Anansi delivers all four captives to Nyame as agreed, and the sky god, true to his word despite having expected failure, hands over the stories, formally renaming them Anansesem, Anansi's stories, in recognition of the spider's cunning rather than continuing to call them by his own name. This origin account explains, within the tradition itself, why so much Akan and wider West African and Caribbean diaspora oral narrative circulates specifically under Anansi's name regardless of its actual subject matter, since the category of story itself became identified with the trickster who first won the right to tell it.
The tale belongs to a much larger cycle of Anansi stories, most of which do not concern the origin of storytelling directly but instead put the same cunning to work against other animals, wealthier or more powerful figures, and occasionally against Anansi's own family, frequently with morally ambiguous results in which greed or overreaching cunning costs Anansi as much as it gains him. Robert Pelton's comparative study of West African tricksters situates Anansi within a wider pattern shared with figures such as Eshu, arguing that the trickster's disruptive cleverness serves a serious cultural function of testing and exposing the limits of social norms rather than simply providing entertainment. The cycle carried directly into the Caribbean and the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, where it remains one of the best documented survivals of West African oral tradition in the diaspora.