FFC 304

Theoretical Milestones: Selected Writings of Lauri Honko, edited by Pekka Hakamies and Anneli Honko

Lauri Honko (1932–2002) was among the leading folklorists of his time. In particular, he developed theories and concepts relating to folk belief, genre and epic. The present collection represents a selection of Honko’s key articles, which he considered worthy of republication himself. They relate to Honko’s own research, to the debates and discussions he took part in; some are introductions to article collections produced by groups of researchers.

Honko’s writings combine a typically strong empiricism with clear theoretical thought. His own theoretical framework was above all one of functionalism, within which he united other currents within folkloristics, such as ‘composition in performance’, ‘ecology of tradition’ and ‘textualisation’. He was occupied by the question of how the individual performer used folklore, be he a teller of proverbs or jokes, a singer of oral poetry or a producer of written epic.

Honko was at no stage a representative of the traditional ‘Finnish school’ of folklore research, and origins and developments were a research challenge to him particularly from the perspective of how folklore adapts in different ways to its setting and circumstances of performance by means of variation, and how regularity may be discerned within this.

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FFC 303

G. A. Megas, Anna Angelopoulos, Aigli Brouskou, Marianthi Kaplanoglou, Emmanouela Katrinaki: Catalogue of Greek Magic Folktales

The Catalogue of Greek Magic Folktales comprises an epitome in the English language of the ‘Greek Catalogue of Magic Tales’ published originally in five volumes in the Greek language. The collected texts cover a period of more than a century of recordings (from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the mid-1970s) and geographically cover not only the entire Greek territory and Cyprus but also other areas where Greek populations live(d) and Greek cultures thrive(d) (Asia Minor, Pontus­, Cappadocia, Southern Italy). It was Georgios A. Megas, the eminent folklorist, who drafted the first (unpublished) catalogue, gathering and indexing all published and unpublished Greek folktale versions, so that the number of texts finally exceeded 23 000. A group of specialists continued for nearly 30 years carrying this project, consulting, classifying, and commenting G. Megas’ handwritten card indexes, and finally edit­ing this rich material, scattered in public and private archives.

May this Catalogue of Greek Magic Folktales, in its English edition, serve as a useful tool for future comparative research.

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FF Network 42 (December 2012)

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FFC 302

Alexandra Bergholm: From Shaman to Saint: Interpretive strategies in the study of Buile Shuibhne

A shaman, a saint, a remorseful penitent, or a mad novice? Since the publication of J. G. O’Keeffe’s edition of the medieval Irish text Buile Shuibhne­ in 1913, the enigmatic presentation of its main protagonist Suibhne Geilt has become a subject of a plurality of scholarly analyses, which have sought to understand the true nature of his madness. 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. The examination of four prevalent interpretative frameworks – historical, pre-Christian, Christian, and anthropological – relates theoretical conceptions of literary theory, comparative religion and historiography to the study of medieval narrative material, by considering the nature of different methodological presuppositions that have guided the scholars’ understanding of the tale’s meaning. The integration of issues relating to text, context, and interpretation raises the issue of communally shared reading strategies in the explication of interpretive variety, thereby highlighting the importance of asking not only what a text means, but also how it means.

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FFC 301

Merrill Kaplan: 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 scene appearfour times in the fourteenth-century manuscript Flateyjarbók. Thou Fearful Guest analyzes how these episodes create meaning by their connections to custom, law, myth, discourses of historical and spiritual truth, typological understandings of time, and the historical context of the manuscript in which they appear. Thou Fearful Guest explores how and to what end medieval Icelanders thought about tales of heathen gods and heroes.

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FF Network 41 (December 2011)

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FF Network 40 (June 2011)

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FFC 284–286 reprinted

Hans-Jörg Uther: The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. 3 vols. First printing 2004, second printing 2011.

The catalog of international tale types (ATU) based on the system of Aarne/Thompson constitutes a fundamentally new edition with extensive additions and innovations. The descriptions of the tale types have been completely rewritten and made more precise. The essential research cited for each type includes extensive documentation of its international distribution as well as monographic works or articles on that type. More than two hundred and fifty new types have been added. Types with very limited distribution have been omitted. A detailed subject index includes the most important subjects, actions, and other motifs, including actors and settings.

Part I: Animal Tales, Tales of Magic, Religious Tales, and Realistic Tales, with an Introduction. 619 pp. Part II: Tales of the Stupid Ogre, Anecdotes and Jokes, and Formula Tales. 536 pp. Part III: Appendices. 285 pp.

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FFC 300

Bengt af Klintberg: The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend

The documentation of folk legends in Sweden was begun already in the sixteenth century by Olaus Magnus, the last Catholic archbishop, and reached its peak as late as in the first half of the twentieth century. This rich material has hitherto been accessible to international study only to a limited degree. The over 1800 legend types listed in the present catalogue give a vivid picture of the Swedish peasant society with its trolls, ghosts and witches and illustrates its concept of history. The index is based on unprinted records in the four largest folklore archives of Sweden and about 150 printed sources, covering all provinces in Sweden and the Swedish-speaking parts of Finland. Each section of the catalogue contains an introduction, in which the general background of the legends is described.

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FFC 299

Timo Kaartinen: Songs of Travel, Stories of Place. Poetics of Absence in an Eastern Indonesian Society

This book explores narratives of people who trace their origin to Banda, the famous Nutmeg Islands of Eastern Indonesia. They were displaced from their ancient homeland by the Dutch colonization of Banda in 1621 and carry on their language and traditions in the village described in this study. The Bandanese continue traveling to distant places in pursuit of recognition by their ancestral allies. They bring their past into life through rituals and verbal arts which commemorate absent travelers and anticipate their return.

The expressive genres of the Bandanese force us to ask what counts as history and how people’s own interpretations of world-scale political events shape their predicaments and possibilities of action. This book argues that ethno-history can be a source of exemplary acts which inform collective responses to new circumstances. The folk poetry of the Bandanese is neither a subaltern reaction to colonial contacts and state interventions nor evidence of their hegemonic effects. It places real, historical events in several chronotopic frameworks in which they are relived as memory and given a total meaning as history. By analyzing poetic expressions and their effects on society this book contributes to the efforts of anthropologists to historicize the ethnographic realities they study.

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