One tenth of the fairy tales in the Estonian Folklore Archives have been collected in Virumaa. The article gives an overview of the fairy tale types most widely spread in Virumaa: wondertales ATU 300, 301, 313, 327A, 403C, 409, 480, 650B, and animal tales ATU 117, 169*, 243. Some tales of magic less known elsewhere in Estonia (ATU 312D, 326, 650B) are inherent in Virumaa. The article dwells upon fairy tales including anthroponyms, which are rather exceptional among fairy tales, and also fairy tales that are related to concrete places in Virumaa. In spite of some eastern features especially prominent in four parishes of Ida(East)-Viru County, Virumaa fairy tale tradition generally belongs to northern Estonian fairy tale repository. By their strategies of name-using in fairy tales, Virumaa narrators have been similar to the ones elsewhere in Estonia. Although Virumaa fairy tales seem to include more place names than in Estonia on average, the most peculiar developments in this sphere often result, above all, from the style of concrete collectors.
In the first third of 19th century the romantic movement inspired interest in folklore. Folk art was collected, published and reworked by professional artists, especially as concerned epic folklore genres. Authentic legends, published in Vienna by Alois Mednyanský, include a romantic novella in a remarkable way utilising a folklore theme from two different European cultures. The study traces and analyses the folklore theme used for the story and tries to reconstruct the path through which the theme from the remote Scotland reached Mednyanský. The novella intentionally creates an impression to be a historic legend set in the times of Hussite wars, being interlaced with strongly pro-Catholic criticism of the period happenings. The story adopts the character of the Bohemian sorcerer called Žito 74 and uses elements of Moravian life and institutions. A Moravian patrician in the role of a romantic pilgrim sets off for a dangerous journey with a tragic end. The description of Scottish life documents profound knowledge and understanding of Scottish legends and local names by the author. In addition it documents period fascination with Scottish history. Past of the novella analyses the ritual of taghairm nan caht - its variants and functions in the traditional Gaelic culture - its description is the literary apogee of the novella and was probably taken over from the London paper The Literary Gazette.
The article focuses on the legend related to the Mongolian Jangar Epic that was collected by the scholar Benjamin Bergmann among the Kalmyks living in the Volga basin at the beginning of the 19th century and elaborates on the origins and transmission of the legend while scrutinizing its first edition.
„Reflections on Elephants‟ is a nature documentary film produced by „Wildlife Films Botswana‟ for the National Geographic Society. The movie was released in the United States on the 9th of February 1994. It is narrated by Stacy Keach, written and edited by the well-known south-African director of photography Dereck Joubert. The figurative language used by Dereck Joubert is surprisingly rich and blends nicely with the visual metaphors resulting in a flavory and watchable Sunday evening family film. The film captures the extraordinary journey of elephant herds through the bushes of North Botswana and their incredible capability of adaptation and understanding of the surrounding nature. Being „a symbol of the African wilderness‟ (Reflections on Elephants, approximately 3‟30”), the majestic African elephants „live out their isolation, slowly drawing life from the Earth‟s opened wounds‟ (approximately 3‟59‟‟) and „each movement is a calculated conservation of energy, each day, a tiny investment in a legend‟.„Reflections on Elephants‟ is a nature documentary film produced by „Wildlife Films Botswana‟ for the National Geographic Society. The movie was released in the United States on the 9th of February 1994. It is narrated by Stacy Keach, written and edited by the well-known south-African director of photography Dereck Joubert. The figurative language used by Dereck Joubert is surprisingly rich and blends nicely with the visual metaphors resulting in a flavory and watchable Sunday evening family film. The film captures the extraordinary journey of elephant herds through the bushes of North Botswana and their incredible capability of adaptation and understanding of the surrounding nature. Being „a symbol of the African wilderness‟ (Reflections on Elephants, approximately 3‟30”), the majestic African elephants „live out their isolation, slowly drawing life from the Earth‟s opened wounds‟ (approximately 3‟59‟‟) and „each movement is a calculated conservation of energy, each day, a tiny investment in a legend‟.
The objective of this article is to consider legends or oral narratives in Norway which deal with the Chudes. Who were the Chudes - an important nation acting in a particular historical context or a mythological image? In order to answer this question it is necessary to examine different references to the Chudes preserved in Norwegian legends and historical sources. Here I consider the following tasks: 1) to clarify the meaning of the word ‘Chude’ in Norwegian culture; 2) to analyze legends about the Chudes in order to pick out the main plot-constructing elements. Legends are narratives which claim to be true and are usually connected to well-known places and people. Migrating legends are narratives which have been narrated in many places and for a long period of time. This also concerns legends narrating about the Chudes. This article discusses the effect on the percentage of truth in the narratives. For fifteen years I have taken the lead in doing research work at UiT (The Arctic University of Norway), the Institute of Teacher Education and Pedagogy, where my students and I collected several hundred legends, mainly from Northern Norway. The reason why pedagogy students were involved in this work is that legends can be applied as a method of knowledge development. It will be helpful when the students become trained teachers and face their own pupils at primary and lower secondary schools. Interest in legends can strengthen skills and content awareness, being at the same time a gateway to establishing knowledge structures.
The aim of the article is to analyse the value of myth and legend in shaping historical policy. The activity of politicians and their influence on shaping historical policy is most often associated with political change, secession, reconstruction, or state renewal. The creators of these transformations seek to find historical connections in the past that would legitimise the changes and the purposefulness of the actions taken by the government. Historians play a considerable role in such endeavours; however, they should not forget historical truth, which may conflict with political needs.
Currently interest in Slavic and sometimes pagan culture is undergoing a Renaissance phase. It seems reasonable to remind that also in enlightenment writers willingly reached for these threads, reinterpreting them. Among them, it is worth paying attention to the tragedy Krakus of Jan Chodźko, preserved in fragments, which was created in 1804, during a period of intensified dramatic activity, initiated by a competition announced in 1803 by the Society of Friends of Sciences for a tragedy based on historical events. The article attempts to present the artistic vision of the enlightenment artist on the basis of art fragments published in „Journal Vilnius” and „Rubon”.
The author describes the origin of the first remembrance book devoted to Poznań 1956 protests, edited by Jarosław Maciejewski and Zofia Trojanowiczowa, professors of Polish at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and published during the “Solidarity carnival” of 1981. The essay describes attempts by those in power to stall the initiative, presents and comments on the content of the book, which was regarded by many readers as the “book of the year”. The essay also makes a number of statements on the reasons for the book’s success and its instantly legendary status.
The article entitled “Rafał Wojaczek: Advertisement in the Light of a Legend” is the first part of a draft which tries to describe a breakthrough moment, in which the biography of Rafał Wojaczek coincides with the beginning of his literary output. The author makes a central point of the formula: “advertisement is the engine of trade” (appearing in the notebook collecting his early poetical notes from the period of studies at Polish philology), which is placed in contrast to the statement by Julian Przyboś: “the art of a poem is the engine of poetry”. The author, examining the earlier editions of Wojaczek’s poems explains (using the sociological and philosophical apparatus) the mechanisms conditioning the phenomenon of the reception of his poetry. At the same time, he launches the notion of pre-reception, which-being a labile notion, situated in the borderland between reception and advertise-ment-indicates a dual position of an object, to which the pre-reception refers (presence and absence at the same time). This, in turn, announces the poetic strategy of Wojaczek, embracing the form and the subject matter of a poem (expressiveness against a precise structure of a poem), and foretells a subsequent part focusing on the question of the actual reception, taking into consideration the somatic character of his output as well as its autothematic involvement.
The article speaks about the depiction of the basilisk found in St. Isidore’s of Seville Etymologies. The surviving description greatly influenced the information on this snake found in mediaeval bestiaries and encyclopaedias. The portrayal is a remarkable example of the gradual mythicisation of the basilisk’s features. The process was partly caused by misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the source material. The article shows how the compilation of many different sources, from many historical periods, can create an extraordinary depiction of a creature that in its early descriptions was devoid of almost all of its fantastical characteristics.
The purpose of this article is to use North Norwegian legends and show how these oral stories have been used in the education at the Institute for Teacher Education and Pedagogic, University of Tromsø - Norway’s arctic university since the time I started this project at the end of the 1990s period. Here, there will be given a definition and expansion for the types of legends that exists, what was stated about it in the lecture plan (L97) at the time, and what created the basis for this research. An important part of this work was to collect legends in order to document this traditional material for later, as a contribution to North Norwegian cultural history and, thereby, as a gateway to establish knowledge structures.
The purpose of this article is to analyse a northern Norwegian legend. Working with legends will provide a cultural insight and can thus be a gateway to establish knowledge structures. The main purpose of this paper is to reveal some of the diversity that a legend contains, and show that an analysis of this type of text can be a tool for dissemination and discovery learning. The analysis in this article is made from a multi-perspective approach: a literary perspective, religion, historical, mythical and folkloric perspective. The word legend is characterized in Norway as religious texts. The proper Norwegian term for the text being analysed here is actually “sagn”. However, I choose here in the English language to use the word legend instead.
Among worlds. Alpine mountain nymphs called Salige in the works of Paula Grogger The subject of this article concerns the images of alpine nymphs popular in Alpine mythology and called Salige in selected works by the Austrian writer Paula Grogger (1892–1984): in the legend Das salige Kind (1929) and in the novel Das Grimmingtor (1926). In alpine stories these nymphs are the guardians of mountain nature and the embodiment of the pre-Christian Great Goddess. In the works discussed here, the real world permeates with the metaphysical world: the first presents the attempt of the peaceful coexistence of the nymph and the people, and the second emphasizes its role as a guide into the underworld. The analysis was inspired by the theory of landscape mythology, which combines historical and archaeological facts, with a description of the folklore of the area, stories and solemnities, local names and lay of the land in order to obtain the most comprehensive analysis of cultural texts.
The present study aims to analyse one of the most complex Ancient sources that enable us to study not only history and geography, but – as will be explained – also the ethnology of the life in ancient Greece and Rome, not only in the second century A.D., but in the older periods as well. The great quantity of folklore data is compartmentalized according to the types of literary folklore forms. This system is introduced by the researcher, as the Antiquity did not use such categorizations. The source contains a great number of tales and legends, fewer small folklore forms and also many topics known from later fairy tales. The concluding part of the article focuses on the importance of Pausanias’ work for the culture of the Antiquity in general and to the parallels with similar works produced in the Czech milieu in the nineteenth century.
The article focuses on the analysis of collections of fairy tales and legends of the Czech revivalist Božena Němcová, especially those in the Czech language. The specific clusters of tales are being analyzed one by one, as for the frequency of textual emendations made by B. Němcová. The most modified were the magical tales, less modified the anecdotic and humoristic ones, only slight changes were applied to animal, legendary and cumulative tales. All the changes correspond to the „mythological school“ of her time, but unlike Erben Němcová did not sought for the mythological origins of the texts, but rather aimed at expanding them and adapting them in accord with the conviction of the Czech National Movement on the crucial importance of the popular culture
The article attempts to illustrate the folk motif of bringing objects and people to life by means of drawing them. Such an act of creation has not yet been classified as an independent motif of oral folklore, so the working term: “the creation by drawing motif” was chosen. Examples of the implementation of the motif have been found in various genres of Polish, Ukrainian and Russian folklore (porquoi stories, heroic tales, magical fairy tales, humorous fairy tales), Polish e-folklore (demotivators) and in children’s literature and cinematography (Polish and Russian). This motif is present in cultural texts with different broadcasting intentions – informative (porquoi stories), ludic (humoresques, demotivators), compensatory (heroic legends, magical fairy tales), didactic (children’s literature and cinematography) and nostalgic (demotivators). The permanence of the creation by drawing motif in various cultural texts results from the universal longing for the possibility of a quick fulfilment of desires and improvement of one’s own life or the world.
PL
W artykule podjęta została próba egzemplifikacji ludowego motywu ożywiania przedmiotów oraz ludzi przez rysunek. Taki akt kreacji nie został dotychczas sklasyfikowany jako odrębny motyw ustnego folkloru, dlatego przyjęto termin roboczy „motyw kreacji przez rysunek”. Przykłady realizacji motywu odnaleziono w gatunkach polskiego, ukraińskiego i rosyjskiego folkloru (legendy ajtiologiczne, legendy bohaterskie, bajki magiczne, bajki humorystyczne), polskiego e-folkloru (demotywatory) oraz w polskiej i rosyjskiej literaturze i kinematografii dla dzieci. Motyw kreacji przez rysunek jest obecny w tekstach kultury o różnej intencji nadawczej – informacyjnej (legendy ajtiologiczne, legendy o bohaterach), ludycznej (humoreski, demotywatory), kompensacyjnej (bajka magiczna), dydaktycznej (literatura i kinematografia dziecięca) i nostalgicznej (demotywatory). Trwałość motywu kreacji przez rysunek w różnych tekstach kultury wynika z uniwersalnej tęsknoty człowieka za możliwością szybkiej realizacji pragnień i poprawy własnego życia lub świata.
Święci Pańscy wskazują nam, jak zmierzać do Boga poprzez ciągłą pracę nad sobą i świadectwo życia. Stanowią specyficzne narzędzie oddziaływania Boga, który przez przykład życia czczonych w liturgii, wzbudza w sercach wiernych pragnienie wcielania w czyn Ewangelii. Autor artykułu zwrócił uwagę, że chrześcijański kult świętych jest wciąż aktualny. W niniejszym artykule podjęto próbę krótkiej syntezy rozwoju kultu św. Jadwigi Śląskiej na ziemi wielkopolskiej. Na podstawie dostępnych materiałów i opracowań ukazano rys historyczny i kwestię rozumienia kultu świętych we wspólnocie kościoła, przedstawiono życie i działalność księżnej Śląska, jej kanonizację, rozwój kultu po śmierci i wpływ jej życia na pobożność średniowieczną. Następnie przedstawiono rozwój kultu świętej w Wielkopolsce od kanonizacji do lat 50 –tych XX w. oraz następstwa kultu w pobożności ludowej, w postaci legend, które stworzono na ziemi poznańskiej na przestrzeni dziejów.
EN
Saints of the Lord show us, how to reach God through the continuous work on ourselves and the testimony of life. They are a specific tool for the influence of God, who, through the example of life of the venerated in the liturgy, arouses in the hearts of the worshippers the desire to incarnate in the Gospel deed. The author of the article took notice that the Christian cult of saints is still valid. This article shows a short synthesis of the cult of St. Hedwig of Silesia in Greater Poland. On the basis of available sources, a historical outline and the issue of understanding the cult of saints in the church community were presented as well as the life and work of the Princess of Silesia, her canonization, the development of worship after her death and the impact of her life on medieval piety were presented. Moreover, the development of sacred worship in Greater Poland from the canonization up to the 1950s and the sequence of worship in popular piety, in the form of legends, which were created in the region of Poznań throughout the history, were presented.
The aim of the study is to cast doubt on the exposition of the second quarter of the seventeenth century as a time when emigration deprived the Czech lands of readers with higher literary requirements. Proof of this thesis includes the artistic and literary activities of the Prague Monastery of the Barefoot Augustinians at Zderaz, especially a book about St. Wenceslas, published in Czech (1643), German (1643), and Latin (1644). Addressing the question of the adequate narrative representation of the past, the book adopts an even-handed position on the visual and textual components. Moreover, every part of the three-part structured chapters calls for different modes of reception. A more proficient reading literacy is also required.
During his exile at island of Saint Helena, Napoleon is condemned to look back upon his life. Le Mémorial, dictated by Napoleon and edited by Las Cases, is the very foundation of Napoleonian legend. Napoleon mentions the ingratitude of those monarchs which he installed to the throne himself and who later denied him. The work is the bases of the legend that oscillates between monarchy and citizenship, the king and the nation and the dictatorship and liberty. As a literary work Le Mémorial inspired Musset, Chateaubriand, Mme de Staël, Bourrienne, la duchesse d’Abrantès, Balzac, Mme de Rémusat and many others. It has also influenced all European cultures, including Czech literature. The one, who “changed the world” died in solitude and obscurity, in deep meditation about his own failure.
What is presented in study is the completed project “Explore culture of the region or storytelling with Bison the Animal” – artistic and educational workshops for young schoolchildren, as an attractive proposal for educational activities. The main purpose of the meetings was to introduce children to the culture of the region by reading them the legends of Podlasie.
PL
Przedstawiam zrealizowany projekt „Poznaj kulturę regionu, czyli bajanie z Żubrozwierzem” – warsztaty artystyczno-edukacyjne dla dzieci w wieku wczesnoszkolnym, jako atrakcyjną propozycję zajęć edukacyjnych. Głównym celem spotkań było przybliżenie dzieciom wielokulturowego bogactwa regionu i jego tradycji poprzez czytanie legend Podlasia.
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