Bronislava Kerbelytė

The Structural-Semantic Types of Lithuanian Folk Tales, 2 vols.

Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (Academia Scientiarum Fennica). 2015. 477 + 331 pp.

ISBN 978-951-41-1113-6 (vol. 1, FFC 308), 1114-3 (vol. 2, FFC 309)

Available at Bookstore Tiedekirja. 80 euros.

The classification system of the types of folk tales published by Antti Aarne in 1910 was a much needed and courageous project. The author of this book has classified more than 40,000 variants of Lithuanian folk tales according to the international catalogue by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson (AT). She has concluded that it is necessary to improve the classification system. The author has determined elementary plots (EP) as structural elements of folk narratives. She has created the structural-semantic method for analysis and description of texts on several levels. Structural-semantic types of folk tales as well as concrete plots of Lithuanian tales are described in the book. The classification of elementary plots and their types contains much information about folk tales and about people. The classes of EP reflect people’s perpetual goals. The EP types reflect the ways of achieving goals, people’s rules of behaviour.

Bronislava Kerbelytė is Professor of Folkloristics, a prominent Lithuanian researcher and author of more than 20 books and 200 articles on Lithuanian narrative folklore published in Lithuanian, Russian, German, and English. From 1963 to 1999 she worked at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore in Vilnius and from 1996 to 2010 at the Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. Her areas of interest include the classification, systematization and structural-semantic analysis of folk narratives.