“From Shaman to Saint. Interpretive strategies in the study of Buile Shuibhne”
This study charts the ways in which Buile Shuibhne has been interpreted in twentieth-century scholarship, by paying particular attention to the religious allegorical readings of the text. This examination of four prevalent interpretative frameworks ‒ historical, pre-Christian, and anthropological ‒ relates theoretical conceptions of literary theory, comparative religion and historiography to the study of medieval […]
“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 […]
“Exploring the Gardens of Delights. Essays in Bosch’s Paintings and the Medieval Mental Culture”
The phantasmagoria in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) has led most scholars to interpret him as some kind of heretic: an astrologist, alchemist or adamite. Scholars use the same symbols for their personal preferences. The focus in this book is on Bosch as an ardent realist in his minute attention to detail. He […]
“Ob-Ugaric Metrics”
Robert Paul Austerlitz (December 13, 1923 – September 9, 1994) was a Romanian-American linguist. Born in Bucharest, he emigrated to the United States in 1938. In June 1950, he received a Master of Arts from Columbia University, where he studied under André Martinet. With funding from the Ford Foundation, he studied the Uralic and Altaic […]
“Child Murderess and Dead Child Traditions: A comparataive Study”
The comparative analysis of child murderess and dead child traditions in Irish and European folklore is the focus of this study. Drawing extensively from the Irish Folklore Collections housed at the Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin and citing a variety of folklore and documentary sources, this study explores Irish and European traditions concerned […]
“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 […]
“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. […]
“A Study of Eastern Moroccan Fairy Tales”
This book studies the structure and style of orally transmitted fairy tales from Eastern Morocco in Berber and dialectal Arabic. Drawing on materials collected in his own fieldwork and other sources, the author pays special attention to the aesthetics of the fairy tale as understood by Max Lüthi and to the analysis of tale-specific formulae. […]
“Collaborative Representations. Interpreting the Creation of a Sámi Ethnography and a Seto Epic”
CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS are constructed through interaction of cultural researchers and culture bearers. A study of collaborative processes that resulted in published representations of Sami and Seto traditional culture requires an exploration of the emerged voices and representational agencies, editorial activities and reception histories. The focus of this book revolves around two manifestly representative texts from […]
“Whom Does God Favor: the Wicked or the Righteous?”
In his research, Heda Jason aims to provide a detailed description of a subgenre of folk tales, namely stories about rewards and punishments. FF Communications 240
“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 […]
“Edige : A Karakalpak Oral Epic as performed by Jumabay Bazarov”
Edige is one of the most esteemed oral epics of the Karakalpaks, a Turkic-speaking people, who live on the mouth of the Amu Darya and the shores of the Aral Sea. Edige is a historical personage from the time of Timur at the turn of the 14th to the 15th century. He is considered the […]
“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 […]
“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 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 […]
“Reciprocity systems of the rural society in the Finnish-Karelian culture area: With special reference to social intercourse of the youth”
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 […]
“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 […]
“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 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 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 […]
