The paper dwells upon the opposition of fiction and veracity in classical Japanese literature. This contraposition can be traced back to the first treatises on poetry of the Heian era. This paper unfolds concerning the situation in Japanese literature of the late middle ages and presents a peculiar text upon composing a “right” haiku poem. This text also seems to be quite late, although traditionally it is ascribed to Matsuo Bashō, the great Haikai poet of the 17^th century.

The paper is written within the context of the project aimed at creating a database of world folklore and mythology. As soon as we outline the areas of expansion of thousands of folklore motifs, we can compare the results with the data provided by other historical disciplines. Patterns of motif distribution can be explained via cultural and demographic processes present in certain periods. S. Thompson’s views concerning the aim of his research inspired the structure of his folklore indexes and overwhelmingly influenced the development of folklore studies between 1940 and 1990. This influence was not always for the better. For the author of the current paper, the main analytical unit is the motif. Unlike the elementary motifs of S. Thompson, it means any elements of the text that are subject to replication, including narrative episodes, images reflecting worldview, clichés, personal names and the like. In the paper particular attention is paid to the motifs characteristic for animal tales. Episodes of such tales and the animal characteristics of the protagonists are independent from each other, the latter being more stable than the former. Areas of distribution of the corresponding motifs (trickster fox, trickster hare, etc.) must have formed earlier than the areas of distribution of particular episodes.

A new method is proposed for analyzing spatial distributions of mythological motifs aiming to answer the following question,"Which motifs have the same or similar spatial distribution compared to a given motif?". The theory behind the method is explained along with its advantages compared to previously used approaches. Spatial analysis of several motifs from Yu.Ye. Berezkin’s catalogue of mythological motifs is presented as a case study.

Very few war conflicts in Western Subarctic are mentioned in colonial era sources in comparison with other areas of North America. However, there is a number of war legends found in Subarctic Athabaskan narrative folklore. The author suggests a method of quantitative analysis of folklore systems to specify the percent of war tales. Based on this analysis, the author concludes that war storylines are found in the Athabaskan folklore as often as in folklore of other ethnic groups whose history and culture have been heavily influenced by warfare. This indicates that wars in the Athabaskan history took place more often than it is reflected in the historical sources. Therefore, folklore is the most suitable basis for the reconstruction of military history of the Western Subarctic in the precolonial and early colonial era.

The paper is dedicated to comparative analysis of versions of the myth, the pathos of which may be articulated as subdual of “solar chaos”. It is widely distributed among the peoples of Asia and Europe, with some expressive parallels in African and Native American folklore (not dwelled upon at this stage of the research). The purpose of the research is to investigate, from the structural and historical perspective, the motifs comprising the myth’s versions: namely, Himalayan and Southeast Asian, Mongolian, East Tungusic, Japanese and Balkan-Slavic (as well as several “stand-alone” recordings: Armenian, Lithuanian, Russian (Smolensk), Chuvash, Bashkir, Komi, Nenets, Symsk Evenk); to examine their regional (and more local) cultural contexts. The analysis of the versions’ correlations allows to suggest certain hypotheses of structural and historical and genetical sort: of the four-part composition of the “core” mythological plot and its extensive “periphery”, of probable genesis of the myth in the East Himalayan epicenter and of genesis of its various versions with the further branchings of the tradition, of ethnolinguistic and territorial factors’ impact on their distribution.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the structure, composition and style of the only preserved Old High German heroic epic poem of the Middle Ages, The Lay of Hildebrand. The consensus has been that The Lay of Hildebrand goes back in origin to oral tradition. Since Andreas Heusler’s research it has been regarded as the most archaic doppelseitiges Ereignislied , which includes dialogue and narrative and enables viewing events from both sides (through the speeches of heroes and the narrative of the singer). The article attempts to show that, on the level of formulas, type-scenes, and motifs, traditionally comprising the return songs, the Old High German lay is structured not in conformity with the canons of heroic epic poetry, but rather so as to effect their refutation, which accounts for its inclusion into the Latin theological corpus.

The paper dwells upon evolution of the motif of marriage to an Otherworld dweller in Early Modern Irish genealogical texts. Regarding diachronic evolution of the motif of marriage to a Tuatha De Danann in the context of Irish social history, the author, firstly, demonstrates its Old Irish roots and prerequisites and, secondly, shows how arrival to Ireland of Anglo-Norman elite led to the “reincarnation” of this motif. Appropriation of mythological genealogies by Anglo-Norman nobles in Late Middle Ages, “secondary” inclusion of the modified motif into the native Irish tradition and its later transformations, blending and remnants are dwelled upon

The paper tells about two hand-written collections of folk songs, “Songs of Milenino village” (1923) and “Reed-pipe. A collection of children’s folk songs” (1924), collected and arranged by S.N. Schil. Both manuscripts were being prepared for publication in the 1920s, but had not been published. “Songs of Milenino village”, collected in summer 1916, provides 434 prikazki , among which there is a distinct thematic group of those dating from the World War I, as well as 299 jumping, wedding, circle dance songs, lullabies, military songs, songs of literary nature, etc. All of these are properly attributed and provided with seven indexes: a thematical index, an index of personal names, a song type index, a formal index (according to the type of narrative), indexes of local words and of local dialect. Songs are classified as “non-rhymed stariny” (with a ramified hierarchy according to the text cohesiveness type), rhymed songs of the new type, songs developed from chastushki , songs of literary nature, children’s songs, etc. The “Reed-pipe” collection (the final draft), prepared for lifetime publication, contains 160 songs collected by other people. S.N. Schil had supposedly been commissioned with it in the 1910s, as she was a well-known children’s author, but due to financial troubles of the publishing houses the collection was never published. A review of folklore collection of the archived documents is also accompanied by short biographical, historical and literary comments

This paper is based upon an essay on history of folklore studies written under the “Folklore and Mythology” MA program in the Center for Typological and Semiotic Folklore Studies of the RSUH. The review covers research concerning the main stages of folklore studies’ emergence as an academical discipline and nuances of the use of the key term of the discipline.

This paper presents a review upon two dictionaries on Slavic folklore studies and ethnolinguistics published in Poland in recent years, which reflect the variety of trends and methodological approaches in contemporary Polish Slavic studies. The first book that is reviewed is Volume V of the “Axiological lexicon of the Slavs and their neighbours”, edited by the well-known Polish ethnolinguist Jerzy Bartmiński. The reviewed volume is dwelling upon the concept of “Honor” (Lublin, 2017; edited by Peter Sotirov and Deyan Aidachich) and is an example of parallel description of Slavic system of values based upon varied comparative data. The second book that is reviewed in this paper is the “Plants in folk beliefs and customs” dictionary (Wroclaw, 2016) by Adam Fischer, one of the most renown Polish ethnographers and folklorists of the first half of the 20^th century. Most of the data for the dictionary had been already collected and processed by Fischer in the 1930s, but the dictionary itself was edited and published by the research group in the University of Wroclaw only two years ago. The dictionary provides information on 250 plant species used in folk culture.