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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.