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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Romanian folk beliefs about strigoi, focusing on two modes of storytelling: (1) autonomous narratives and (2) fragmentary, contextual versions. The case study reflects on the revenant’s motif, oicotype, and how milieu shapes narrative forms.

Paper long abstract

Romanian beliefs and folk stories about strigoi are numerous and diverse. They involve a variety of characteristic subjects and topics, assigned to particular characters of this traditional system. I will describe this group of folkloric characters using the formula “& co”.

These tales sometimes take the form of relatively long and elaborate texts, organized around recurrent and conventional subjects. On other occasions, the narratives are brief, fragmentary, allusive, full of taboos, and with numerous sequences that rely on implicit meanings. There are two separate manners of “using” the same corpus of narrative data, the same index of motifs and the same group of characters. In the first situation, complete, beautiful and self-sufficient narratives are created (and repeted). In the second case, the texts are fluctuating, varying from case to case, and they can only be understood constantly referring to the neighbouring reality and, moreover, by a good understanding of this reality.

Proposed paper aims to provide a brief (as necessary) description of this system of beliefs and stories that are organising aound the Romanian strigoi, focusing on the two forms of textualization. The proposed case study allows a multiple reflection on the concept of oicotype. Firstly, it concerns the adaptation of the widespread motif of the revenant in Romanian folklore. Secondly, the comments on the fragmentary texts which can only be understood in relation to the proximities allow for a more accurate and closer look at the ways in which the “milieu” influences the construction of narrative texts.

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Paper short abstract

Could Von Sydow’s notion of ecotype illuminate how the “foundational myths” of translation circulate in the history of translation theorization? Viewed as ecotypization, their use in scholarship reveals how translation theory evolves through adaptation, localization, and refunctionalization.

Paper long abstract

Von Sydow’s notion of ecotype offers a productive heuristic for examining the narratives that shape the prehistory of translation theorization. Translation historiography, as Bassnett (2014), Pym (2018), and Hermans (2007) have observed, is often sustained by narratives whose use and function resemble those of foundational myths: the miracle of the Septuagint, the self-fashioning of the Renaissance humanist translator, or the belief in inevitable loss in translation, among others. Once mobilized by translators and scholars, these narratives do not remain static; instead, they undergo continual processes of cultural adaptation, assuming distinct ideological and institutional functions in diverse contexts. The Septuagint legend, for instance, is reinterpreted in Hellenistic Judaism, early Christianity, and Enlightenment philology, each time reconfigured to authorize specific conceptions of linguistic truth and textual legitimacy. Similarly, narratives of fidelity and betrayal recur across cultural traditions, yet are inflected by localized perceptions of authority, creativity, and identity.

In this panel, I propose an ecotypical perspective on the “foundation myths” of translation theorization, offering new insights into the dynamics of circulation, localization, and refunctionalization of migratory narratives that have underpinned the history of translation theory. This approach reframes the history of theorization not as a linear succession of canonical episodes, but as a narrative field of cultural adaptation in which globally recognizable story patterns acquire situated forms that both reflect and shape disciplinary self-understanding. Thus, Von Sydow’s ecotype framework could provide translation studies with a comparative methodology for analyzing how translational myths travel, persist, and mutate across time and space.

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Paper short abstract

Previous scholarship has identified hundreds of parallels between international folktales and Greco-Latin literature. But how many of these folktales actually circulated in areas once inhabited by Greco-Latin civilisation? How could an ecotype approach improve the comparison between the two?

Paper long abstract

Since the dawn of folklore studies, scholars have observed parallels between modern folktales and ancient Greco-Latin narratives. This field of research was reinvigorated when Graham Anderson (2000, 2006) and William Hansen (2002, 2017) used the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification to identify hundreds of correspondences between international folktales and classical texts.

In this respect, Gregory Nagy and Maurizio Bettini argued that such typological comparisons, though not always genealogically linked, can illuminate both systems under comparison. More recently, Tommaso Braccini (2018) suggested focusing on ecotypes from areas once inhabited by Greco-Latin civilization to refine textual comparisons between folktales and Greco-Latin texts, given their geographical and cultural proximity to the possible ancient context.

Expanding on Braccini’s insights, I discovered that, contrary to expectations, international folkloric types with possible Greco-Latin antecedents don’t always circulate in areas formerly inhabited by Greco-Latin civilization. These discrepancies may partly stem from documentation gaps, but also from previously underestimated factors that could have influenced the historical-geographical evolution of certain narrative traditions emerging similarly in both ancient literature and folklore.

In this paper, I propose a quantitative survey of the presence or absence of international folktales with Greco-Latin parallels in areas once inhabited by Greco-Latin civilization. By mapping and analysing these distributions, I aim to lay the groundwork for a future ecotype atlas of international folktales with Greco-Latin parallels. This approach aims to improve our understanding of how some of the world's most enduring narratives have evolved over time and space, addressing the complex relationship between ancient literary traditions and modern folklore.

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Paper short abstract

According to Lauri Honko, folklore must undergo milieu- and tradition-morphological adaptation to function in a community. In my presentation I ask, how applicable this theory of tradition ecology has been, and is, to the analysis of archived folklore texts.

Paper long abstract

Although Finnish folklorists maintained close ties with their Swedish colleagues from the early 20th century onwards, it is nevertheless striking how little influence Carl von Sydow’s concept of oicotype exerted on Finnish folkloristics. The first serious attempt to engage with the concept did not occur until 1979, when Lauri Honko, in a theoretical article, posed the question: What makes folklore “typical” within a given physical and socio-cultural environment?

For Honko, however, oicotype proved to be an insufficiently precise or comprehensive concept. Instead, he turned to the notion of milieu dominant, a term introduced by Swedish folklorist Albert Eskeröd as a interpretation of von Sydow’s idea. According to Honko, for stories and other folklore to be accepted and function effectively within a community’s narrative system, they must undergo both milieu-morphological and tradition-morphological adaptation. The former refers to the process of familiarization and localization—an external adaptation—through which the unfamiliar setting of a narrative is replaced with a recognizable one, thereby anchoring the tradition to a specific physical location within the community’s broader narrative and belief structures. The latter, in turn, refers to adaptation within the community in accordance with its collective tradition, and to alignment with a person’s life history and personality.

I ask how Honko’s theory of milieu- and tradition-morphological adaptation has been received in Finland, where folkloristics has historically relied on the comparative analysis of archived folklore texts. To what extent has Honko’s tradition ecology proven applicable to the interpretation of archival materials?

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Paper short abstract

Current paper proposes a case study on how traditional storytelling evolved from authentic performance to recorded preservation, valorizing the voices and narratives of Banat’s last traditional storytellers.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents a case study based on a collection of complementary audiovisual documents of an ethnographic nature, preserved in the Archive of the West University of Timișoara. The materials are the result of field research conducted between 1965 and 1975 in representative localities of Banat, a cross-border region in southwestern Romania. The collection is relevant to the current panel as it gathers elements defined as narrative structures belonging to canonical folklore genres, such as fairy tale, anecdote, story (basm, snoavă, povestire). The collection represents the sound and content corpus of the last traditional storytellers in the region. Each element corresponds to a clearly defined moment and results from the unique interaction between a storyteller, connoisseur of the local narrative repertoire, and a researcher (often accompanied by a small group of students) visiting the community, most often in the informant’s home. The villages of origin of these informants, and consequently the texts themselves, are well-known and regionally representative.

Building on this corpus, the present study aims to observe the regional evolution of performance style, from its authentic context, through the process of data recording during field research, to the preservation of the recorded voices of the region’s last storytellers.

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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes how Romanian folkloristics approached transnational themes in the 20th century, often neglecting von Sydow’s theoretical contributions to the field. It reveals how comparison became politicized, supporting claims of national aesthetic superiority.

Paper long abstract

My paper investigates how certain transnational themes have been addressed within Romanian folkloristics mostly throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Owing to either unfamiliarity with or possible resistance to Carl Wilhelm von Sydow’s concepts of tradition and oicotype, the principles of the Finnish School have maintained a prolonged influence within the Romanian discipline. When scholars such as Mircea Eliade, Gheorghe Vrabie, Adrian Fochi, or Dumitru Caracostea engage with international themes—such as The Craftsman Manole, The Dead Brother’s Journey, or The Undead Fiancée—they tend to treat these narratives as fixed or static entities, often relying on prose summaries they themselves (the folklorists) have constructed as “evidence”. This approach frequently gives rise to a discourse that proves the aesthetic superiority of Romanian versions and appropriations in contrast to those found in neighboring countries, thereby turning folkloristics into a political instrument.

The paper is structured in three parts. First, I offer a brief overview of von Sydow’s reception in the Romanian scholarly context. Second, I examine how folkloric evidence from other regions has been re-constructed to serve the argumentative purposes of Romanian scholars, particularly in light of von Sydow’s theoretical contributions. Third, I analyze how the notion of aesthetic superiority has been articulated within the framework of Romanian national folkloristics.

In addition to the highly questionable conclusions reached by these folklorists in the absence of sound theory, this analysis also seeks to illuminate the disciplinary mechanisms through which the comparative method becomes politicized.