Volume 62, Issue 3-4

Although a relatively recent invention (c. 1500), many legends have accumulated around the origins of lace, more than have been recorded for other crafts. Almost every region involved in pillow or needle lace had its own origin story: I will concentrate on those circulating in Italy, Catalonia, France, Belgium, and England. Lacemaking was a poorly paid, dispersed and overwhelmingly female occupation, but none the less it had a strong craft tradition, including the celebration of particular saints’ feastdays. The legends drew on elements of this work culture, and especially the strong connections to royal courts and the Catholic Church, but they did not originate among lacemakers themselves. Rather they were authored by persons – lace merchants and other patrons – who in the nineteenth century took on the task of defending homemade lace in its drawn-out conflict with machine-made alternatives. Legends first circulated in print, in lace histories, newspapers and magazines, before transferring to other media such as the stage, historical pageants, even the visual arts. More recently they have continued to propagate on the web. While not originally oral narratives, they behave much like legends in oral storytelling environments: they are usually unsourced; they accumulate and shed motifs; they adapt to new circumstances and audiences. They were told with the intention of creating a special status for handmade lace, and to mobilize protectors and consumers.

The history of international folklore research has seen several attempts to systematise the folklore texts. The (fairy) tale research has been the most productive, with nearly one hundred national tale catalogues available as well as the international tale catalogue at its fourth, improved edition. In contrast to tale and other epic genre (ballad, exemplum), the last 110 years of legend research have resulted in only a handful of books that systematised the folk heritage of the genre. Apart from a dozen of catalogues of aetiological and belief legends, until the publication of the Hungarian book series The Catalogue of Hungarian Historical Legends  I‒XI, 2018, no comprehensive type- or motif index of national legends was available. This study is a review of the international pursuits in the European folklore research directed to systematise historical legends, which, to date, due to various reasons, have been only partially successful.

Zusammenfassung In der gegenwärtigen Erzählforschung wird oft bezweifelt, dass es eine längere mündliche Kontinuität des Volksmärchens gegeben hat. Dieser Beitrag versucht, die Kraft der mündlichen Überlieferung aufzuzeigen. Als Grundlage dienen Märchen, die zwischen 1960 und 1997 in Namibia aufgenommen wurden. Vergleichsstudien der Motive zeigen nicht nur, dass eine ganze Anzahl der Texte nicht von Buchversionen abhängen können, sondern dass sie regionale Besonderheiten der mündlichen Erzähltradition in Europa erhalten haben. Auffallend häufig sind Beziehungen zur mündlichen Überlieferung der Bretagne und des Mittelmeerraumes. Es ist zu vermuten, dass diese Märchen von den Hugenotten-Flüchtlingen, die meist aus diesen Gegenden stammten, um 1700 nach Südafrika mitgebracht wurden.

With few exceptions, narrative theory does not ordinarily consider the self-reflexive capacity of The Thousand and One Nights beyond its canonical instance of framing, and Arabic literary scholarship does not ordinarily engage with its narratological aspects. This article proposes a narratological approach for a systematic breakdown of story cycles through abstraction, partly by making use of computer programming language, in order to demonstrate the narrative typology in the Nights . It argues that repetitions, transpositions, substitutions, and reversals testify to tensions between the overt ideology of the text and the counter discourse that unsettles this logic, concealed in its poetics. The article thereby aims to bring some of the core concepts of narrative theory into dialogue with the Nights scholarship, and to contribute to a theoretical conversation about ideological critique in narrative analysis, particularly within the pre-modern storytelling tradition.

My aim is to analyze a corpus of Spanish gitano stories in which the phenomenon of self-representation arises and involves, among other concepts, auto-images and hetero-images, that is, the stereotyped images or imagotypes that a given group has of itself and others. I will examine various processes by means of which the heritage assimilated and transformed is perceived by the gitanos as belonging to their own culture.

The first Scandinavian mentions of magic folk tales and ballads are by two clergymen-cum-historians, Olavus Petri (the Swedish reformer, 1493–1552), in a generic discussion in the lengthy Introduction to his unpublished Swedish Chronicle ), and Anders Foss (1543–1607, Danish-born bishop of Bergen in Norway), who cites ATU 327B & 853 in a discussion of the reliability of Saxo’s late twelfth-century Gesta Danorum ). Both discuss the value of traditional oral tales (and ballads) as historical sources: Anders Foss rejects them, whereas Olavus Petri emphasizes their value as expressions of demotic attitudes towards the rich and mighty. This was heavily censured by King Gustaf I Vasa, who forbade the publication of Olavus’ Chronicle. Note on terminology: Olavus Petri’s preface, a large part of which is here translated for the first time, seems to be the first evidence of the Swedish word “sagor” (plural of “saga”) being used to denote a specific narrative genre (= wonder tales?). Similarly, Anders Foss’s “euentyrer” (archaic plural form of “eventyr” = Märchen, sg. & pl.) is probably the first example of the word being used in this sense in Danish (other than in the still current meaning “adventure” or “quest”).

Two Greek authors, Georgios Sphrantzes (fifteenth century) and Makarios Melissourgos-Melissenos (sixteenth century) refer to a variant of the type ATU 1525E , Thieves steal from one another . It is the oldest known version, and it is remarkably close to the variants later attested in Georgia and the Balkans (an area that clearly shows the features of the Byzantine cultural heritage). The comparison also makes it possible to clarify and confirm the meaning of an obscure word used in the oldest version, that of Sphrantzes, where pine-cones ( koukoutzella ) and moss are at the center of the exchange.

The present epoch is the time of intense international communication. Effective interaction of ethnicities demands, however, to construct the dialogue of cultures on the basis of justice. Moreover, we argue that local justice models need to take priority over the international justice model. Local justice models are reflected in folklore. In this article, we analyze Colombian, Peruvian, Venezuelan, and Bolivian ethnic tales of justice. The purpose of our research is to reveal and systematize justice models in Latin American folklore including contextual, general, private, evolutionary, demographic, historical, divine, ecological, restorative, formal, selective, procedural, and other justice models.