“Selkup Mythology. Encyclopaedia of Uralic Mythologies”
Selkup Mythology is the fourth volume of The Encyclopaedia of Uralic Mythologies, edited by Anna-Leena Siikala, Vladimir Napolskikh and Mihaly Hoppal, which offers a basis for study of the roots and present nature of Finno-Ugric and Samoyed religions. The volume introduces readers to the mythic narratives, beliefs and religious traditions of the Selkups, an indigenous […]
“Sources and analogues of the Uncle Remus tales”
….And yet, Harris is the first white writer to be recognized as transcribing African-American speech and folklore. As Robert Bone noted in 1975, the subversive folk hero Brer Rabbitt provided “the missing link between the Afro-American folktale and the Afro-American short story” (Bickley 1981: 130). In fact, since the first volume of Uncle Remus tales […]
“Studies in Finnic-Slavic Folklore Relations”
Felix Oinas was born in Kambja to the dairy farmer Ernst Oinas (1885–1975) and his wife Marie (née Saarik, 1885–1960), who was a homemaker. He grew up in the village of Maltsa. Ernst had a keen interest in literature and maintained a small library. Felix became an avid reader during elementary school, particularly interested in […]
“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
“Textualising the Siri Epic”
How does an illiterate singer produce a long oral epic? What is the origin of his “text”, available only for a fleeting moment at its performance? How can a multifaceted oral performance be transformed into a book? The primary oral textualisation and the secondary written codification of the Siri epic, 15,683 lines, are described in […]
“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 Enigma of Arnold Van Gennep (1873-1957): Master of French Folklore and Hermit of Bourg-la-Reine”
Arnold van Gennep, full name Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep (23 April 1873 – 7 May 1957), was a Dutch–German-French ethnographer and folklorist. Biography He was born in Ludwigsburg, in the Kingdom of Württemberg (since 1871, part of the German Empire). Since his parents were never married, Van Gennep adopted his Dutch mother’s name, van Gennep. […]
“The Game of Rich and Poor: A Comparative Study in Traditional Singing Games”
Elsa Elina Enäjärvi-Haavio, also Elsa Eklund, (1901–1951) was a Finnish folklorist who carried out extensive research into folk poetry in the 1930s. As a result, in 1947 she was appointed docent of Finnish and folk poetics at the University of Helsinki. She was an influential member of many organizations, including the Finnish Federation of University […]
“The Holy Mountain. Studies on Upper Altay Oral Poetry”
Harvilahti, Lauri in collaboration with Zoja Sergeevna Kazagaceva The aim of this study is to achieve a synthesis in forming a new overall view of the stylistic-poetic and structural devices used to produce the archaic mythical and epic cultural tradition of the Upper Altay region. Attention is also being paid to the inherent ethnic nature […]
“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 Narrative World of Finnish Fairy Tales. Structure, Agency, and Evaluation in Southwest Finnish Folktales”
Finnish fairy taies represent the northern branch of the Western European fairy-tale tradition. Although Finnish epic folklore and mythology have been objects of great research interest, Finnish fairy taies have been studied surprisingly little. This study answers not only methodological but also the most important empirical questions, such as: what are the themes, plots and […]
“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 […]
“The Siri Epic as Performed by Gopala Naika. Part 2”
Mr Gopala Naika is one of the many talented singers of oral epics in Tulunaadu, the land of Tulu speakers in southern Karnataka, India. The Finnish-Indian team, Prof. Lauri Honko and Ms Anneli Honko, M.A., from the University of Turku and Prof. Viveka Rai and Dr Chinnappa Gowda from the University of Mangalore, documented his […]
“Thou Fearful Guest. Addressing the past in four tales in Flateyjarbók”
A STRANGER APPEARS at the court of a Norwegian king known best for bringing Christianity to the North. Variations of this seene appear four times in the fourteenth-century manuseript Flateyjarbok. Thou Fearful Guest analyzes how these episodes ereate meaning by their connections to custom, law, myth, diseourses of historical and spiritual truth, typological understandings of […]
“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 […]
