Sources and edition limits
Published · text produced with AI under human direction and review; quoted passages were checked word for word against the digitized editions cited.
We use the public-domain corpus maintained for Águas Profundas. Every work listed here is present in its local source manifest. Our reading list explains which passages to start with. Wallace is contextual reading; the other works below support the guides or films, or their particular English-language comparisons.
What a source establishes
A collector records a belief, a teller or an interpretation. A literary author reshapes a tale. We identify that distinction in the guides. Quotations retain the source’s wording and are checked against the digitized edition. Our English translations are labelled and placed next to their Portuguese originals.
Corpus and free reading
The Naturalist on the River Amazons
Henry Walter Bates (1863)
English. Start with chapter II on forest noises near Pará, then chapter X on the Caypór at Ega. A visitor records what people told him; his judgments require the same care as his descriptions. Used in our Curupira guide.
Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast
Herbert H. Smith (1879)
English. Read Myths of the Amazonian Indians, especially the Curupira passages around pp. 559–566. Smith names Maria dos Reis of Santarém as the teller of one story. Used in our Curupira guide.
A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro
Alfred Russel Wallace (1853)
English. Read the travel narrative for river and settlement context, keeping the nineteenth-century observer distinct from the people he describes. Begin with the opening account of Pará. This is background reading from the corpus, not quotation evidence in any of our five legend guides.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving (1820)
English. Read the whole short literary tale, especially the church bridge, the pumpkin and the uncertain ending. It gives a precise comparison rather than a generic headless rider. Used in our Headless Mule guide.
The Book of Were-Wolves
Sabine Baring-Gould (1865)
English. Read chapter V on Livonia and the passages on France, Normandy, Schleswig and Holstein. Keep each place attached to its belief. Used as a comparison in our werewolf guide, not as proof of a Brazilian origin.
Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland
Thomas Crofton Croker (1844)
English, 1844 edition. Read the note at the end of the Shefro section for fairy whirlwinds, and The Dullahan for particular headless figures. Used in our Saci and Headless Mule guides. These comparisons do not establish a shared origin.
Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms & Superstitions of Ireland
Lady Wilde (1887)
English. Read The Hurling Match, the fairy whirlwinds and the stray sod that keeps a traveller walking all night. Used in our Saci and Curupira guides. The Irish stories keep their own setting.
O Selvagem
Couto de Magalhães (1876)
Portuguese. No English edition is offered here; the English passages on this site are our own translations. Read the part on family and religion, where the Saci, Boitatá and Curupira appear together. Used in the Saci, Curupira and Boitatá guides.
Poranduba Amazonense
João Barbosa Rodrigues (1890)
Nheengatu and Portuguese. No English edition is offered here. Read the Curupira and the hunter, and the story in which the Curupira takes a husband’s place. The parallel texts show how the collector rendered the story. Used in our Curupira guide.
O Sacy-Perêrê: resultado de um inquérito
Monteiro Lobato (org.) (1918)
Portuguese. No English edition is offered here. Begin with the inquiry’s questions, then the first letter and A. Reinke’s testimony. Used in our Saci, werewolf, Boitatá and Headless Mule guides. Only the 1918 text is used: the modern introduction in the digital reprint is excluded.
Lendas do Sul
João Simões Lopes Neto (1913)
Portuguese. No English edition is offered here. Start with A Mboi-tátá and read item 14 in the closing list of southern beliefs for the Headless Mule. The author explicitly gives traditional material a literary form. Used in our Boitatá and Headless Mule guides.
Tradições Populares de Portugal
José Leite de Vasconcellos (1882)
In Portuguese: section 348 lists the werewolf beliefs village by village, with the name of each place, including the wife, the pine tree and the oven.
Jack o' the Lantern (The Dublin Penny Journal)
E. W. (1836)
A short Irish piece in English: an uncle meets the light by a bog, then tells his nephew why Jack wanders with a lantern.
Folk-lore pernambucano
F. A. Pereira da Costa (1908)
Portuguese. The corpus uses a digitized 1908 edition. Read the werewolf and mule passages together. Used in the werewolf and Headless Mule guides. The guides give digitized-text line references. A free reading link has not yet been verified.
O Saci
Monteiro Lobato (1921)
Portuguese. Paraphrase only from the modern-spelling corpus edition; no literal quotation from that edition. Used for the literary Saci and Boitatá, and for the twelve-creature film. The archive copies of other Lobato works should not be mistaken for this edition.
For Pereira da Costa’s Folk-lore pernambucano (1908), the local corpus identifies a Google/University of California scan. We have not confirmed a public item URL from the material available here, so there is no guessed archive link. The Headless Mule guide and werewolf guide give the quoted passages and corpus line references.
For O Saci (1921), the local file is the Projeto Livro Livre / Iba Mendes 2019 modern-spelling edition. We paraphrase rather than quote it. The source of a fact and the rights in a particular edition are separate questions.
Public-domain status
The manifest records the historical works as public domain, with edition-specific reservations where needed. This does not extend to every page in a later reprint. We use the 1918 text of O Sacy-Perêrê, excluding its modern introduction. Gutenberg headers, branding and licence notices are not presented as part of the historical text.
The Irish and North American works are used for narrow comparisons. We do not turn similar motifs into claims about how a Brazilian legend originated.
Material we exclude
- Luís da Câmara Cascudo’s protected text, retained outside the quotation corpus until 2057. He may be named as a reference author; his prose is not reproduced.
- Stories posted to r/nosleep. They are not public-domain folklore sources for this site.
- Modern forewords, translations, notes and introductions unless their rights have been cleared.
- The modern editorial material attached to the Anchieta edition excluded from this corpus. The guides state exactly what they did and did not consult.
Corrections and citations
Each guide has a citation block and dated revision history. Send a correction through the channel, with the book, passage and page it concerns.