“Carl Wilhelm von Sydow. A Swedish Pioneer in Folklore”
IN THIS BOOK, Professor Emeritus Nils-Arvid Bringeus provides a detailed analysis of the founder of folklore research in Sweden, Professor Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (1878-1952). We are introduced to a fascinating personality and able to follow his persevering struggle to gain acceptance for a new academic discipline. Von Sydow took a highly active interest in […]
“Chasing the Monk´s Shadow”
A Jouney in the Footsteps of Xuanzang “An Indian woman with a China craze, a Chinese monk with an Indian obsession; we had the same schizophrenia, the monk and I. It seemed logical to take the same road.” In the seventh century AD, the Chinese monk Xuanzang (earlier spelt as Hiuen Tsang or Hsuan Tsang) […]
“Folk Belief Today”
The e-publication is based on the collection of articles, published in 1995 by the Institute of Estonian Language and the Estonian Museum of Literature. Edited by Mare Kõiva & Kai Vassiljeva. In collaboration with Ume Kelam, Õie Sarv, Leidi Veskis, Ergo-Hart Västrik. Notes Taive Särg
“Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristsics”
JEF Volume 2/2008 Number 1 Contents: Tuija Saarinen. Sickness, Hygienic Education and Village Practice: Tuberculosis in the Life of a Cobbler Outi Fingerroos. Places of Memory in the Red Vyborg of 1918 Riina Haanpää. From a Fratricide to a Family Memory Helena Riotsala. Does Sense of Place Still Exist? Kristin Kuutma. The Making of Sami […]
“Khanty Mythology. Encyclopaedia of Uralic Mythologies”
The Encyclopaedia of Uralic Mythologies offers a comparative base for the study of the roots and present forms of Finno-Ugrian and Samoyedic mythologies and ethnic religions. The peoples speaking the Uralic language are indigenous peoples of Northern Eurasia in the territory extending from Fennoscandia to the Taimyr Peninsula. Along with their complicated histories and cultural […]
“Lugalbanda: The Boy Who Got Caught Up In a War”
From the land we now call Iraq comes the story of a young prince’s extraordinary adventures. On his way to war with his older brothers, Lugalbanda meets the goddess Inana and the magical Anzu bird, which gives him the power to be strong, tireless and to run like lightning. Lugalbanda uses his new powers to […]
“Myths from Mesopotamia. Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others.”
A new translation by Stephanie Dalley Oxford World´s Classics Between the great rivers Tigris and Euphrates lies the rich alluvial land of Mesopotamia (now in modern Iraq), which supported a complex and prosperous society over 4,000 years ago. The stories translated here are all of ancient Mesopotamia, and include not only myths about the Creation […]
“Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia”
Translated and introduced by N. K. Sandars The Babylonian Creation, the first of these Ancient Mesopotamian poems, was probably composed in the twelfth century BC. Comparable with the Book of Genesis, it opens in watery chaos and sings of the foundation of the world and its centre, the fabulous golden city of Babylon. A hymn […]
“Sumerian Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium B.C.”
“The Sumerians were a non-Semitic, non-Indo-European people who lived in southern Babylonia from 4000-3000 B.C.E. They invented cunieform writing, and their spiritual beliefs influenced all successive Near Eastern religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They produced an extensive body of literature, among the oldest in the world. Samuel Noah Kramer spent most of his life […]
“Tales of the Amber Sea”
Fairy tales of the peoples of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
“The Babylonian Legends of Creation”
The Babylonian Legends of the Creation is a summarization of the beliefs of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians about Creation, taken from baked clay tablets discovered by British archaeologists in the mid-19th century in Nineveh. This relatively short book describes the excavation of the tablets, their publication and translation, as well as the contents of […]
“The Ballad of Heer Halewijn: Its Forms and Variations in Western Europe”
This ballad about a maid hwo kills a would-be lady-killer is known in England as “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight”, in France as “Renaud le Tueur de Femmes”, in Scandinavia as “Kvindemorderen”, and in the Netherlands and Belgium as “Heer Halewijn”; in the German-speaking area it is called “Ulinger” or “Ulrich”. Having analysed the features […]
“The Mohave Heroic Epic of Inyo-Kutavêre”
The Mohave Heroic Epic, the study of Inyo-kutavêre’s Great Telling of how the Mohave regained their Given, then Lost Valley, belongs to the discipline of Ethnopoetics, one that has progressed by leaps and bounds since Alfred Kroeber chanced to record the tale as it was translated live into English for him in 1902, and with […]
“The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales”
The present work is a scientific study of a primitive art-form . The art-form is the folktale of the North American Indians; the study is scientific insofar as a hypothetical ab stract model is constructed and tested . The structural model of North American Indian folktales is tested by comparing empirically its properties with those […]
“The New Comparative Method: Structural and Symbolic Analysis of the Allomotifs of “Snow White””
An examination of the mystery of folktales, this study takes a look into the heart of one folktale in order to use it as a model for all folktales. It analyses over seventy folk versions of “Snow White” in order to reveal their shared narrative core of episodes and themes. The investigation documents the way […]
“The Road to Middle-Earth”
Revised Edition A detailed and fascinating journey to the roots of The Lord of the Rings, by award-winning Tolkien expert Professor Tom Shippey. The Road to Middle-Earth is a fascinating and accessible exploration of J.R.R.Tolkien’s creativity and the sources of his inspiration. Tom Shippey shows in detail how Tolkien’s professional background led him to write […]
“Types of Indic Oral Tales: India, Pakistan, and Ceylon”
The authors have analysed a corpus of oral Indian narrative material containing practically all the collections published in European languages and a selection of oral tales available only in native languages. They apply the familiar taxonomy of the Types of the Folktale by Aarne and Thompson. The work supplements the earlier motif index by Thompson […]
“Väinämöinen: Eternal Sage”
Martti Haavio’s study on old Finnish-Karelian epic poems in the Kalevala metre reveals the many faces and roles of their central personage, Väinämöinen, the eternal sage. On the basis of extensive comparative material he shows that there are at least two basic roles for Väinämöinen in the poems, the shaman and the cultural her, whose […]
