Poetry & Literature

What this is

This is the collection's belletristic layer — 112 witnesses of literature meant to give pleasure, the closest this archive comes to storytelling that admits it is storytelling. The catalogue splits it as Folk Tale (71) and Secular Literary Work (41), and the split is real: on one side stories, on the other side forms — the sung verse metres of Lanna, often with no story attached to the title at all.

It is a small genre with a large claim on the tradition, because it is where the north kept the things it could not file anywhere else. And its single most surprising holding is an epic that most readers would never think to look for on a palm leaf.

The Ramayana on palm-leaf

Twenty-one of these 112 witnesses are Rāmāyaṇa.

They arrive under four northern names, and no two of them look alike:

• รามเหียร / รัมมะเหืยร (Lamhian, Lammahian) — six witnesses, the two longest and earliest at Wat Sung Men in Phrae (1861, 45 pages) and Wat Phra Luang in Phrae (1849, 70 pages), the rest small: Wat Phaya Phu in Nan (1919), Wat Si Bun Rueang in Chiang Rai (1927), Wat Pa Mueat in Nan (1937), and one untitled bundle at Wat Don Chai Phra Bat.
• หอรมาน / หอรมาร (Horaman, Holaman) — Hanuman, with the monkey general's name serving as the title of the whole book. Seven witnesses in this genre alone: Wat Chiang Man in Chiang Mai (1852, the oldest), Wat Phra Luang in Phrae (1902), Wat Pa Sak Noi in Chiang Mai (1932), Wat Lai Hin Luang in Lampang (1940), two at Wat Phra That Lampang Luang (one titled a wohan, a running gloss), and an 88-page modern copy.
• ตำนานพระรามพระลัก — "the chronicle of Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa," six witnesses, three of them at Wat Si Khom Kham in Phayao (two dated 1956), one at Wat Ban Luk in Lampang, two modern. The word in front is tamnan: this telling presents itself as history.
• พระยาราม — "King Rāma" plainly, at Wat Sung Men, 1837, with a companion bundle the same year pairing the wohan of Phanya Ram with the Lammahian.

And it does not stop at this genre's borders. Five more Hanumans are filed under other — Wat Thao Bun Rueang in Chiang Mai (1913), Wat Dong Mada in Chiang Rai (1936), Wat Si Bun Yuen and Wat Phra That Hariphunchai in Lamphun, Wat Phra Luang in Phrae. Two more went to chronicle: a Tamnan Horaman at Wat Mae Wa Luang in Lampang (1957), and — the best title in the set — ปฐมกัปรัมมะเหียรพระยาราม, "the first aeon, the Rāma-story, King Rāma," at Wat Nong Bua in Nan, 1933, which files the epic as cosmogony. At Wat Kam Ko in Mae Hong Son a Shan bundle of 285 mulberry-paper pages, dated 1989, is catalogued as เจ้ารามะ ลังกาสิบหัว — "Lord Rāma, and the Ten-Headed One of Laṅkā."

Inference — one story, and the cataloguers of five different libraries could not agree what kind of thing it was: poem, folk tale, chronicle, cosmogony, or the miscellany. That disagreement is the finding. In the north the Rāmāyaṇa is not a fixed genre-object; it is a body of material that each copyist assigns to whichever shelf his purpose needs.

The sixth assignment is the most consequential of all, and it is not on this page. พรหมจักก์, Phommachak, has six witnesses — Wat Ban Ueam in Lampang (two copies, both 1865), Wat San Rim Ping in Lamphun, Wat Muai To in Mae Hong Son (1902), a 262-page modern copy, and one bundle at Wat Ban Caem in Lamphun in which Phommachak stands at the head of a complete Mahāchat, ahead of Thotsaphon, Himmaphan, Thanakhan, Wannapawet, Chuchok and the rest of the thirteen chapters, the whole marked as the Sabap In Long Lao recension. Every one of them is catalogued as jātaka. Tradition holds — Phommachak is the Lanna Rāmāyaṇa retold as a birth-story, with Rāma as the Bodhisatta; that is the move which lets an Indian court epic be bound between the pages of the Great Birth without anybody objecting.

The verse forms, and what they were for

The other half of the genre is not stories but metres — and in the catalogue they often appear with the metre named and the content left blank, which tells you what the scribe thought mattered.

Thirteen witnesses carry ฅ่าว / คร่าว (khao), the long sung-verse form of Lanna; twelve carry คำขับ (kham khap) or กาบ (kap); six carry โคลง / คโลง (khlong) or กลอน (kon). Six untitled bundles are catalogued as nothing but Untitled (Khao), Untitled (Kham khap) — a poem whose only surviving identity is its metre.

Three of them are worth naming:

• โคลงหริภุญชัย — the Khlong Hariphunchai, in two witnesses at Wat Si Khom Kham in Phayao, both dated 1841, of two and five pages. Tradition holds — this is one of the oldest surviving works of secular Lanna poetry, a pilgrim's verse-journey to the great chedi at Lamphun. The archive holds it not in Lamphun, where its subject stands, but in Phayao, on a handful of leaves.
• ฅ่าวสี่บทพระยาพรมโวหาร — "the four-stanza khao of Phanya Phrom Wohan," 105 pages, and beside it a plain ฅ่าวสี่บท of 81 pages, both dated 1989. Tradition holds — Phaya Phrommawohan is the north's most-remembered vernacular poet, a court scribe whose life ran through disgrace and whose verse is still recited; here his work survives in the collection only in late copies, which is what happens to a poet whose real medium was the voice.
• คร่าวดอยพ่อเจ้าอินทวิชยานนท์กับราชเทวี — a five-leaf khao at Wat Chiang Man, Chiang Mai, on the mountain, the ruling prince Inthawichayanon, and his royal consort. A poem about the living rulers, kept in the founding temple of their city. Court poetry, catalogued as folk literature — see the note on labels below.

The คำขับ cluster is the ethnically distinct one. Four bundles at Wat Nong Bua in Nan — a Tai Lue temple — hold Untitled (Kham khap) twice, plus คำขับกาหลง ("the khap of the lost crow") and คำขับผีน้อย ("the khap of the little ghost"), all on mulberry paper. Two more untitled kham khap sit at Wat Yuan in Phayao, one at Wat Saen Mueang Ma. Phi Noi, the little ghost, also has a stand-alone Tai Lue copy in Phayao. Inference — the khap is a Lue singing form, and the manuscripts behave accordingly: paper rather than palm-leaf, Tham Lue script, clustered in the Lue temples of Nan and Phayao, and named for tunes rather than plots.

The romances, the Shan shelf, and the Central import

The story half of the genre reaches well outside Lanna.

Six witnesses are Shan, and they are the physically largest things here: at Wat Pang Mu and Wat Luang in Mae Hong Son, ม๊อกขะระปั๊ด runs to 147 mulberry-paper pages, ผุ่งนานฉิ่นมะ โหว่ยหม่าติกะ to 137, and ตันต้ะพิงญะ, นางปิ้งเขียด to 134; หม่องมิดสริยะ นางมะหล่อหลี่ ("Maung Mit-Sariya and Ma Hlaw-Li") to 24; ม่าฮกโต๋ sits at Wat Pa Pao in Chiang Mai, the Shan temple inside the Lanna capital. Beside them, เจ้าแสงเมิง Cao Saeng Moeng, 58 pages, at Wat Pang Mu.

ขุนสามลอ — Khun Sam Lo, usually named as the great northern love-tragedy — is here in exactly one witness, and it is not a Lanna one: 23 pages, Shan script, mulberry paper, Wat Luang, Mae Hong Son, undated. Inference — a story everyone in the north knows, surviving on this shelf only in a border-Shan copy, is a precise measure of how badly the oral repertoire is under-represented in written form. The tale is not rare. The manuscript is.

The Central Thai import is subtler than it first looks. There is no copy of Phra Aphai Mani in this collection. What there is, at Wat Phra That Chang Kham Worawihan in Nan, is an untitled mulberry-paper bundle of 25 pages catalogued as คร่าวพระอไภยมณี — Sunthon Phu's Bangkok epic rendered into the Lanna khao metre. Not a text that travelled north; a text that was re-versified on arrival, into the form a northern audience could hear. The same treatment runs the other way at Wat Bun Yuen in Nan, where คำเหล้นคร่าวเวสสันตระ — "the khao of the Vessantara, for playing" — takes the north's most sacred narrative and sets it to the entertainment metre. Scripture out, poem in; poem in, scripture out. This genre is the exchange floor.

Small, strange, and two leaves long

A last register deserves naming, because it is the easiest to overlook: the two-and-four-leaf tale. Wat Phra Sing in Chiang Rai contributes five untitled fragments of four to six pages each, one dated 1851, one 1856. And scattered across the north sit titles that are almost entirely title:

• แลนสองลิ้น — "the two-tongued monitor lizard," two leaves, Wat Pa Sao, Lamphun, 1921.
• ตำนานอ้ายแขนสั้น — "the tale of Short-Arms," four leaves, no temple recorded.
• ตำนานอ้ายบุญกว้าง — "the tale of Ai Bun Kwang," two leaves, Wat Ku Khao, Lamphun.
• ตำนานกวางฅำ — the golden deer, six leaves, Wat Pa Sao, 1946, with a plain ตำนานกวาง at Wat Dong Mada, Chiang Rai, 1961.
• ตำนานดาวควัน — the smoke-star, six leaves, Wat San Rim Ping, 1910 — a title that also turns up on the didactic shelf, where three more copies are filed as moral instruction, alongside the nīti material traced on the Lokanīti page.
• สุวัตฏังขันธัง — Suwattang Khanthang, 20 leaves at Wat Phra That Chang Kham Worawihan in Nan, catalogued as a Secular Literary Work. Inference — the name is close enough to the northern verse-romance of Cao Suwat to be worth reading for it; that romance is the text in which the kai page finds a mo kai, a chicken-bone diviner, at work — which would make this leaf a hero-tale that also records how a rite was actually done. Twenty leaves would settle it.
• นิทานนักขัตตฤกษ์ and นักขัตตสัตตรีส — the tales of the lunar mansions, at Wat Sung Men (1836) and Wat Nantharam. The stars have stories, and the stories are folk tales.

Inference — four leaves is not an abridgement, it is a reminder. A performer who already knows the tale needs the sequence, not the text. That is why the vernacular record is thin even where the tradition is thick, and why so many titles here name a metre or a star and stop: the manuscript was never meant to be the work.

The shape of the collection

Two features set this genre apart from the learned corpora, and both survive checking.

First, it is the latest-dating genre in the collection: of 54 dated witnesses, the oldest is 1836 and the latest 1989 — 21 in the 19th century, 33 in the 20th. Nothing here reaches back to the 15th-century stratum that jātaka holds at Wat Lai Hin Luang. Vernacular literature was committed to writing late, long after the scripture and the grammars.

Second, its support and geography break the canonical mould. Palm-leaf falls to 73 of 112 (65%); 23 are mulberry paper and six are khoi, so better than a quarter of the genre is on paper against the 3–9% typical of the scholastic shelves — and the six khoi witnesses are almost all one work, the หงหีน / ฅ่าวหงหีน / ฅ่าวเจ้าหงหีน cluster of 1881 and 1907, a story that exists in this archive chiefly as a folded paper book. (What that choice of support means is worked out on nuea.) Script diversifies too: 95 Tham Lanna, but 7 Tham Lue, 7 Shan, 2 Thai.

And it is not a Wat Sung Men tradition. Wat Si Khom Kham in Phayao leads with 11 witnesses; Wat Sung Men has five. By province, Phayao (20) and Nan (14) lead, Chiang Mai (11) and Lamphun (10) follow, and Phrae — which dominates every learned genre — trails at nine. The folk literature lived away from the great scholastic library, which is exactly where you would expect to find it, and is worth tracing on the atlas.

Notes

• The most exposed genre, and the most urgent. These forms are oral and performed, and were written down only from the 19th century; this is the corpus most under-represented on the shelf, and the one whose witnesses are physically slightest — a great many of them two to six leaves. Khun Sam Lo at one Shan copy is the warning case. Anything in the khao and kham khap families deserves early attention despite the small catalogue footprint, because the catalogue footprint is not the tradition's size — it is the tradition's residue.
• Porous boundaries — it absorbs from everywhere, and leaks in every direction. Central Thai imports arrive re-versified; the Vessantara is retold for entertainment; the Rāmāyaṇa is split across four genres and canonised as a jātaka under a fifth name; folk tales shade into chronicle wherever a title opens with tamnan, which here it very often does. Browsing this genre in isolation will always undercount it — use browse alongside the neighbours.
• Border diversity is real and is concentrated. The Shan and Tai Lue presence here is higher than in any learned genre, and it is not evenly spread: it sits in specific houses — Wat Pang Mu and Wat Luang in Mae Hong Son for Shan, Wat Nong Bua in Nan and Wat Yuan in Phayao for Lue. Secular story crosses ethnic and linguistic lines more freely than canon does, and these six or seven temples are where the crossing is documented.
• One label, two objects. Oral folk tale and written secular literary work are distinct traditions collapsed together, and the collapse is producing visible errors — a court khao about a reigning prince of Chiang Mai is filed as "Secular Literary Work," while a tamnan of Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa is filed as "Folk Tale." Separating performance- register from provenance-register is the obvious next pass.
• A transcription target with an unusual profile. Unlike jātaka, where the priority is length, here the priority is breadth: dozens of four-leaf fragments, each cheap to read, several of which are the only surviving instance of their title anywhere in the open record. The five untitled Wat Phra Sing fragments in Chiang Rai — 4, 4, 4, 6 and 2 pages, two of them dated to the 1850s — would cost almost nothing to transcribe and might not be recoverable from any other source.