The First Oral Folk Tale Ever?

Fabula ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 316-334
Author(s):  
Ole Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
First Record ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Folk Tale ◽  
Folk Tradition

AbstractMs. Uppsala E.8 contains an incomplete version of the wonder tale ATU 510B, Donkey-Skin, taken down from oral performance in 1612. Though briefly mentioned in reference works it is largely ignored and has not been translated before. Other than being the first known version of the tale and of the motif Three Magical Dresses known from the Cinderella cycle it is probably the first record anywhere of a folktale taken down from an oral source, as demonstrated by its form. It also appears to be the only folktale manifestation of the motif Three Animal Opponents, known prominently from Dante’s Commedia. Complete versions of the tale come from Scandinavian nineteenth-century folk tradition in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Some of these have the incest motif (The Unnatural Father) common to ATU 510 B, while others, including the 1612 fragment, do not: these tell of a farmer or similar who wants to give his daughter to a man she does not want, not of a widowed king pretending a marriage with his own child. In both cases the heroine escapes from home, assisted by a magical Animal Helper. An early fourteenth-century version as a non-magical novella is found in the Florentine collection Il Pecorone; there is also a loose connection to Straparola’s novella Tebaldo – the latter with, the former without the incest motif. Furthermore, the existence of the tale is one of several obstacles to Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s controversial theory that wonder tales were a sixteenth-century urban creation in print rather than a European oral tradition.

Kings, Titles, and Quarters: A Conjectural History of Ilesha I: The Traditions Reviewed

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 109-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.D.Y. Peel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Regional Centers ◽  
Conjectural History ◽  
The Town

This is an essay in conjectural history. Its subject is Ilesha, the capital of Ijesha, one of the larger Yoruba kingdoms, founded probably in the early sixteenth century roughly midway between the larger regional centers of Oyo and Benin. Except for some cursory references to Ijesha rescued from slavery in Sierra Leone in the early nineteenth century, there is absolutely no positive contemporary evidence, whether documentary or archeological, until Europeans first visited the town in 1858. Thereafter, since Ilesha was the leading member of the Ekitiparapo alliance which fought Ibadan to a standstill in the 1880s, contemporary documentation becomes fairly abundant. But my concern here is with the evolution of Ilesha's socio-political structure, with what has since come to be considered its “traditional” constitution, over roughly three centuries up to the third quarter of the nineteenth century. For that, virtually all our evidence lies in what people have said and done since the 1880s.African historians have perforce relied greatly on such evidence and since Vansina's Oral Tradition they have been able to use it both more confidently and more critically, especially in the area of Bantu Africa. My fellow sociologists, however, remain more radically sceptical. Despite their admission of the need for history, they have learned too well how dynastic tradition and legends of origin tend to serve as “characters” for contemporary arrangements and need primary interpretation in the light of this -- and have often concretely illustrated the point with devastating and, for those desirous of using oral traditions for historical ends, depressing effect.

The Badkhn: From Wedding Stage to Writing Desk

2003 ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Ariela Krasney
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Other ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Fixed System ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter discusses two key roles of the traditional Jewish entertainer known as the badkhn: as a performer on the wedding stage (bimah) at Jewish weddings and as the author of published versions of such performances. It examines, first, the badkhn's techniques of expression and, second, the process through which, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the badkhn's work began to move from oral performance to written literature. The badkhn first emerged in Europe during the Middle Ages alongside comparable artists among other peoples. As Jewish society and Judaism evolved from the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, the badkhn adapted himself to the changing conditions. By the nineteenth century, his identity had crystallized into that of a figure with two faces: one of riotous, chaotic, topsy-turvy jesting, rooted in ancient sacrificial traditions surrounding the god Dionysus and evincing a tendency towards social subversiveness; and the other of conservative, learned discourse rooted in the fixed system of halakhic mitsvot and serving as a mouthpiece for them.

Grimm Legacies

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Zipes
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Folk Tales ◽  
Brothers Grimm ◽  
Folk Tale ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Standards ◽  
Wilhelm Grimm

This book explores the legacy of the Brothers Grimm in Europe and North America, from the nineteenth century to the present. The book reveals how the Grimms came to play a pivotal and unusual role in the evolution of Western folklore and in the history of the most significant cultural genre in the world—the fairy tale. Folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm sought to discover and preserve a rich abundance of stories emanating from an oral tradition, and encouraged friends, colleagues, and strangers to gather and share these tales. As a result, hundreds of thousands of wonderful folk and fairy tales poured into books throughout Europe and have kept coming. The book looks at the transformation of the Grimms' tales into children's literature, the Americanization of the tales, the “Grimm” aspects of contemporary tales, and the tales' utopian impulses. It shows that the Grimms were not the first scholars to turn their attention to folk tales, but were vital in expanding readership and setting the high standards for folk-tale collecting that continue through the current era. The book concludes with a look at contemporary adaptations of the tales and raises questions about authenticity, target audience, and consumerism. The book examines the lasting universal influence of two brothers and their collected tales on today's storytelling world.

MYTHOLOGIZING YORUBA ORATURE: LOBOTO MIZING SWIVELLED PULSES OF LAUGHTER IN NIYI OSUNDARE’S WAITING LAUGHTERS AND REMI RAJI’S A HARVEST OF LAUGHTERS

Imbizo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-42
Author(s):  
Niyi Akingbe
Keyword(s):  
Seasonal Variations ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Oral Poetry ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Momentary Happiness ◽  
Political Turmoil

Every literary work emerges from the particular alternatives of its time. This is ostensibly reflected in the attempted innovative renderings of these alternatives in the poetry of contemporary Nigerian poets of Yoruba extraction. Discernible in the poetry of Niyi Osundare and Remi Raji is the shaping and ordering of the linguistic appurtenances of the Yoruba orature, which themselves are sublimely rooted in the proverbial, chants, anecdotes, songs and praises derived from the Yoruba oral poetry of Ijala, Orin Agbe, Ese Ifa, Rara, folklore as well as from other elements of oral performance. This engagement with the Yoruba oral tradition significantly permeates the poetics of Niyi Osundare’s Waiting laughters and Remi Raji’s A Harvest of Laughters. In these anthologies, both Osundare and Raji traverse the cliffs and valleys of the contemporary Nigerian milieu to distil the social changes rendered in the Yoruba proverbial, as well as its chants and verbal formulae, all of which mutate from momentary happiness into an enduring anomie grounded in seasonal variations in agricultural production, ruinous political turmoil, suspense and a harvest of unresolved, mysterious deaths. The article is primarily concerned with how the African oral tradition has been harnessed by Osundare and Raji to construct an avalanche of damning, peculiarly Nigerian, socio-political upheavals (which are essentially delineated by the signification of laughter/s) and display these in relation to the country’s variegated ecology.

Hymnody and Liturgy

2019 ◽  
pp. 491-506
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Metrical Psalmody ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.

scholarly journals The Reception of Petrarch’s Africa in Fascist Italy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Asad Abijuwa Agbamu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
Second Punic War ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

AbstractIn his 1877 Storia della letteratura (History of Literature), Luigi Settembrini wrote that Petrarch’s fourteenth-century poem, the Africa, ‘is forgotten …; very few have read it, and it was judged—I don’t know when and by whom—a paltry thing’. Yet, just four decades later, the early Renaissance poet’s epic of the Second Punic War, written in Latin hexameters, was being promoted as the national poem of Italy by eminent classical scholar, Nicola Festa, who published the only critical edition of the epic in 1926. This article uncovers the hitherto untold story of the revival of Petrarch’s poetic retelling of Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal in Fascist Italy, and its role in promoting ideas of nation and empire during the Fascist period in Italy. After briefly outlining the Africa’s increasing popularity in the nineteenth century, I consider some key publications that contributed to the revival of the poem under Fascism. I proceed chronologically to show how the Africa was shaped into a poem of the Italian nation, and later, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, of Italy’s new Roman Empire. I suggest that the contestations over the significance of the Africa during the Fascist period, over whether it was a national poem of Roman revival or a poem of the universal ideal of empire, demonstrate more profound tensions in how Italian Fascism saw itself.

The Canons of John Mauropous

1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Hussey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
John Chrysostom ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time ◽  
Service Books

John Mauropous, an eleventh-century Metropolitan of Euchaïta, has long been commemorated in the service books of the Orthodox Church. The Synaxarion for the Office of Orthros on 30th January, the day dedicated to the Three Fathers, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. John Chrysostom, tells how the festival was instituted by Mauropous and describes him as ‘the well-known John, a man of great repute and well-versed in the learning of the Hellenes, as his writings show, and moreover one who has attained to the highest virtue’. In western Europe something was known of him certainly as early as the end of the sixteenth century; his iambic poems were published for the first time by an Englishman in 1610, and his ‘Vita S. Dorothei’ in the Acta Sanctorum in 1695. But it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that scholars were really able to form some idea of the character and achievement of this Metropolitan of Euchaïta. Particularly important were two publications: Sathas' edition in 1876 of Michael Psellus' oration on John, and Paul de Lagarde's edition in 1882 of some of John's own writings. This last contained not only the works already printed, but a number of hitherto unpublished sermons and letters, together with the constitution of the Faculty of Law in the University of Constantinople, and a short introduction containing part of an etymological poem. But there remained, and still remains, one significant omission: John's canons have been almost consistently neglected.

Probability—the difficulties of definition.

1951 ◽  
Vol 10 (03) ◽  
pp. 204-212
Author(s):  
S. R. Searle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Marine Insurance ◽  
Good System ◽  
Vital Importance ◽  
Fields Of Study ◽  
The Subject

Although the subject of probability is of such vital importance to insurance, no great detailed study was given to it until the sixteenth century. This was nearly two thousand years after the world's first insurance venture, that of Antimenes on behalf of Greek slave-owners against loss of their slaves (the early Greeks had also a good system of marine insurance). As in many fields of study, the early students of probability met with a great deal of opposition, which must have extended well into the nineteenth century, judging from the evidence of de Morgan's book of 1838.

scholarly journals Autour de la figure de Marie Stuart

Nordlit ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 121
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Le Baillif
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century

The Sixteenth century constitutes an inspiration for writers of the nineteenth century. My paper is based on two works: Jean de Virey’s tragédie: Jeanne d’Arques published in 1600; Le quadrille de la duchesse de Berry which took place in 1829. In both the life of Marie, Queen of Scots, is given a political meaning: she was a woman who made herself conspicuous and consequently became a symbol of decadent power.

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