The second Brazilian collection of oral folk tales was published in 1907. It was entitled Contribuição do folk-lore brasileiro para a bibliotheca infantil and compiled by Alexina de Magalhães Pinto (1870-1921), an educator born in the state of Minas Gerais. This author published thirteen folk tales that she collected herself from the state's hinterland, along with six others rewritten from Silvio Romero's records. One striking feature of this pioneering work is the presence of black narrators, as observed in the notes written by the researcher herself, as well as the strong presence of songs within the narrative, a trait highlighted by more than one scholar as characteristic of the African oral tradition.  
The title of the collection alone hints at
the intention to give traditional oral folk tales the status of written literature, appropriate for inclusion in Brazilian children's libraries. The book invests in the affirmation of the identity of the young Brazilian nation, seeking its own literature through setting down oral narratives in writing - a language close to the spoken word, free of the syntax imposed by European colonialism (Almeida and Queiroz, 2004, p. 39).  
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[^0]:    2 As attested to in 'Distribuição sistemática das obras de Sílvio Romero (feita por ele próprio)', front matter of Romero, 1943.  
The narratives collected by De Magalhães Pinto were written in standard Portuguese. In contrast, she sets down almost all the sung verses in popular dialect, or Afro-Brazilian, an Africanized form of spoken Portuguese. An example of this is the tale Beija-Flor (hummingbird), the verses of which are reproduced in a language that appears to be a mixture of Portuguese and Kimbundu: