Propp Revisited: A Structural Analysis of Vuk Karadžić’s Collection Serbian Folk Fairy Tales

Abstract

Summary In the mid-19th century Vuk Stefanović Karadžić collected folk tales in the broader South-Slavic region and published them in a collection titled Serbian Folk Tales. Folk fairy tales make the major part of the collection. In this paper, the authors determine the folk fairy tale structure according to the methodology proposed by Vladimir Propp in the Morphology of the Folktale. The aim of the paper is to investigate, whether these fairy tales can be fully described using Propp’s Morphology. Propp’s model of the meta-folk fairy tale was developed inductively based on a rich, comprehensive, yet limited, corpus of Russian folk fairy tales, which opens up space for further testing of the proposed model. The hypothesis was set that the analyzed folk fairy tales completely conform to the plot structure of the meta-folk fairy tale with a maximum of 31 functions as proposed by Propp. The hypothesis is grounded in: 1. the time when the folktales were collected (mid-19th century, the same time as the Russian collection analyzed by Propp) and 2. the similarity of the South Slavic peoples with the peoples of the Slavic East. However, after categorial and structural analyses of the corpus were performed, it was clear that the hypothesis could not be accepted in its entirety. In the analyzed folk fairy tales, no new functions were found as compared to the 31 functions identified by Propp, but some of these functions were altered as compared to those to be expected in folk tales. This alteration occurred not only regarding the changed order of functions, assimilation and cases of dual morphological meanings of functions, but also in terms of the fantastic category of the marvelous, which is the core feature of the fairy tale genre, whose nature was changed. The study identified the rationalization of some magical motifs, which partially mitigates the quality of the miraculous in the fairy tale and found out that, in some cases, the marvelous was mitigated and “shifted” towards the (merely) fantastic. This was achieved by introducing oniric elements. One of the important conclusions of our study of the fairy tale is that these fairy tales, although labeled as folk tales, feature significant authorial intervention.