I just finished reading 494 pages of indo-european folktales...

[JVS]

ask me anything.

[HEyHEY]

1. Jeez, I can't think of anything

[JVS]

2. Would you like to borrow the book sometime?

494 pages of rich folktale goodness. You could use some of the folktales as filler whenever your paper is short.

[HEyHEY]

3. I'll put your byline on it too

:-)

[JVS]

5. This just in from J. and W. Grimm in Frankfurt

The Rose
Once there was a poor woman who had two children. The youngest one had to go into the forest everyday to fetch wood. Once when he had gon a very long way to find wood, a child who was very little but very strong came to him and helped him gather the wood and carried it up to his house, but then in the wink of an eye he disappeared. The child told his mother about this, but she didn't believe him. Finally the child brought a rose and said that the beautiful child had given it to him and that when the rose was in full blossom he would come again. The mother placed the rose into water. One morning the child did not get up; the mother went to his bed and found him lying there dead. On the same morning the rose came into full blossom.

[HEyHEY]

7. More details as they arrive

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

15. The Brothers Grimm?

Kinder-und-Hausmarchen.

Supposedly collected from the Hessian peasantry, but I read somewhere that the Grimms had borrowed from French sources too.

But these all go back to some Indo European source?

[patcox2]

4. Since indo-european was never written, how were these tales preserved?

For starters.

[JVS]

6. orally

[patcox2]

8. Please name this book

I am fascinated; are you using indo-european in a different sense than I am? There is no evidence of oral transmission of any tales from the time when indo-earopean was spoken to today; its not possible, the tales cannot be transmitted in a dead langauge (the only thing close I have heard is that australian aborigines do have legends and tales which may go back 30,000 years or so, but that is an exceptional case, an extremely conservative culture which has little changed over that time).

[JVS]

9. Voices from the Past. The Cycle of life in Indo-European Folktales

By D. L. Ashliman. I think I am using the term "indo-european" in a different sense. In this book are stories from different Indo-european languages that although being from very different regions have the same theme. For example, there are extreme similarities between the tale of "True and Untrue" from Norway and the tale of "Dharmabuddi and Papabuddhi" from India.

[patcox2]

10. Wow, seriously.

I studied (undergrad, just part of a basic linguistics course) indo-european as a language, but I had no idea that there were comparisons of folktales suggesting the tales had common roots as old as the language itself. I am fascinated that orally transmitted materials can cross such spans of time. Or is it that they are the results of the jungian collective unconscious? Either way, cool.

I often wonder if the only living oral transmission tradition in our society right now is the little rhymes kids recite, the ones you don't learn in books, like "ta ra la boom dee aye, my teacher died today . . ." Kids don't get that from books, its passed from child to child. I was surprised to read in Mencken's autobiography that in 1890 in Baltimore he sang some of the same songs I did in the 1960s.

[JVS]

11. One of the most common oral transmission forms in our current ...

society is joking. Particularly dirty jokes that are often transmitted without ever being written down.

[Snow]

13. Fascinating stuff, and oral folklore is a little-respected area,

unless you've ever been in a society that still has the oral tradition going. I've heard that the homeric tales were originally sung, and what better memory aid than to have a tune to help? There's tons of interesting folk tales in the american indian culture, all oral tradition.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. Any Latvian folktales in which the sun is portrayed as a woman?

That's a common theme in Latvian folksongs, the sun as a beautiful woman.

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

14. Are you Latvian? The baltic cultures are interesting.

Ive read that the Lithuanians where the last Europeans to convert to Christianity, well into the Middle Ages.