Trickster Archetype in Selected Orring Folktales

ABSTRACT
This research focuses on the Trickster Archetype in selected folktales of Orring people, using Carl Jung’s archetypal theory as its theoritical framework. Archetypal theory according to Carl Jung maintains that human behavior is dominated by the unconscious which he classified into two major domains – the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. And the collective unconscious is the repertoire of the memory of the race, and this memory houses the knowledge, images and experience of all mankind, therefore, he called these ‘archetypes’ which he takes to mean the primordial images, a part of the collective unconsciousness, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same kind, and thus part of the inherited pattern of the race or a same cultural system and these patterns are drives that determines how these individuals reacts to life. The research evaluates four (4) distinctive folktales: The Tortoise and Other Animals, the Tortoise and the Sheep, the Tortoise Affair with a Married Woman, and the Tortoise Friendship with Aphiophio. This study identifies and analyse the trickster archetype in selected Orring folktales, and the cultural and societal significance embedded in the representation of the trickster figure, this is as a result of the absence of any research work on trickster archetype in the selected folktales of Orring people. The Jungian tenets of archetypal theory is essential to this study to uncover the insight of the collective unconscious.