The voivod's children

The Voivod's Children - Fairy Tales of the Slavic Peoples is a collection of folk tales from all over Eastern Europe , compiled by Angel Karalijchew and Nikolai Todorov . The collection was published in 1984 by the “Bulgarski Hudoshnik” publishing house ( Sofia ), where a German translation was also printed (by Lotte Markowa and Gerda Minkowa ).

General

The collection includes a total of 43 fairy tales from almost every country in Eastern Europe. There are 13 from Bulgaria , 5 from Poland , 4 from Serbia , 3 each from Russia , the Czech Republic and Slovakia , and 2 each from Bosnia-Herzegovina , Croatia and the Ukraine . Montenegro , Romania , Ruthenia and Belarus are represented with a fairy tale.

And the moral of the story ...

Some stories tell a simple morality based on human behavior. In Who Doesn't Work ... a family lets the lazy bride of the landlord starve until she pulls herself up to work, as does The spoiled daughter . - The angry ax destroys a bridge and falls into the river. The haughty butterfly mocks a caterpillar and with it itself. The story of the barrel describes the disintegration of a family.

Help yourself ...

By far the largest space is taken up by classic, tongue-in-cheek David Goliath stories. Here the poor prevail against the rich, the powerless against the powerful, the stupid against the educated - almost exclusively through understanding, ingenuity and a certain amount of cheek. The greedy merchant wants to cheat a porter out of his savings and in the end has to buy his own children. - Ratscho omniscient has more luck than intellect in fortune telling and barely gets away with it. - In Omar and the Usurer , a woman appears as a judge and thus saves her loved one from mutilation. The learned dog makes a stingy large farmer a mockery and finally feeds his servant.

... then God will help you

In the Slavic region, too, as everywhere in the world, many folk tales are interwoven with the belief in higher, supernatural powers that intervene in people's lives and "bring everything back to order". Often this power appears as an old man or a lonely wanderer working miracles and rewarding or punishing people depending on their behavior. Janek and Hanka and The Four Brothers are classic prime examples. The role of this god-like figure is taken from time to time by quite earthly lords and rulers. Kings ( The Petition ), the Turkish Padishah ( Ero and the Sultan ) or the Judge ( The Laughing Third ) are invoked for justice.

... or not

But the higher powers also have a downside. In some stories it is only through them that evil comes into the world, for example in The Snake Mill or Where Diseases Came From . How a simple person can cope with evil goblins ( the farmer and the tribulations ), death ( the disciple of death ) or even the Lord God personally ( how the blacksmith came to paradise ) falls into the second category again.

Parallels

Almost inevitably, some Slavic folk tales have certain motifs that are very familiar to the reader from the German-speaking area. The forest hut appears as a marginal rewrite of the Bremen town musicians , and the blessing motif from the snake mill is strikingly reminiscent of Frau Holle . The statements of famous plays can also be found in this collection: Ero from the hereafter reads like the Bosnian version of Hans Sachs Traveling Pupil , and the averting of brutal debt redemption from Omar and the usurers takes place almost exactly in William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice .

Conclusion and comparison

The Slavic folk tales published here have, in contrast to many fairy tales in the German-speaking area, a more realistic background. Especially the “fairytale”, that is the unbelievably magical moment ( fairies , dragons, etc.) is almost completely missing. The heroes are rarely kings or princes, but farmers, craftsmen or crooks - people “like you and me”. Most of the stories (at least in the German version) are told in a tongue-in-cheek tone and all in all correspond more to our art form of instructive anecdotes .

literature

• Angel Karalijtschew (Ed.): The Voivod's Children . German Edition Sofija 1984.