DOI 10.1515/fabula-2015-0006 | Fabula 2015; 56(1/2): 95–108

Vilmos Voigt Nunquam Revertar

Abstract: Already two hundred years ago folklorists realized the dialectics of ‘dying out’ and ‘revival’ of folklore genres. The shift of the narrative contexts, the rapid development of techniques of communication in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries do not mean that all old, ‘classical’ forms of folklore ceased to exist. Themes, motifs, genres might survive. But it was the social base of folklore which changed most definitely. In the 1960s, the heyday of the revival of (worldwide) comparative philology, the concept of Volkserzählungsgemeinschaft emerged. Since then new research paradigms were launched, but the compara- tive and textual perspective of folk narrative studies remained the central issue. Such typically old species of research (e.g., tale-type catalogues, tale-type and genre monographs, critical editions of famous collections) appeared continu- ously. Besides, new fields such as morphologic and structural analyses, pare- miology, contemporary narratives or ideological criticism of folklore texts have been explored. The emergence of Soviet, African, Asian or Baltic folkloristics was very productive. Furthermore, there are works dedicated to ‘new’ systems of folk narrative theories. Although we should not disregard the increasing number of new trends, the last half-century of folk narrative research ‘will never come back’.

Résumé : Depuis deux cents ans déjà, les folkloristes se rendent compte de la dialectique qui existe entre disparition et renouveau des genres populaires. La transformation des contextes narratifs, le développement rapide des techniques de communication dans les XIXe et XXe siècles ne signifient pas que tous les formes < traditionnelles > ont cessé d’exister. Thèmes, motifs, genres survivront possiblement. Pourtant, la base sociale du folklore a changé profondement. Dans les années 1960, à l’apogée de la renaissance d’une philologie comparative à l’échelle mondiale, la conception de Volkserzählungsgemeinschaft émergeait. En dépit des nouveaux paradigmes de recherche, la perspective comparative et textuelle des études sur le conte populaire restait centrale. Les formes classiques de recherche comme par exemple des catalogues de contes-type, des mono- graphies de contes-type et de genres continuaient d’apparaître. L’émergence des études de folklore soviétiques, africaines, asiatiques ou baltiques s’avéra très productive. En outre, de < nouveaux > systèmes de théories sur le folklore

||  Plenary paper presented at the sixteenth Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, Vilnius, June 25–30, 2013.

Brought to you by | Eotvos Lorand University Authenticated Download Date | 5/17/18 1:20 PM 96 | Vilmos Voigt surgissaient. Sans déprécier le nombre croissant de nouvelles tendances, le demi- siècle passé des études sur le conte populaire < ne reviendra pas >.

Zusammenfassung: Schon vor zweihundert Jahren waren sich die Erzählforscher einer Dialektik des Aussterbens und der Wiederbelebung der Gattungen der Volksüberlieferung bewußt. Die Veränderung der Erzählkontexte, die schnelle Entwicklung der Kommunikationstechniken im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert bedeutet nicht, daß alle alten, ,klassischen‘ Formen der Volksüberlieferung aufgehört haben zu existieren. Themen, Motive, Genres werden möglicherweise überleben. Aber die soziale Basis der Volksüberlieferung hat sich von Grund auf geändert. Das Konzept der Volkserzählungsgemeinschaft stammt aus den 1960er Jahren, dem Höhepunkt der Wiederbelebung einer (weltweiten) philologischen Kompa- ratistik. Trotz neuer Forschungsparadigmen stand nach wie vor die verglei- chende und textbasierte Perspektive der Volkserzählforschung im Mittelpunkt. Es erschienen weiterhin die typischen alten Forschungsgegenstände wie Typen- kataloge oder Monographien über Erzähltypen und Gattungen. Daneben wurden neue Bereiche wie morphologische und strukturelle Analysen, die Sprichwortfor- schung, zeitgenössische Erzählungen oder die Ideologiekritik von Folkloretexten untersucht. Als äußerst produktiv erwies sich das Hervortreten der sowjetischen, afrikanischen, asiatischen oder baltischen Folkloristik. Andere Arbeiten waren ‚neuen‘ Systemen von Volkserzähltheorien gewidmet. Ohne die steigende Anzahl neuer Trends geringzuschätzen, müssen wir uns doch darüber im klaren sein, daß das vergangene halbe Jahrhundert der Volkserzählforschung ‘nie zurückkommt’.

|| Vilmos Voigt: Budapest, Eötvös Loránd University, Institute of Folklore

“Nunquam revertar (I will never come back) – the quotation in my plenary talk is from a letter by Dante (1313).

If we take the formula Folk Narrative in the Modern World seriously as the title of the sixteenth ISFNR congress, we might ask first of all: what do we label as ‘modern’ in contrast to ‘old’? Contexts of (folk) narratives have so often changed in the past. The invention of writing, the spread of literacy, the invention of print, producing copies of one book ad libitum, new forms of mass communication/ information (such as telegraph, telephone, photo, film, broadcast, television, etc.) – all those had a negative effect on the old forms of oral tradition, but at the same time they have fostered new forms of it. (Folk) narratives – at least to some extent – survived all changes, and they have even benefited from them to some

Brought to you by | Eotvos Lorand University Authenticated Download Date | 5/17/18 1:20 PM Nunquam Revertar | 97 extent. Newspapers and TV shows are an endless source of ‘modern legends’. Xerox was used for chain letters and other ‘paperwork folklore’ (see the pioneer publication: Dundes/Pagter 1976). Political jokes about Stalin circulate (of course in our days and not during his lifetime) and are available at least in three specialized data banks in Moscow, as well as in the archive of the 1992 collection in Tartu (see, e.g., Krikmann 2004; Laineste 2008; Krikmann/Laineste 2009). The publication of the folktales of the world seems to never come to an end, and children’s books are still regularly based upon world folklore. In advertisements we find more folktales today than ever – on www. From the very first days of collecting activities folklorists commented on the changing social situation, and already more than two hundred years ago proclaimed the twelfth or twenty-fourth hour of the disappearance of truly traditional folklore. Right! Ballads of chivalry and numskull stories (immor- talized by the late antique joke collection Philogelos) from a remote past in fact mostly vanished. No living person could have been an eyewitness to the feats of Robin Hood, Cartouche, Schinderhannes, and scarcely also Al Capone. Saint George the Dragon-Slayer disappeared from oral tradition (and then also from the Calendarium Romanum). On the other hand his ‘colleague’, Saint Nicholas of Myra, the Wonder Worker, has only changed his costume: he is much alive in a red coat with white fake fur as Santa Claus, breeding reindeers, sounding Christ- mas bells and sending letters and gift parcels from Lapland to the world. The tra- ditional Saint Nicholas became the Patron Saint of Bari, where every year on May 7–10 his huge statue is paraded around with ten thousand or more onlookers. Not all species of ‘old’ folklore have died out automatically. Surrounding political events, new folklore is flourishing: Gulag folklore, Holocaust folklore, Mao Tse-tung folklore, JFK folklore, astronaut folklore, Fidel Castro folklore, Saddam Hussein folklore, Osama Bin Laden folklore (see, e.g., the funny German expression “Ich bin Osama Laden”), Barack Obama folklore, Bashir Assad folk- lore, etc. In Hungary ‘1956 October folklore’ and ‘true histories’ about the shift of power in 1989 are ever increasing. I do not enter into the discussion whether those are phenomena of ‘modern folklore’ or ‘post-modern folklore’. The fact is more important than its naming. ‘New’ phenomena appear every day. Still, I have some doubts if this kind of lore is the continuation of folklore (see again the expression: nunquam revertar). To what degree is this lore indeed a ‘modern’ folklore which steps into the place of a never-more-returning old folklore? Neither by its communication, nor by its motifs. When you watch, e.g., parliament sessions (not only in Eastern Europe) you hear hundreds of old- fashioned folklore items. When anniversaries are approaching, we look at Goo- gle, for ‘funny and traditional’ birthday rhymes, and people improvise fairy tales

Brought to you by | Eotvos Lorand University Authenticated Download Date | 5/17/18 1:20 PM 98 | Vilmos Voigt in IMF discussions. (“The economic growth of Hungary is like a fairy tale” – the Hungarian minister of finance said a year ago.) One may recall an anecdote con- nected with Napoleon: “Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas. – Bien sûr: le Pas de Calais.” My concern connected with the label ‘modern folklore’ is not about the disproportion of the survival or revitalization of some folklore items – and the vanishing of many –, but about the ‘social circumstances’. Folklore was origi- nally always shared within a given, close, face-to-face community. Today this has changed into the ‘world-wide-web’. It is not the motifs and entire narratives, but the social basis of folklore that is dying out in our ‘modern world’. I used to read the ISCLR newsletter with passion. When a story (distributed by Brian Chapman, on Friday, 8 October 2012) entitled Did Laina Fetherolf in a courtroom throw her undergarments at judge John Wallace? reached me, I immediately felt comfortable as a folklorist, some of its variants involving both the pop star Madonna and a story by Boccaccio (Decamerone 9.2); I also remembered some Old French fabliaux. My only trouble is: where is the folkloric community today in Laina’s undergarment story? I read it (or any similarly ‘modern’ story, both in a newspaper and in a scholarly newsletter) from a distance, just as I am reading Gulliver’s Travels, or the official manual of traffic instructions (i.e. not as a participant in a face-to-face communication) and therefore I ask myself again and again: where does there exist a ‘close commu- nity’ around those narrative texts nowadays? I want to present one more ‘modern storytelling community’, in order to show the difficulty in analyzing it as a folklorist. In spas and saunas (in ‘modern’ times much frequented all over the world) customers exchange their views – just like in old folklore communities, and the stories are often spiced with traditional folklore ingredients. I like such stories, e.g., about illegitimate children of prom- inent politicians, red-haired people who are ‘no good’, or secret panacea recipes and so on. But after such conversations the customers leave the steam bath and the basin – and the same narrating community will never (nunquam) come back again. The gradual disappearance of traditional communities is a phenomenon that has often been described. I can tell another case: At the time of the first long distance flights the pas- sengers’ talk remained vivid all the time, about their exciting impressions (e.g. the fountain pens that jerked their ink). Stewardesses were involved in the conversation. Soon afterwards all that did not seem to be so exciting any more – and the passengers, instead of chatting with their neighbours, preferred to read the newspapers offered for free. Their texts still served to some extent for commu- nication. Nowadays on flights a lot of people devote every free minute to their

Brought to you by | Eotvos Lorand University Authenticated Download Date | 5/17/18 1:20 PM Nunquam Revertar | 99 own information kits, laptops with all possible programs – and there is absolutely no communication between the passengers. In the early sixties airline passengers collected all kinds of information and ‘documents’ for later storytelling at home with friends: ballpoints, tax-free deodorants, mini-bottles or the handsome red-and-white dotted figure of a cow, with her message: “Karoline ist mein Name, Käse aus Dänemark ist aus meiner Milch gemacht.” For my ISFNR talk now, I did not collect the case stories from any archive of ‘modern’ folklore. I simply remember them, as a member of the one close community. The same is the case with the following two ‘true’ stories, featuring well-know folklorists. Once, on an American Airlines flight from Nashville to Austin Richard Bauman lectured me about all possible kinds of cocktails served on the flights. In exchange, I told him stories about Russian Aeroflot flights, with passengers bringing cabbage, water melons and hens as hand-baggage. At another time Reimund Kvideland (then not yet ISFNR presi- dent) praised the advantages of the then brand new Jumbo Jet for half an hour – at the time none of us had yet experienced them. This kind of spontaneous narrative community was still to be found fifty or forty years ago, keeping alive an ‘instant’ folklore. Everything was acceptable for folkloric use. Alan Dundes’ provocative statement “folklore is everything, which at least in one respect connects the people” – was true at that time – but it is not true anymore in our days (see his somewhat variable argumentation as early as Dundes 1977). American soccer can be understood as folklore? Political demon- strations against governments can be labeled as folklore? Instead of that limitless use of ‘folklore’, I prefer, e.g., to listen to a nice klezmer disc – realizing that it represents ‘folklorism’ and not ‘folklore’. “Those were the days” again, which will never come back (nunquam). It is typical that Gene Ruskin’s famous words are not authentic American expressions for an attitude towards life, they were translated from a Russian hit: “By the long road” (Dorogoy dlinnoyu, text by Konstantin Podrevsky, music by Boris Fomin). It then expressed a common feeling around the world: ‘those days’ will not come back ... However, today there are other cases providing new frames for oral performance. Facebook, blogs and other virtual communities exist and develop rapidly. Stand-up programs in theatre and television mobilize thousands of per- sons around stories, carefully selected by media experts. In every country there are mass media programs pouring out jokes, humorous narratives, etc. (Folk- lorists can often spot from which folklore collections or even folktale type indexes they stem.) French TV Canal 5 sends a program mocking the most popular stand- up stars (and jongleurs and magicians). Still, I can ask: to what degree is there a

Brought to you by | Eotvos Lorand University Authenticated Download Date | 5/17/18 1:20 PM 100 | Vilmos Voigt community among the people involved? We are not able to decide in advance whether they will form a ‘folklore-like’ community using narratives – or not. Twenty years ago, the number one reporter on Hungarian TV, Tamás Vitray, launched a program “Here I sit and tell stories” (Csak ülök és mesélek). He put a chair on the stage, sat down and told stories. Most of them were extraordinary biographic narratives (thus not traditional folklore texts), but the whole situation was in fact ‘past-oriented’: there were one storyteller and a million of listeners in front of the TV screen. From such general statements, let me now return to the proper history of ISFNR – from the point of view of nunquam revertar. In the 1960s the foundation of the journal Fabula, the first ‘new’ folk narrative Congress in Kiel and Copenhagen and the establishment of ISFNR coincide with the international and interdisciplinary revival of philology in post- war Europe. Linguistics, comparative literature, Finno-Ugric and Slavonic stud- ies, comparative religion, ethnomusicology followed the same pattern. Members of the ‘old guard’ of folklorists organized and built up a new international network. In folklore (and ethnography) folk narrative studies responded to the initiative taken by Kurt Ranke. The method followed by the ‘revived’ scholarly associations was in fact a continuation of the previous research method and paradigm. The circle of the persons involved was slowly developing. A few Ameri- cans, more folklorists from Eastern Europe, and only very few from the Soviet Union could join the otherwise West European initiative of the ISFNR. Even in the thawing period the political limitations remained the same. In the sixties and seventies ‘new’ ISFNR members came from the United States, not from the areas with a rich tradition in folklore research such as the Baltic States, Georgia or India. The founding generation of the ISFNR (Stith Thompson, Kurt Ranke, Richard Dorson) was wholeheartedly engaged in international cooperation. The next generation paid more attention to the theory of folk narratives. Key figures, such as Alan Dundes, Lauri Honko, Heda Jason, Bengt Holbek, concentrated on genre theory. It was the high tide of structuralism – everywhere. It is interesting that the same development and shift of paradigm occurred in the Soviet Union. After the generation of V. Ya. Propp or V. M. Zhirmunsky a circle of scholars around E. M. Meletinsky and G. L. Permyakov came into being. Both the first and the second generations will not return. (Nunquam.) And sometimes I feel that folklorists in our days do not read their works any more. (Let me not make an exhaustive list, and mention here only the names of Max Lüthi, Lutz Röhrich, Rudolf Schenda, A. J. Greimas, Claude Bremond and K. V. Chistov.) The ISFNR was designed from a world-wide perspective. Since the late sixties Africa was the new ‘promised land’ for emerging folklorists. Alas, in spite of all

Brought to you by | Eotvos Lorand University Authenticated Download Date | 5/17/18 1:20 PM Nunquam Revertar | 101 of our efforts, this was an illusion. Today there are fewer folklore researchers in Africa than half a century ago, and we do not know more about African folklore than did Germaine Dieterlen, Denise Paulme, Geneviève Calame-Griaule, William Bascom, Hasan El-Shamy or Lee Haring. This trend of developing African folklore studies, I am afraid, will not come back either. On the other hand, it seems to me that recently the Arabian Nights attract a wide audience (see the summarizing books by Marzolph 2006, 2007). Wayne State University Press publications and the journal Marvels and Tales mirror a new form of interest of readers for folktales. The use of tales in education and therapy is as long as the history of the tales. Today it is a world-wide and profitable business. In some cases such authors also use scholarly works and statements by folklorists. There were attempts at drawing Chinese folklorists into our circle, too – but, again, hitherto without much success, in spite of the fact that in China there are nowadays thousands of researchers on a topic they call folklore. On the other hand, India was always and still is a dominion of ISFNR scholars. Something should also be said concerning the former Soviet Union (and today’s Russian Federation). The thoroughly organized Soviet folkloristics were accessible to folklorists from other countries – if they knew Russian and were interested in such contacts. Today there is an even larger but not centralized folklore network in Russia. It is, however, invisible and difficult of access, even for the Russian colleagues. There is an enormous book market in Russia – but we do not see the books. After the fall of the Soviet Empire, there was a return of previous trends and schools: first of all of Slavic mythology, but also the works of ‘neglected’ figures, including Propp, Freydenberg, Zelenin, Losev. With not much of an impact on the ISFNR. Unfortunately only some of the works of a few contemporary Russian scholars are (well-)known in our circles. The Leningrad ‘ritualist’ school (G. A. Levinton, K. A. Bayburin), the circle of comparative philologists in Moscow around S. Yu. Neklyudov, or individual scholars like A. L. Toporkov, E. E. Levkievskaya, Yu. Berezkin deserve more international attention. Of course, the initiative for cooperation with the ISFNR should come from ‘their’ side. But it is evident that without involving current folklore research in Russia there is no truly international folklore movement or society. (A remark in parenthesis: my generation had the privilege to meet the mem- bers of both generations of international folklorists. I remember in person Stith Thompson, Albert B. Lord, Victor Zhirmunsky, Vladimir Propp, Petr Bogatyrev ... I know that today young folklorists cannot meet such giants of folklore research. But they should start to build up their own international partnership as soon as possible.)

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Folkloristics before World War II loved handbooks. The ISFNR earned that heritage. Stith Thompson’s 1961 tale-type index, or Will-Erich Peuckert’s project of a Handwörterbuch der Sage were not children of the ISFNR, but Hans-Jörg Uther’s three-volume index, ATU (Uther 2004), is unthinkable without the Arbeitsstelle Enzyklopädie des Märchens in Göttingen. In the early sixties the ISFNR turned its interest from tale-type indexing to folk legend catalogues. Unfortunately, nobody took the task of compiling an international catalogue of folk legends seriously and such a work does not exist to this day. I am afraid to state that today we are more behind that task than ever. I find it typical that when (after nearly half a century of preparation) Bengt af Klintberg (2010) finally published the voluminous type catalogue of Swedish folk legends, he gave a report on the history of the project (which in 1993 he called an “unfinished catalogue”), but without raising any theoretical problems, and with- out mentioning the ‘European’ legend cataloguing attempts by Gerhard Heil- furth, Gisela Burde-Schneidewind, Ina-Maria Greverus etc. He was a witness to most of them – thus his silence means he found them useless for the Swedish catalogue. Moreover, af Klintberg, a specialist in contemporary legend research does not mention the ‘modern legends’ at all. Since the late 1960s many folklorists began to collect and publish so-called ‘contemporary legends’ or ‘urban legends’. In the U.S., it was Jan Harold Brun- vand, in England Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, in Germany Rolf Wilhelm Bred- nich, in France Véronique Campion-Vincent, in Finland Lea Virtanen, in Sweden Bengt af Klintberg who took the initiative – a list of eminent folklorists who were eager to do research in a new field. An International Society for Contemporary Legend Research was established, publishing its annual journal Contemporary Legend, and a newsletter, FOAFTale News. It is important for folklore research to immediately deal with ‘new’ narratives – otherwise they might fall into oblivion. The once very popular Biafra stories or Idi Amin stories, narratives about the Arabic secret army of Nicolae Ceauşescu are now only available in the archives of contemporary legend scholars. A similar attempt to form a belief tales study group was launched in 2009 that developed into ISFNR’s flourishing ‘Belief Narrative Network’. It was in the golden age of the ISFNR, when Matti Kuusi revitalized paremiology. He drafted an international proverb catalogue and made the views of Permyakov and Arvo Krikmann internationally available. Wolfgang Mieder’s life-work is his personal monument (see, e.g., volume 30 [2013] of Proverbium – Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship), but we remember, too, that once upon a time at every ISFNR congress there was a session for paremiologists. The Estonian and Lithuanian multi-volume corpus of proverbs (and riddles) realized the plans of modern folk literature studies from the twentieth century. The ISFNR

Brought to you by | Eotvos Lorand University Authenticated Download Date | 5/17/18 1:20 PM Nunquam Revertar | 103 may also closely cooperate with paremiologists in the future (see Krikmann/Sarv 1980—87; Krikmann/Saukas 2001–02; Grigas et al. 2000–08). Monographs of single folktale types become more and more rare – but still appear. Only in some cases we find a truly innovative approach. We should mention the encompassing description of the Lithuanian Egle tales, as an unsurpassed attempt to present one ‘national’ folktale in its complexity, listing also Latvian, Finnish, Slavic and other parallels (Sauka 2007–08). National tale- type indices still appear regularly. It is one of the major achievements of Folklore Fellows Communications to secure a space for such publications. I hope that at this point, I must not repeat my slogan (nunquam) again. Catalogues of folktale ‘types’ ideally rest on three pillars: carefully selected texts, a logical sequence of the individual tale types and a theory of genres (and sub-genres) in folk poetry. It is not by chance that especially the third component is weak in many tale type catalogues. The exception is found in Heda Jason’s publications. At first she tried to elaborate a new multilingual terminology of ethnopoetics/ethnopoetry (1975, 1977). Then she compiled a handbook and a survey of type and motif indices (2000). The latter one is better known, because it was published in FFC (as no. 273). The third important part of her genre analysis is found in – alas – rather inaccessible publications. Her three-volume manu- script: Εποποιία. Epic. Oral Martial Poetry. Models and Categories (Preview Jerusa- lem 2004) not only has a thousandfold terminology for describing texts of heroic poetry, but in itself it is a mirror epic text. Unfortunately, little discussion arose about Jason’s system (but Russian folklorists translated and discussed some of her proposals). Another very individual work was accomplished by Bronislava Kerbelytė. She compiled a card index of 85,000 Lithuanian tales, fables, legends and similar texts, improving the (generally accepted) order and the definitions of the genres. Her catalogue takes the Aarne/Thompson system into consideration, but both in describing the narrative plots and in arranging them, she followed her own system. (The catalogue was published in Lithuanian [Kerbelytė 1999–2009] and in a shortened Russian edition [Kerbelytė 2005]). Perhaps because of the lan- guage barrier these works (and others of her theoretical publications) were not discussed on an international level, as far as her new systematization of narra- tives is concerned, which she calls ‘structural-semantical’. We remember that before and after the AaTh tale-type catalogue there were tale-type indices with a different grouping and classification system. But they were practical, following the inner similarities of the folktale texts in the given archives. In the beginning Kerbelytė’s approach was also a practical one, but later she aimed at a semantic description of the various narrative genres and sub-genres. Which is not a simple task! Similar folktales could be separated from one another (as AaTh and ATU are

Brought to you by | Eotvos Lorand University Authenticated Download Date | 5/17/18 1:20 PM 104 | Vilmos Voigt doing), using a ‘practical’ term: the (tale) type. As we know, this is not a theoretical term, but just a reference to the theme/plot/sujet of the tale. People learn and tell folktales, because the ‘types’ are interesting, not an underlying sys- tem. But if we want to describe a tale as an abstract semantic unit, and if the cata- logue of narratives is systematized according to that (in this case: semantics of the tales) – it is not a mirror of the narrative people tell. Storytelling concerns a tale-type such as AaTh/ATU 306: The Danced-out Shoes – a story everybody remembers if she/he once heard it. Kerbelytė classifies this tale as The hero makes an end to the person’s contact with a dangerous object and 3.1.0.9. The hero brings evidence about a particular person or object – a clever interpretation of the moti- vation in the narrative, but not moving anybody to tell a folktale about it! The other trouble with her actual semantic description is that it serves as a frame to many stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot who “bring evidence about a particular person or object” at the end of the (folk)tale by an explanatory meeting. I do not know whether in the future there will be more attempts to create new theories of indexing folk narratives – but I am afraid that it will not happen. (Nunquam? – I repeat the word this time with a question mark.) Communicative forms, performance and genre analysis were connected successfully in the works of leading American folklorists (Dan Ben-Amos, Richard Bauman, Joel Sherzer and others) in the first half of the seventies. They made strong efforts to introduce the Soviet and French structural schools in the U.S., too. But this time is over. (Nunquam.) As a person, who at that time had con- structed a model for genres in everyday communication – folklore communica- tion – professional communication, I should say that today nobody in folk narra- tive research uses the ‘models’ of ‘those’ years. The Enzyklopädie des Märchens asked me to write several entries representing the ‘modern approaches’ from Anordnungsprinzipien (vol. 3, 565–576) to Volkserzählung (vol. 14, 328–334) – which was a great honour – but this also shows that the core persons in Göttingen did not want to write about those ‘modern’ or ‘modern theoretical’ topics themselves. It is not by chance that the ISFNR Commission for Theoretical Prob- lems was established in 1974, and its activity was traceable for the last time in 1980 (Bauman et al. 1980). If we count the years from the first drafts of manuscripts until today, the Enzyklopädie des Märchens spans at least two generations of folklorists. It is like the Old Testament and the New Testament (one is modelled by the other and is at the same time a new continuation) but in the case of the Enzyklopädie des Mär- chens the text was cut into alphabetically arranged headings. The half century since the 1960s is today over. These good times will not come back.

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The Enzyklopädie des Märchens is, in a way, the most important harvest of the ISFNR. If it were not a sacrilege, I could quote the well-known Soviet poster: “When we say Lenin, we mean the Party. When we say the Party, we mean Lenin!“ (My govorim Lenin – podrazuemevaem Partija. My govorim Partija – podrazumevaem Lenin.) (My trouble as a folklorist was that I could not find the first source of that saying!) I hope we will soon see the final volume of the Enzyklo- pädie des Märchens. Comparing the first volumes with the latest ones, one real- izes that the entries grew more and longer (a typical illness of all encyclopedias). In volume 1, Afroamerikanisches Erzählgut filled four and a half columns. In volumes 13 and 14, Usbeken was accorded five columns and Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika just sixteen. Tempora mutantur. And the entry on Veckenstedt, Albert Edmund (volume 13) is as long as Linda Dégh’s or Alan Dundes’ (volume 3). At the time of proofreading, I once more checked the figures and could find good counter-examples, too: Ägypten (51 columns) and Andreev, Nikolaj Petrovič (six and a half columns) versus Vertauschung schlafender Ehepaare (three columns) and Wallonen (four and a half columns). A full correction of the misbalance will happen nunquam. One Hungarian humorist (György Hámos) once wrote a sketch: Pótkötettel a halhatatlanságba (Going to eternity with a supplementary volume – published in 1967), mocking how impossible it is to be important – in a supple- mentary volume. In the middle volumes the Enzyklopädie des Märchens was like the brood-hen for all folklorist chicken, and some non-chicken too. Lengthy entries were written on themes and persons of culture history and religion. As far as they are meaning- ful: let they occupy the pages of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens’ volumes! The Enzyklopädie des Märchens will thus serve better for many generations with information about folktales, folk poetry – and much more beyond. The bulk and the scholarly level of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens is another case of nunquam revertar. Today we look for information on the ‘net’, which is very complex, abundant with otherwise unknown data, sometimes excellent, sometimes dull. But it will disappear at the very moment when you press another button. The Enzyklopädie des Märchens keeps standing forever on the bookshelves. I know some similar international handbooks – and I am convinced that the Enzyklopä- die des Märchens is the best one among them. The differences between the first and last volumes are due to the changing situation of folk narrative research, and by some shift in editorial policy, too. This makes a further ‘mirror effect’ of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens – we feel a movable, developing enterprise in folklore research. It is a pity that there were not many important reviews of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens’ volumes. I can understand well: why? Nobody could be an expert in all topics the Enzyklopädie des Märchens covers, and definitely not from its

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‘world-wide’ horizon. Once I was asked to write a lengthy review on one of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens’ volumes (Voigt 1996) – and it was a wonderful and hopeless task at the same time. What is folk narrative? It is the topic of ISFNR congress participants in their researches. Do we know more about it since the first congress in Kiel and Copen- hagen? My imperative answer is: yes. During the last decades questions have been asked concerning the identity of folk tales as such. Whether they are subver- sive, fakelore, or whether the best of them are due to some Italian writers. To be frank, I am happy to notice that this kind of criticism follows the general trend of folktale studies. Theodor Benfey traced all tales back to Sanskrit books, Joseph Bédier to advertisements for pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. Albert Wes- selski could not find any traces of folktales on earth before the time of Jan Hus. Carl-Wilhelm von Sydow connected tales of magic with the megalith age, V. Ya. Propp with the initiation rites of the savages. I do not say that all those theories are correct. But I am convinced that folk narrative is a large basin of so many stories (‘The ocean of story-rivers’ as the Sanskrit poet Somadeva said about 1070 A.D.). Folktale scholarship will never repeat the old masters in all the details of their wisdom, but will in principle follows in their footsteps. In this case nunquam revertar means: folk tale studies will ever be developing, issuing new ideas. In this survey I did not deal with some important topics in folk narrative research: theory of folklore, biology of narration, structural and post-structural approaches, ideological reframing of the tales, ethics of collecting and publish- ing, feminist studies, etc. They are important – I simply had no space for evaluat- ing them. Similarly, it would be a promising task to review the activities of the French school of ‘mentality history’, or the German philological school during the last half of a century. Unfortunately, I do not have space to enumerate their results. We know about the social and cultural background and the text-philology of early Italian, French and German tales. ‘Deconstruction’, ‘colonization’, ‘gender lore’, and in general ‘culture and tale’ studies appeared, and there is a growing market for such studies. I cannot but leave now their evaluation to a ‘next’ paper. I do not want to suggest that some ‘Golden Age’ of folk narrative studies will never occur again. I only wanted to make clear that the past will never return. In our days where so many sudden changes occur, one may think that either folklore will exist in the near future and the coming generations – or not. The answer is as doubtful as the Delphic Oracle’s reply to Pyrrhus: “Ibis redibis nun- quam in bello [or: per bella] peribis” (you will go and return not in the war shall you perish). The stress is again on the word nunquam. (The sentence was original- ly a Latin verse which only later has been translated into Greek.)

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Here we can come back to Dante who in the Inferno refers to this famous double-decked sentence: “Ibis redibis ... ”: He knew that its meaning depends on where we put the comma in the sentence. As for the future of folk narrative studies, I suggest the following translation: it [folk narrative study] will go on, and return again and never (nunquam) will be destroyed in troubles! We just have to place the word nunquam for indicating the positive solution.

* * *

My lecture was a personal account of events, trends and persons in folk narrative research, which ‘will not come back’. I also wanted to express my personal feelings and impressions. It is not my task to evaluate the sixteenth ISFNR congress either. But I have noticed that some of my forecast (concerning, e.g., the number of ISFNR participants from important areas; preference or negligence of ‘traditional’ folk narrative themes and methods; the lack of an emerging ‘new paradigm’) seem to have come true. Both in ISFNR and SIEF there are recently some diligent working groups, others died out. Sometimes (as in the case of the ‘charm’ and the ‘ritual year’ commissions) they only overlap with folk narrative studies. Their almost annual meetings are a very positive sign. In one word, the ISFNR survived the challenges of the last times. Let me finish with some further personal remarks. I have the privilege to call more than one country my folkloristic homeland: my native Hungary of course, then Suomi, then recently more and more Eesti, and for more than half a century: Lietuva. I was and I am very proud of the folklorists from those countries. First of all the old professors, who taught me – they represent the traditional lore about traditional lore. Then I am proud of my colleagues with whom I shared the events and achievements in folk narrative studies during so many years. And finally I am proud of ‘our’ students and the students of our former students, representa- tives of the next and coming generations of folklorists. We all feel how heart- warming it is to have 127 young people participating in our sixteenth ISFNR congress who are mostly from the promising ‘Greater Balticum’ area. We are so proud of you, wishing you will continue to achieve something in the wonder- world of tales. If folk narrative were a God (better: a Goddess) seeing those young people in the lecture room I may repeat the words from Simeon’s canticle: “Lord, I have seen your glory, let thy servant go in peace!”

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Bibliographical references

Because of the limited space I only list here the publications that have been mentioned specially. For folkloric and theoretical terms alike, see the entries in the Enzyklopädie des Märchens.

Bauman, Richard et al.: Current Trends in Folk Narrative Theory. A Report. In: ARV. Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore 36 (1980) 25–55. Dundes, Alan: Who Are the Folk? In: Bascom, William (ed.): Frontiers of Folklore. Boulder/ Colorado 1977, 17–35. Dundes, Alan/Pagter, Carl A.: Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Austin 1975. Grigas, Kazys et al.: Lietuvių patarlės ir priežodžiai 1–2. Vilnius 2000–08. Jason, Heda (in collaboration with G. Grober-Glück/E. Güttgemans/D. Segal): Ethnopoetics. A Multilingual Terminology. Jerusalem 1975. ead.: Ethnopoetry. Form, Content, Function. Bonn 1977. ead.: Motif, Type and Genre: A Manual for Compilation of Indices and A Bibliography for Indices and Indexing (Folklore Fellows’ Communications 273). Helsinki 2000. Kerbelytė, Bronislava: Lietuvių pasakojamosios tautosakos katalogas – The Catalogue of Lithua- nian Narrative Folklore 1–4. Vilnius 1999–2009/Kaunas 2009. Kerbelite, Bronislava: Tipy narodnyh skazok. Strukturno-semanticheskaja klassifikacija litov- skih narodnyh skazok 1–2. Moscow 2005. Klintberg, Bengt af: The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend (Folklore Fellows’ Communications 300). Helsinki 2010. Krikmann, Arvo (ed.): Netinalju Stalinist – Internet-anekdoty o Staline – Internet Humour about Stalin. Tartu 2004. id./Laineste, Liisi (eds.): Permitted Laughter. Socialist, Post-Socialist and Never-Socialist Hu- mour. Tartu 2009. id./Sarv, I[ngrid] [eds.]: Eesti vanasõnad 1–5. Tallinn 1980–87. id./Saukas, R[ein] [eds.]: Eesti mõistatused 1–2. Tartu 2001. Laineste, Liisi: Post-socialist Jokes in Estonia: Continuity and Change. Tartu 2008. Marzolph, Ulrich (ed.): The Arabian Nights Reader. Detroit 2006. id. (ed.): The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective. Detroit 2007. Sauka, Leonardas: Pasaka Eglė Žalčių Karalienė (Egle the Queen of Serpents) 1–3. Vilnius 2007– 08. Uther, Hans-Jörg: The Types of International Folktales. A Classification and Bibliography 1–3 (Folklore Fellows’ Communications 284–286). Helsinki 2004. Voigt, Vilmos: Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Band 7. In: Fabula 37 (1996) 129–138.

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