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- Convenors:
-
Audun Kjus
(Norsk Folkemuseum (The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History))
Jakob Löfgren (Lund University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- NARRATIVE
- Location:
- Room H-206
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel addresses the past and future of the study of narrative motifs, inviting discussions on the methods and theories involved and the empirical studies produced. How do we handle digitized archives and digital folklore genres? How do we respond to recent endeavours from other disciplines?
Long Abstract:
Since the mid-twentieth century, Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1955; 1958) and Antti Aarni and Thompson's Types of the Folktale (1961) have been powerful research tools of folkloristic enquiry, often considered fundamental in the study of folktales and popular narratives. In recent years interest in motifs have spread to a number of disciplines outside our own, from linguistics (Croft and Cruse 2004) and literature (Frontini et al. 2018) to bioinformatics (Darányi et al. 2012), and as a tool in digitalized, automatic text processing (Čech et al. 2017); sparking new debates and interdisciplinary discourse on the concept of motif and its usefulness in research.
Our panel seeks to address the past and future of the study of narrative motifs, inviting you to discuss both the methods and theories involved and the empirical studies produced. We welcome papers both in English and in Scandinavian languages, pondering questions such as:
• How has research on narrative motifs been conducted within folklore-studies, today and historically?
• How has research on motifs been conducted outside the discipline of folkloristics, and how can these approaches be used and understood as interdisciplinary tools and assets in future research?
• How does research involvement with the increasingly digitized folklore archives and the growing corpuses of digital folklore genres relate to the methodological tools and the cultural theories of narrative motifs research?
Join us in (re)visiting, revamping and (perhaps) revitalizing the continuous (re)search for motifs.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Back in 1895, Romanian-Jewish folklorist Lazăr Șăineanu anticipated some of the methodological innovations of Aarne and Thompson. Nevertheless, his work, written in Romanian, remains largely ignored. The paper aims to (re)establish the author's role in the history of international Folklore studies.
Paper long abstract:
When Șăineanu (1859-1934) was active as a folklorist, linguist and philologist in Romania, the conceptual and methodological tools to classify international folktales were still lacking because a clear distinction between type and motif had not yet been made.
Attempting to address this problem empirically, Șăineanu’s Romanian Fairy Tales - A comparative study (1895, republished by Ovidiu Bîrlea in 1978) proposed original and innovative solutions.
Breaking with previous ethnocentric perspectives, for the first time Șăineanu collected in a single volume the entire repertoire of Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and Balkan fairytales published up to 1895. Approximately 500 variants, presented in summary form, are catalogued by type according to Hahn's classification.
Most strikingly, the consultation of such a vast international corpus is facilitated by the keywords that Șăineanu included in an extensive 'Folkloric Index'. Although the author does not use the word 'motif', this 100-page index indeed constitutes the first tool for researching recurring narrative patterns in international folklore. Thus, there are grounds for arguing that it conceptually anticipates Thompson's more extensive and advanced Motif-Index. Despite its modernity, however, being written in a language of limited circulation, Șăineanu's Index has remained largely ignored outside Romania.
The examined data seem to suggest that Șăineanu's interdisciplinary experience as a linguist and lexicographer played a role in the conception of his Index. Analysing how it was devised could illuminate a forgotten part of the prehistory of the concept of narrative motif in Folklore Studies, as well as re-establish Șăineanu's relevance in the history of the discipline.
Paper short abstract:
What comes to light if we follow this motif through millennia and across continents? Tracing cultural forms through time and space is the old-fashioned way to do folklore studies. Before the performance paradigm, it was not doubted that such an approach could give good results. Perhaps it still can?
Paper long abstract:
Moses in the Sinai. Aeneas on the roaring seas. The city of God. The pilgrim fathers. The Germanic homeland. The modern utopia. The motif of the wandering people has had its home in many different highly circulated narratives, all of them telling stories about leaving an unsustainable place of habitation in search of a new and better home.
I wish to follow some iterations and modulations of this motif through time and space. In addition, I will discuss how my approach relates to similar approaches from the late 19th and early 20th century. First and foremost, I will refer to 'the systematic descriptive method' of Svale Solheim and to 'the poetical roots' of Moltke Moe.
My point of entry to the narrative complex will be the ethnography of the historian P.A. Munch, who at the onset of his monumental ‘History of the Norwegian people’ told the story of how the country was settled by North-Germanic tribes. I will show how the motif has wandered through the text of P.A. Munch by laying bare both previous and later iterations, some immediate and others more distant. My final discussion will be about how, in practical use, both the content and the meaning of narrative motifs are layered.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses early scholarship on fairy tale motifs in Old Norse literature, which is for most parts only available in the German language. Those early theories have little been discussed in the last decades, but deserve to be re-examined and re-evaluated by new generations of folklorists.
Paper long abstract:
Long before Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature was published, the relations between the fairy tale and Old Norse literature was widely debated and discussed by early scholars of folklore and literature. The Brothers Grimm, for example, pointed out several important relations and similarities between some of their collected fairy tales and medieval Icelandic literature in their annotations to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. While some early folklorists regarded the fairy tale elements to be of an old age, which have been consciously incorporated into Old Norse literature (Olrik 1892, Rittershaus 1902, Bugge 1909, Einar Ól. Sveinsson 1929), others supported Theodor Benfey’s theory on a rather recent migration of the fairy tale from India to the far North, for which reason fairy tale elements could only be late additions to Old Norse texts (von der Leyen 1899). Some of the major accomplishments in this field were made by Friedrich Panzer, who assumed that the fairy tale was the soil out of which Old Norse literature and Germanic epic emerged in the first place, by adapting certain patterns and elements common to the fairy tale (Panzer 1901; 1910-12).
In this paper, I would like to present and discuss early ideas and scholarship on fairy tale motifs in Old Norse literature, which is for most parts only available in the German language. Those early theories and approaches have little been discussed in the last few decades, but deserve to be re-examined and re-evaluated by new generations of folklorists.