SLOVENIAN FAIRY TALES IN EUROPEAN CONTEXT

Abstract

Although fairy tale motifs can be found even in Antiquity, fairy tales for adults began to appear only in the 16th century (G. F.Straparola, G. Basile) and for children in the 17^th century (C. Perrault). The best-known collection for children is the Brothers Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales (1812– 1815). For researchers there is much of interest in their manuscript collection The Oldenburg Manuscript from 1810. With the help of 344 collectors, the Slovene literary historian Karel Štrekelj (1859–1912) collected more than 2000 Slovene fairy tales and folk tales, which have still not been published and are kept by the Institute of Slovene Ethnography at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts Research Centre, where they are looked after by the leading researcher into Štrekelj’s life and work, Monika Kropej. In 2014 ZRC SAZU published Karel Štrekelj’s History of Slovene Literature (I–IV), which is kept in manuscript form at the University of Graz, where he taught Slovene Literature.