Group Of Tales Research Articles

Музыка в северо-хантыйских сказках

The paper describes the musical component in the folktales of the Northern Khanty. The work is based on published and unpublished sources. The author selected eighteen samples of folktales in three formats: sound recording, text transcript, and translation. Three basic types of intonating in the Khanty folktale were identified: singing, speech, rhythmized speech. Singing, in this case, is considered as intonating, intermediate between vocalization and speech. It can be shown in the musical notation indicating the pitch and rhythm. Rhythmized speech can be written without transmitting the sound pitch. Based on segmentation, the author analyzed the structure of folktales, determined the role of musical episodes and the specifics of tunes. As a result, it was established that the Northern Khanty folktale with music has two genre varieties (subgenres): a sung folktale and a folktale with musical (sung) episodes. The first variety is sung from beginning to end, with its tunes correlating with the epic nature of the narration. The second variety includes introductory tunes on the jaw’s harp, episodes with singing, with rhythmized speech, with a clear rhythmic formula in its tunes. The melodies from the group of tales about the greedy mouse are similar to the songs performed in dramatic performances at the Bear-Feast. Music in folktales acts as a differentiating factor within the genre and also shows the ambiguity of the boundaries between genres of the Northern Khanty folklore.

The Relation between Sasak and Samawa Folktales: Comparative Literature to Multicultural Education

There are three problems which would like to be answered. They are (1) relation between Sasak and Samawa folk folktales; (2) the description of Sasak and Samawa people based on the folktales; and (3) the use of the folktales’ relation which gives the description of both people as the basis of the application of multicultural educational values. Problems answered using Levi-Strauss structural theory which says that tale is the gate of understanding the people. The folktales used as data are (1) Batu Goloq (Sasak) and Batu Plantolan (Samawa); Mandalika (Sasak) and Lala Buntar (Samawa); and (3) Tegodek dait Tetuntel (Sasak) and Ne Bote Ne Kakura (Samawa). Data gathered through library research followed by triangulation by reconfirming to the respondents to have more valid data. Data were analyzed using Levi-Strauss steps: (1) determining the miteme, (2) arranging the miteme syntactically and paradigmatically, (3) comparing the miteme to see the similarities and differences, (4) interpreting using those groups by using logical reasoning of both people, and (5) making different logical reasoning as the material of the application of multicultural educational values. It is found that the relation of each group of tales showed a consistency in similarities and differences. Batu Goloq and Batu Plantolan give a description that Sasak people tend to solve the problems by themselves as the consequence of the closed, while Samawa people tend to invite others as the consequence of the opened. The same characters found in Mandalika and Lala Buntar specifically in miteme processing in taking a decision and solving problems. Mandalika told as a closed one, while Lala Buntar is opened one in deciding and solving her problems. The comparison toward Tegodek dait Tetuntel and Ne Bote Ne Kakura describe hidden protest of Sasak and Samawa. It is the manifestation of the same view toward refusal and disagreement to the oppression done by high-status people. These descriptions of Sasak and Samawa could be used as the material of application of multicultural educational values to students through careful guiding of finding a description of comparison of Sasak and Samawa folktales.

The Forgotten Text of Nikolai Golovin: New Light on the Igor Tale

Sometime around 1792, a collector of antiquities in the service of Catherine the Great discovered a compendium of ancient texts, including a unique secular tale (Slovo o polku Igoreve —The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, or simply the Igor Tale) that was rooted in events of the twelfth century. It was a splendid epic poem about the defeat of Igor Sviatoslavich, Prince of NovgorodSeversk, at the hands of the Polovtsy, a steppe people who were later displaced and assimilated by the Mongol hordes. The text of the Igor Tale was published in 1800, twelve years before the manuscript itself was destroyed during the Napoleonic occupation of Moscow. As decades passed, scholars began to find textual parallels to passages in the Igor Tale— especially in a group of literary tales about Moscow’s first great victory over the Mongols on Kulikovo Field in 1380. This group of tales is customarily referred to as the Kulikovo Cycle. It includes two distinct chronical accounts of the Kulikovo Battle, five more or less complete versions of a “poetic” tale about the battle (Zadonshchina, or The Battle Beyond the Don), and a much longer, more sober tale extolling the Russian Church and the victorious Russian armies (Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche, or Tale of the Battle against Mamai). The Skazanie has numerous redactions and has survived in over 100 manuscript copies. It is clearly the work of lettered authors who appear to have inserted occasional passages from the more poetic and dynamic Zadonshchina into their comparatively dry narrative.1 Nearly all specialists in early Russian history and literature have viewed the Zadonshchina as a literary imitation, or stylization, of the older Igor Tale. The Zadonshchina mirrors the Igor Tale in style and structure as well as in its phrasing. Because the Igor Tale is the only work of its kind to reach us from the early Kievan period, the tale must be studied in conjunction with the works of the Kulikovo Cycle—the tales that are most closely connected with it. Oral Tradition, 26/1 (2011): 145-158

Narrative Form and the Structure of Myth

At each stage in transmission of a tale from generation to generation, modifica- tions take place but something remains. Thus there is a potential for material to be retained from a time in the distant past when the narrative was embedded in a total oral worldview or cosmology. This article introduces the analogical discovery method and uses it to build up a structure based on a group of tales from Greece, Ireland and Wales. It draws the conclu- sion that the structure of myth that is indirectly discernible through them deals with four generations, both of gods and of humans, the last of which contains the king. It agrees with the view proposed by Georges Dumezil that myth reflects human social organisation and argues in addition that matrilineal succession to kingship provides a good fit with the tales. The suggestion is put forward that there was a total, quite complex, cosmological code of which narratives retain traces and that scholars today have the opportunity of deciphering it.

The Hair and the Dog

AT first it was somewhat startling to discover close parallels between a group of tales about deer-hunters in the Scottish Highlands who encountered supernatural women in the mountains, and another series of hunting tales from the Caucasus which dealt with similar themes. It seemed worthwhile to compare these two sets of tales and to consider two main problems. First there is that of distribution since, in Britain, the Scottish tales seem to be confined to the Highland region and no similar examples have appeared from the Lowlands or from England and Wales. The second and major point of interest for the authors is the interpretation of the nature of the supernatural women who play a part in the tales. The Scottish tales were mostly recorded at the end of the nineteenth century. James MacDougall, minister at Duror from 1871 until his death in 1906, took down a number in Gaelic and these, together with his English translations, are found in a collection entitled Folk Tales and Fairy Lore, edited by his friend George Calder, minister at Strathfillan, and published in 1910.' Some similar tales are told by J. G. Campbell, minister at Tiree, in Superstitions of the Highlands, which was published in 1900.2 All three were keenly interested in local folklore and Celtic studies and Calder is described by Alan Bruford as a 'conscientious and scholarly editor' and a trained Celtic scholar.3 Some of the tales were told of well known local hunters, such as Donald MacIan, famous for his great skill with the bow.4 The supernatural woman in the mountains is usually called a hag or glaistig, and is represented as the guardian of the deer, which she herds and milks. She sometimes resents the shooting of her animals by the hunter, particularly if he kills the hinds. James MacDougall records a tale about Donald Cameron, who was told by the glaistig of Buinach not to be so heavy on the hinds, but in this case Donald was quick with his answer: 'I never killed a hind where I could find a stag, and he had no further trouble with the tall glaistig whom he met driving a herd of hinds through the forest.5 Sometimes, however, the glaistig might permit one of her animals to be shot. Donald MacIan of Lochaber got the better of her with the help of his dogs and he was allowed to shoot the White Hind, which he had long pursued without success. As he let his arrow fly, he heard the glaistig cry out 'in a spiteful tone' 'Stick in the stomach, arrow!' 6 Another tale, retold more recently by Affleck Gray, is of two poachers who wounded a hind and then were overtaken by a blizzard. They took refuge in a hut where there was an old woman, who told them that they must leave a fat hind for her on the first Monday of each month on a certain cairn in Atholl during the hind season.' It seems that some shooting was permitted as long as an offering was made to the herder of the deer. The place where the crucial encounter with the glaistig takes place is a bothy, a little hut on the mountain where hunters might spend the night in bad weather. Sometimes the woman is already there beside a fire and sometimes one or more hunters have kindled a fire and are roasting some of their meat when she comes up, looking frail and old, and asks leave to warm herself by the fire. Once invited in, she attempts to persuade the hunter to tie up his dogs in case they attack her, and offers him one of her own

A Fifth Analysis of the Star Husband Tale

could be married to stars that they see one night while sleeping in the open. In various ways, depending upon the version, they ascend to the sky world where they marry stars. Often a child is born. Many events occur in the sky world, and among other things the girl?the story often continues with only one?is warned against digging, but she disobeys and makes a hole in the sky through which she sees her home below. She is seized with the desire to return and does so by means of a rope. Depending on the help she receives and the hostility of her husband, she may or may not succeed in reaching home. Many versions end with the death of the woman, but fre? quently the son is saved. There is a long tradition of utilizing this tale. We are indebted to Stith Thompson (1953, reprinted 1965) for assembling and abstracting the 86 known versions of the tale and for his detailed analysis, exemplifying a historic-geographic approach. His was the second analysis of this tale; the first was that of Gladys Reichard (1921), although she drew on preliminary studies by others, especially Boas (1891). In 1964, Alan Dundes applied his structural approach to the Star Husband materials, and a treat? ment by Levi-Strauss (1968) followed shortly thereafter. The actual num? ber of analyses does not matter; what is important is that this particular corpus of folktales has been the object of analytic attention from several different theoretical perspectives, all of which differ from the approach proposed in this paper. Not unexpectedly, several analysts have come to different conclusions about the materials, despite the fact that the ma? terials themselves remain the same. This circumstance invites a comparison of the different frames of reference, and it also poses a clear intellectual challenge for succeeding interpretations. It may be an accident that five anthropologists have turned their atten? tion to this particular group of tales. What is not accidental is the continuing fascination of social scientists with the problem of how to make sense out of these text-communications. That is, taking the transcripts of folktales, myths, stories, speeches, etc. as the direct expression of social organization, and not as statements about such groups, how can they be

Le Mystere de Picasso

It is not given to all artists to end on a Ninth or to close with a Wake. In our time it fell to James to go beyond The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl; to Yeats to continue after Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium, and Among School Children. The first produced as The Finer Grain a group of tales at once higher in style and lower in pitch than his last three masterpieces, while the second found in Words Without Music a directness and levity not at all characteristic of his major poems. Nor was the very genius of this age permitted to rest upon completing his Guernica. That was almost twenty years ago and Picasso has been busy ever since. Predominant in him too, especially in the past decade, has been a desire to say quickly and often what he thinks of the ways of the world. Comedy succeeds tragedy. In his human comedy we have again and again the spectacle of a man refusing to act seventy, rejecting the sober and sedentary, creating instead at a more and more furious pace, and taking i...