature helped raise Filipino
revolutionary consciousness.
Is Florentino H. Hornedo, “The World and the Ways of the Ivatan Anitu,” Philippine
Studies 28 (1980): 21-58.
16 See Virgilio Resma, “The Folk Literature of the Suban-ons of Zamboanga del Sur,”
(Unpublished M.A. thesis, Immaculate Conception College, Ozamis City, 1980), pp. 30-
40. See also my “The Traditional Filipino Notion of Nature,” (typescript, 40 pp., 1988),
pp.7-18.
17Cp. Francisco R. Demetrio, S.J., Myths and Symbols Philippines (Manila: National
Bookstore, Inc., 1978), p. 13.
3Cf. Nicholas Cushner, S.J., Spain in the Philippines (Quezon City: Institute of
Philippine Culture, Ateneo de Manila University, 1971).
4See Vito C. Santos, Pilipino-English Dictionary (Manila: National Book Store, 1978).
SIbid.
I am indebted to Ms. Engracia Q. Bangaoil who discovered and recorded this
epic narrative for the first time. I have since done fieldwork in the Amburayan River
valley in northwestern Luzon, where additional recording has been done for other
narrative traditions of the Bago culture-a cross between the Iloko and
Kankanaey.
7Florentino H. Hornedo, “Ivatan Oral Traditions: A Survey.” Philippine Studies 25
(1977): 397-398; “Laji: An Ivatan Folk Lyric Tradition,” Unitas 52 (1979): 218-219; also
in Joseph A. Galdon, S.J., Salimbibig (Quezon City: Council for Living Traditions, 1980),
pp. 38-39.
8This cycle of a still-undetermined number of episodes is about a girl named Maria who
never fails to outwit her royal persecutor. Its distribution as a traditional story series
probably reached the greater part of the Philippines. Some episodes have even
appeared in Philippine elementary and high-school readers. In one episode, the
king tells Maria to stop the rolling of the waves by tying them with a rope. She
accepts the order, but sends the king a handful of sand which she requests the king
to turn into a rope so she can fasten the waves.
'Hazel J. Wrigglesworth, Ilianen Manobo Folktales (Cebu: San Carlos University,
1981), pp. 195-202. This is one of several variants. See also Ibid., pp. 203ff.
10 Frank Laubach, “An Odyssey From Lanao,” Philippine Public Schools (1930),
3:359-373; published in Filipino translation in Isagani R. Cruz and Soledad S. Reyes,
eds. Ang Ating Panitikan (Manila: Goodwill Trading Co., Inc., 1984), pp. 13-37.
Mamitua Saber, et al., eds. “The Agamaniyog Folktales,” Mindanao Art and Culture,
no. 1 (Marawi City: Mindanao State University Research Center, 1979).
12 Clement Wein, ed. Raja of Mandaya, a Philippine Folk Epic (Cebu City:
University of San Carlos).
13 Damiana L. Eugenio, "Awit and Korido: A Study of Fifty Philippine
Metrical Romances in Relation to their Sources and Analogues, two vols. (Ph.D.
dissertation, University of California in Los Angeles, 1965). This has been published in
one volume by the University of the Philippines Press,