The book under review began, in a sense, over 100 years ago when folklorist Nikolaos Politis assigned his student, Georgios Megas, the task of compiling a catalogue of Greek folktales based upon the system employed in Antti Aarne’s Verzeichnis der Märchentypen, or Index of Folktale Types, which had just appeared in 1910 as FF Communications 3. Megas’s task was immense, since, for one thing, the number of published and unpublished texts recorded from Greek-speakers in different lands was not constant but kept increasing, eventually exceeding 23,000, and, for another thing, Aarne’s index itself grew and changed as a result of revisions made by Stith Thompson. During his lifetime Megas managed to publish only the first part of his project. The volume, devoted to Greek animal tales (types 1-299), appeared in 1978.
In the 1990s a group of Greek scholars appointed by folklorist Michael Meraklis, to whom Megas had bequeathed his materials, resumed the project and over the years came out with four additional volumes, which appeared during the years 1994-2007. These books indexed the Greek magic tales (types 300-749), or what are commonly called fairytales. Megas’s successors worked from his thousands of handwritten index cards, verifying his sources and adapting to the fact that Aarne’s tale-type index had been revised once again, this time by Hans-Jörg Uther (FF Communications 284-286).
The Greek folktale catalogues, now amounting to five tomes, take account of texts recorded from Greek-speakers from the mainland, the Greek islands (including Cyprus), southern Italy, Turkey, and elsewhere, from ca. 1850 to ca. 1970, the hundred or so years that might be regarded as the heyday of folktale collecting in Europe. Written in Greek, the volumes are unfortunately inaccessible to persons who do not read Modern Greek, but that is where the volume under review comes in. It is a one-volume epitome in English of the four recent volumes that cover the Greek magic tale. Despite its being a summary, it is likely to have all the information on the types of the Greek magic tale that anyone other than a tale-type diehard might wish to know. But for such diehards who read Greek, the original publications are freely available online (page 19 of the present book gives the links).
In their presentation and analysis of the individual tales the authors follow the model of Delarue and Tenèze in their catalogue of French folktales. A typical entry has a type-number and title (some numbers and titles differ from the AT and ATU entries), an episode-by-episode summary of the tale with variations, data on the geographic distribution of the tale among Greeks, a bibliography of translations of Greek texts of the tale into other languages, and, finally, a discursive commentary on the tale type. The translation by Deborah Brown Kazazis, though not always smooth and idiomatic, is clear throughout.
Take for example the extremely widespread tale of the hero who slays a dragon. In agreement with Aarne-Thompson-Uther the Greek cataloguers list this tale as type 300, The Dragon-Slayer, the first in the list. They offer a three-part summary (for the sake of space I omit the variations): in the first episode a dragon takes control of a community’s water supply and demands the annual sacrifice of a maiden as appeasement; in the following episode a youth meets the maiden, slays the dragon, cuts out its tongues, and departs, but when a false hero claims to have killed the dragon, the hero reappears and by means of the tongues proves that he himself is the dragon-slayer; the final episode features the marriage of the maiden and the hero. The authors next inform us that 169 versions of this tale have been recorded from Greek-speakers: 13 from Epirus, 15 from Thessaly, and so on. They list a dozen or so translations of individual texts into English, German, and Italian. In the commentary that wraps up the entry, they mention that scholars have regarded The Dragon-Slayer as one of the oldest of folktales, and that E.S. Hartland, in his three-volume study The Legend of Perseus (1894-96), traces the basic theme back to the ancient story of Perseus and Andromeda, which the authors call a “myth.” They go on to discuss the Greek historic-geographic monograph on the tale published in 1982 by folklorist Minas Alexiadis, one of Megas’s students, and provide succinct details about texts in which The Dragon-Slayer is combined with, or “contaminated by,” other tales. They conclude their commentary with the suggestion that other heroic narratives of monster-slayers have borrowed much from this tale.
This is useful information about the tale type, although it seems rather old-fashioned. The observations on the origin of tales and mixtures of tale types reflect folkloric issues that excited scholars in Megas’s day but are of less interest today. To my mind the possible connections between ancient and modern Greek traditions, which is to say, between the ancient legend of Perseus and the modern tale of the dragon-slayer, is a topic that merits more attention than the reference to Hartland’s nineteenth-century study, and one might have hoped for references to more recent scholarly literature on this topic than Hartland’s. The authors do not show much awareness of current folk-narrative scholarship.
Nevertheless, the authors and translator are to be commended for their work of condensing the huge amount of complex information regarding the modern Greek magic tale, and making it conveniently accessible in English to today’s folk-narrative scholars.
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[Review length: 901 words • Review posted on October 29, 2014]