1 My Favourite Folk Tales Foreword My Favourite Folk Tales could also be understood as a kind of advertising slogan: simple, straight

to the point, and friendly all at once. However, in our case it is much more than simply the call of a ringing bell. In fact it would be more accurate to describe this volume as both an announcement and a wake-up call, since the intention behind it bears witness to the resurrection and interpretation of a common tradition which has long since been a dead branch, almost unknown, indeed a forgotten treasure. Following the logic of the foreword of Kroly KERNYIs Greek Mythology, I would like to emphasise the personal nature of the choice. With the title My Folk Tales I do not wish to own the tale treasury of the various ethnic groups in the Carpathian Basin, nor do I wish to restrict the richly-varied source material to Hungarian tales; quite the contrary, it is the common tradition which has emerged over the centuries which I would like to bring out by introducing the variants originating from different communities. However, I cannot deny what KERNYI noted: The subjective factor () can in no way ever be excluded. Presenting mythology is always an interpretation, and all interpretations depend on the bias of the individual who presents them. In our case it is not just a selection and introduction, but also an interpretation, with four textual-hermeneutic studies (interpretations) in Hungarian and English for each of the four blocks I have identified. The title also reveals that we are only dealing with folk stories, i.e. variants of tales spread orally, collected and published by experts. These are individually selected and grouped together and really have become my favourites, since during the interpretation they played around in my hands until I was able to approach the situations of the tales from the perspective of a new type of phenomenology, from the perspectives of HEIDEGGERs Being-towards-death and LVINAS face and speech.

2 Over the last few years I have had the good fortune as a professorial candidate, a folklorist and a free academic to teach the tale treasury of the peoples living together in the Carpathian Basin. Indeed in the same semester I taught full- and part-time students and already graduated experts, many of whom had decades of experience in teaching in the fields of folk tales and other folk narratives. But even they were amazed to hear the tales collected here, which makes it clear to me that they hardly knew the true folk tale, but rather read and taught literarised variants or those reworked for children; in other words, artificial tales. In what follows I would like to speak about some of those defining experiences acquired among the multiple listeners (often from different ethnic groups), which also serves to clarify the reasons why I selected and edited this tale collection, and what purposes this resource material can serve. 1. Over the last decades a truly significant number of folk tale collections have appeared (exceptionally also Gypsy folktales), often accompanied by brilliant introductions from folklorists, literary theorists and linguists; however, these collections have become rarer, and it is becoming difficult to find them even in second hand bookshops. Although it is true that some of the volumes of tales mentioned in this collection have been published in neighbouring countries, they naturally have reached Hungary only in a limited number. In order to teach, it is, however, vital to collect tales, to sit in libraries, to be eternally within reach of the sources, for students of higher education, for practical teachers and for lay readers and parents alike. It is this gap which I wanted most of all to fill in some way, and to fill consciously by collecting together tales according to certain tale types. Another aim of a selection such as this is that, in an age characterised by the devaluation of the book and the loss of its aura (as both BORGES and BENJAMIN have pointed out), when even university students hardly read, it should help to make the texts accessible, and help people to become familiar with tale variants that are hardly known, or perhaps not known at all. 2.

3 It is perhaps of some use, for experts and non-experts alike, if instead of the former practice of publishing texts (which was based on the place of collection and the local community), we were to publish tale collections adopting a different starting point. In the present case we have concentrated for our collection on variants of four types and their relatives, or what the French refer to as their neighbours. It is obvious that I have not unconditionally or exclusively stuck to variants of types featuring in the AARNE-THOMSON catalogue, when allocating a tale to one or other of the four blocks. It was sufficient if the organisation, or the primary element, of each variant could be assigned to one of the commonly recognised four types: this is particularly true of the fourth block, which features the unfaithful wife as a type, or variant according to my interpretation. 3. Experience tells us that the students and teachers work will be made easier if we provide a thematic collection of texts which allows them to experience and discover easily the similarities and differences existing between tale types and variants, and the changes in motifs and the existential character of the tales. In publishing this selection I wanted, on the one hand, to replace those volumes which are missing and no longer available, as well as the individual flavours preserved in the many different tale-telling communities. On the other hand, by careful choice I attempted to place significant variants next to each other, to help with the comparative analysis of sources. In my approach I considered it worth trying to satisfy the demands laid down by JAKOBSON and HONTI, according to which the more variants we study, the better, since only in this way can we judge appropriately the historical-geographical, poetical-narratological, mythical-spiritual and linguisticsemantic aspects 4. Since this collection of texts features all the variants in a written form, I cannot do other than provide accompanying studies detailing the textual-hermeneutic aspects of the tales. The essence of the hermeneutics is that I intended to focus attention on the inseparable link between understanding

4 and analysis, and their interdependence, as well as the possible methods of textual analysis and a critical approach to sources. 5. The places where the tale variants published here were collected and the ethnic origin of the tale tellers is a clear indication of the multi-ethnic variety which is traceable through the history of the Carpathian Basin and the centuries old traditions of the ethnic groups who live here together. All of the folk-narratives preserved and collected bear the mutual influence about which Pl GYULAI wrote in his Hungarian Folk Tales study of 1862, and which BARTK and KODLY made widely known in the field of folk music. 6. In all of the tale variants I tried to include in the footnotes the information which the original collector or the later editor of a volume of tales considered important. These notes I place in quotation marks and after them the page number in brackets in which they can be found in the commentary volume. Pter BLINT Head of Depertment, Professor Dr. Habil.