Volume 44, Issue 3-4

Contrary to older opinions regarding the fifteenth century as the great divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance/Reformation, sixteenthcentury sermon literature demonstrates through its great preference for exempla the extensive continuity of older traditions. This article illustrates, using Johannes Paulis collection of exempla, Schimpf und Ernst (1521) as a representative example, to what extent he and other clerical authors were familiar with a large portion of medieval and earlymodern literature which they easily integrated into their own texts and used them for their moraldidactic purposes.

The Jewish story about Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa and his donation to the temple appears in Song of Songs Rabbah, an exegetic Midrash of the sixth century, and in the later Ecclesiastes Rabbah. According to this tale, Rabbi Hanina was so poor that he was unable to provide the standard festival offerings to the temple, as was customary on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Instead, he managed to find a heavy stone which he chiseled and brought along with him. The narrative function of bringing weighty stones to holy places also appears in one of the exempla of Dialogus miraculorum which was written by Caesarius of Heisterbach in the thirteenth century. The protagonist of this tale, in apprehension of the gravity of his sins, decided to bring heavy stones to the local Church of the Apostles. On the approaching Day of Judgment, so he hoped, these stones would add to the weight of his good deeds and outweigh his sins. Literary materials and narrative functions tend to circulate across cultural and temporal boundaries, thus making it possible to view different stories that share these features as manifesting one single phenomenon. Their common narrative function expresses a similar, JudeoChristian consciousness of the categories of stone and holy place. The individual cultural settings of these stories, however, establish different interrelations between these classifications.

It is probably due to the fact that in the minds of Hungarian storytellers no sharp dividing line is drawn between the world of magic and the world of reality that in märchen collected with ethnographic methods a great affinity to reality can be observed. This can be found on two levels: on the one hand folktales can finish without a happy ending. On the other, royal or even magic protagonists are often assimilated to plain country folk. Things from everyday life are naturally integrated into a majestic and magic world: scenes and objects of the village, its customs and morals, its legal and eating habits etc. The present study concentrates on this second phenomenon, which not only shows the proximity of genuine folktales to reality, but often delights us with its involuntary, yet charming humour.

The Lithuanian folktale types AaTh 327 C and 327 F may have emerged from concepts of beliefs surrounding death, reincarnation and childbirth. The motifs occurring in these tales are compared with plays, songs, legends, current belief systems and customs, parallels between them are pointed out. The article attempts to show that Lithuanian folk narrative tradition might be as important for comparative folktale studies as the Lithuanian language is for comparative linguistics.

This article contrasts Pontic Greek folktales with European and Middle Eastern tales and also examines the repertoires of two separate narrators from Imera, Pontos. The eighteen yearold males narratives show a strong preoccupation with fate as ordained by God, by studentteacher relationships and the didactic process, and by the perfidy of women. The older womans narratives show an equally strong preoccupation with conflictual relationships within households. Their worldviews are so distinct from one another that there is no overlap between their two repertoires.