Abstract
The present study is part of a sequence of approaches, old and recent, meant to highlight the cultural and historical value of the researches undertaken within The Folklore Archive of Moldavia and Bukovina, which made possible the syntheses published by The Publishing House of “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University within the “Ethnos” Collection, coordinated by Professor Ion H. Ciubotaru, the one who, half a century ago, founded this institution and initiated the largest project for the systemic and systematic research of the traditional culture, before The Ethnographic Atlas of Romania. In their research of the fantastic fairytales of Moldavia, Ion H. Ciubotaru and Silvia Ciubotaru use the monographic perspective not only for the texts of the folkloric variants from the developed corpus, but also for the folk narrators, their relation with the narrating environment, their role in this complex phenomenon of narrating, regarded by the book’s authors as “a living fire, maintained, over time, by both performers and passionate listeners”, marked by “the traditional style, unitary for the Romanian space narrators”, but “still expressive and vigorous”.
The author of this article appreciates and confirms the significant share of tales and narrating in the historical Moldavia, underlines the massiveness of materials from this ethno-cultural space in The Corpus of Answers to the Questionnaires of Ion Mușlea, stating how important the introductory study of the two authors from Iași is in listing all previous contributions to the knowledge of fantastic tales, including for studying the unpublished variants of The Romanian Academy’s Folklore Archive and of the other two archives in Bucharest and Chișinău. This synthesis on one of the most important categories of oral literature is a true model for the scientific turning to account of a documentary corpus from folklore archives. The exemplary transcriptions, the rigorous classifications made using the Antti Aarne-Stith Thompson international catalogue, the thematic index of a rarely-met philological accuracy are scientific performances to be followed by the researchers of the other national archives of folklore from Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Chișinău and Timișoara.
Keywords: fantastic fairytales, the phenomenon of narrating, narrators, collections of tales, classifying narratives.
Cuvinte-cheie: basme fantastice, fenomenul povestitului, povestitorii, colecții de basme, tipologizarea narațiunilor.