Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores the symbolic role of animals in the short tales and proverbial wisdom of Transylvania, a region at the crossroads of Central and Eastern Europe, drawing upon Romanian, Hungarian, and Saxon (German) traditions preserved in the area.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the symbolic role of animals in the short tales and proverbial wisdom of Transylvania, a region at the crossroads of Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing upon Romanian, Hungarian, and Saxon (German) traditions preserved in the area, the study highlights how animals function as moral exemplars, mediators between the human and natural worlds, and carriers of communal memory. Both short tales and popular sayings encode a worldview where cunning, strength, and survival are negotiated through animal archetypes. By examining motifs and idioms, the paper situates Transylvanian animal lore within broader European folklore while stressing its local specificity. The persistence of animal imagery in Transylvanian lore reflects the region’s landscape: forests, mountains, and pastures created close contact with wild and domestic animals. Oral traditions thus naturalized the human struggle for survival into symbolic animal narratives. I am going to analyze how and why these stories and proverbs preserve a vernacular wisdom—both playful and profound—that continues to resonate in the region’s cultural memory, using mostly archived materials from the Cluj- Napoca (Transylvania, Romania) folklore archive. My purpose is to approach as well what is their impact nowadays and how different groups of readers perceive/understand them and what kind of effort was done by the researchers of the mentioned institution to make them accessible to different audiences in the latest.