Folk-tales of Mallorca

From the Preface:
The language of Mallorca (mallorquí), the island’s branch of Catalan, had by the nineteenth century long ceased to be a literary language, but in its spoken form, especially among country people it was extremely vigorous and picturesque; there was also a strong current of oral folklore in the form of a wealth of dramatic or amusing tales, known as rondaies or rondalles. Some of these tales are local versions of those common all round the Mediterranean; others are possibly indigenous to the island.
L’Aplec de Rondaies Mallorquines (Collection of Folk-Tales of Mallorca), from which the tales in this book are taken, is the title that Father Antoni Maria Alcover gave in 1896 to the first volume of his concept of a written record of the folk-tales current in Mallorca. He must by then have seen that there wits a great wealth of tales to be collected, and it may be regarded as one of his major achievements that during his lifetime he published twelve volumes containing over three hundred tales; further volumes were edited from his notes after he died in 1932.