author
Elphinstone Dayrell
1869–1917
Best known for collecting and publishing folk tales from southern Nigeria, he brought stories like "Why the Sun and the Moon Live in the Sky" to a wide English-speaking audience. His work sits at the crossroads of storytelling, folklore, and the history of the British colonial era.
2 Audiobooks
Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria, West Africa
by Elphinstone Dayrell
Ikom folk stories from Southern Nigeria
by Elphinstone Dayrell
About the author
Born in 1869 and died in 1917, Elphinstone Dayrell was a British colonial administrator who served in Southern Nigeria. Sources describing his career identify him as a District Commissioner, and records connected with his name place him within the colonial service in Nigeria.
He is remembered chiefly for gathering and publishing traditional stories from the region, including Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria, West Africa and Ikom Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria. Those books helped preserve and circulate tales that later became familiar to many readers in children’s literature and folklore collections.
Dayrell’s legacy is therefore mixed and historically specific: he helped record stories that might otherwise have reached fewer readers in print, but he did so from within a colonial system. Read today, his books are often valued both as engaging story collections and as early published records of storytelling traditions from Southern Nigeria.