Volume 44, Issue 1

The Min Min Light is a small, close to groundlevel, ball of light said to haunt particular localities in Australia. Early white settlers knew it as the willothe wisp and the jackolantern. Indigenous inhabitants called it the Dead Mens CampFire or the DebilDebil. Min Min Light narratives are examined with regard to motifs and narrative forms; the interpretations and beliefs engendered by the accounts; and the social context of a regional lore now utilised in tourism promotion.

The fairytale type AaTh 566 became widespread thanks to the German popular novel Fortunatus, printed by Johann Heybler in Augsburg in 1509. The novel was translated by the Apulian abbot Pompeo Sarnelli from a French version into Italian during the 17th century. Alongside this bourgeois and baroque line of the novel, this contribution undertakes an analysis of the popular tradition represented by Italian chapbooks. It has its origin in the 15th century, but the earliest identified printed editions appeared in the beginning of the 16th century; they represent one of the first written documentations of the oral tale.

This article demonstrates how postwar Englishlanguage editions of Grimms Kinder und Hausmärchen are framed by editorial paratexts that promote the tales authenticity and universality through strategies that dehistoricize them and deny both their literary nature and cultural specificity. In the final analysis, the paper considers whether this kind of intercultural transmission, especially in an age of globalization and multiculturalism, constitutes cultural colonization.

In an obscure early nineteenthcentury antiquarian publication, the Scot William Motherwell poet, journalist, ballad editor (Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern, 1827) offered a curious historical legend, something he titled The Story of the Palmyarm Ross, claiming its verity. No parallel texts have been noted and the editor of the volume in which it appeared suggested that Motherwell fabricated the text. How then can we read it? This paper suggests that one way to place the text is to interrogate Motherwells lived experience, his habitus, and to engage in historical ethnography. In the process, the author places this study in the context of her own introduction to the study of folk narrative.

Harry Potter is a crosscultural phenomenon in many respects. On the one hand, manifold intertextual references link the British author J. K. Rowlings novels to the literatures of the world; on the other, we state their worldwide commercialization and related tendencies of unification through their medialization and diversification. The Harry Potter debate in the newspaper feuilletons shows general concern regarding the ruthless global commercialization of culture, and can be interpreted as a sign of yearning for a selfdetermined, comprehensible and lasting world.

Oral folktales of the islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Seychelles, and the Comoros became available for Europeans when investigators successfully translated the cultural production of the islands into European languages, as part of the export of raw materials to the western world. Through interpreting tales, ethnographers contributed to the European order of knowledge about the meaning of native discourses.

This interpretation of AaTh 480 + AaTh 510, collected within a still living narrative context, is based on the late Bengt Holbeks theory, propounded in his 1987 Interpretation of Fairy Tales. It is argued that the tale deals with the first of three lifecrises found in such narratives, to wit, conflict between the generations, specifically between mother and daughter. It is proposed that the Cinderella tale, more fully comprehensible when preceded by The SpinningWomen by the Spring, offers a solution to the problem faced by the marriageable daughter: how best to win the love of a man. Although the answers to this question may seem dated at the present time, in the social and narrative context in which the tale was told in the 20th century, it offers what was deemed to be sound advice by the often largely female audiences.