Paper short abstract:

Șăineanu contributed to Romanian lexicography and folklore with constitutive works. Combining the two disciplines, he improved the available dictionaries by including popular words and he innovated the existing tools for international folklore research, anticipating those of Aarne and Thompson.

Paper long abstract:

When Lazar Șăineanu (1859-1934) was active as a philologist and linguist in Romania, folklore was a central interest of many intellectuals and, due to long-standing historical and cultural reasons, it became a crucial factor in the formation of the modern Romanian language and literature.

From a linguistic standpoint, Șăineanu was the first to collect and classify Romanian popular words lacking from dictionaries of that time: autobiographic documentation shows that, in his influential Dicționar universal al limbii române [Universal Dictionary of the Romanian Language] (1896, 1995), he extracted lexicographic material from the transcriptions of folktales, which were published in large number in XIXth century.

Folktales became also the object of Șăineanu’s comparative study Basmele Române [Romanian Fairy-Tales] (1895, 1978), an encyclopaedic work consisting of the Romanian summaries of almost all the fairy tales published in Europe up until 1895, grouped by types. It also includes an Index of motifs which can be considered as an anticipation of Thompson’s: the examined data seem to suggest that Șăinanu’s experience as a lexicographer had an important role in its conception.

From a historical and literary perspective, this contribution focuses on Șăineanu’s approach and its cultural reasons, in order to illustrate how, breaking up with the conventions of his time, he employed ethnographic documentation as a source for his academic Dicționar; and how, in Basmele Române, he created a dictionary-like classification of folktales, which crossed the boundaries of the ethnocentrism hitherto dominant in the discipline, adopting for the first time an international attitude towards folklore.