COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ALBANIAN FOLKTALES IN THE ATU SYSTEM, WITH SLOVENIAN PARALLELS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58885/ijllis.v15i3.11mbaiKeywords:
Albanian folktales, Slovenian folktales, ATU classification, comparative folklore, tale types, Robert Elsie, Monika Kropej Telban.Abstract
This study combines quantitative and qualitative approaches within a comparative framework to analyse Albanian folktales in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) classification system alongside the Slovenian tradition. The quantitative tier surveys Uther's (2011) The Types of International Folktales, identifying 282 Albanian tale types across six of the seven major categories, dominated by Anecdotes and Jokes (55.9%), with Formula Tales entirely absent. The qualitative tier analyses Robert Elsie's (2001) corpus of thirty-two narratives, assigning five folktales to international types (ATU 510, 514, 550, 561, 425C), tracing motif correspondences from Strabo and Apuleius through the One Thousand and One Nights to Perrault and Grimm, and confirming that the ten legends lie beyond the ATU framework. The comparative tier juxtaposes the Albanian findings with Monika Kropej Telban's type indexes of Slovenian folktales (2015, 2025a, 2025b). Three conclusions emerge: the two traditions share the pan-European narrative inheritance while preserving irreducibly local mythological systems (Bukura e Dheut, Kulshedra, Zana; povodni mož, Wild Man, vile); typological identity does not entail mythological identity; and the contradiction between the catalogue's silence on Albanian Formula Tales and the presence of a cumulative tale in Elsie's corpus demonstrates that distributional figures measure the history of documentation as much as the tradition itself. The asymmetry between the systematically indexed Slovenian repertoire and the dispersedly documented Albanian one issues a programmatic call for a national Albanian type index.
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