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Paper short abstract

Analyzing a North Croatian fairy tale "Stekljena gora" (Glass Mountain) and its variants, the paper explores narrative structures symbolically tied to nature. This foundation is both universal and more closely connected to the locality where it was recorded.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines a Kajkavian variant of an oral fairy tale structured around the central motif of the glass mountain, recorded in the early 1980s in northern Croatia. The motif, attested in diverse dialectal and lexical forms, is also present in numerous related versions within the broader corpus of South Slavic oral literature. In addition, the narrative features anthropomorphic (the old woman and the fairy) and anthropomorphized (the four winds, the horse) appearances, all of which are conceptually tied to the natural world.

The mystery of the relationship between external and internal nature is conceptualized, represented, and mediated through human consciousness-transcending the ethical “sum of all appearances” (Kant), the idealistic “Spirit estranged from itself” (Hegel), the cosmocentric “pure will” (Schopenhauer), the dialectical “nature’s universal metabolism” (Engels), the anthroposophical “source of wonder” (Steiner), the biocentric “awe of life” (Jahr, Schweitzer), the existentialist “split between subject and object” (Jaspers), the anthropocentric view of “nature as a resource” (Catton), the antianthropocentric notion of “dark ecology” (Morton) etc. Modern man, unlike his traditional counterpart, often loses direct interaction with nature and tends to compensate through reinterpreted neo-traditional practices.

Through the analysis of the reference version of the fairy tale, compared with its other variants, this paper – using ethnological, anthropological, symbolic, philological, and mythological theoretical discourse – explores the multilayered structure of the oral narrative, which draws its conceptual and symbolic foundation from nature. This foundation is both universal and more closely connected to the locality where it was recorded.