Tale
Latvju teiksmas
Not translated into English
Jānis Veselis · 1942
Synopsis
Prose legends drawn from the dainas, the Latvian folk songs, to bring the life wisdom of the ancients closer to the modern reader. The Latvian deities appear in them, Laima, Kārta, Dēkla and Māra, and the sons of God and the daughters of the sun walk among men. Karola Dāle sees in them a legendary world full of enchantment, of a soft light, in a rhythmic and musical prose.
Context
Published in Riga in 1942, the book was reissued as early as 1943 with lithographs by Niklāvs Strunke. Kārlis Kārkliņš reviewed it the year it came out in Izglītības Mēnešraksts. The Lithuanian Universal Encyclopedia reads it as a philosophical allegory in which the ideas of the dievturi pass, the cult of the ancient gods to which its author belonged. Exile brought it back into print in Västerås in 1966, from Ziemeļblāzma, with fifteen illustrations, and Jānis Rudzītis devoted another article to this reissue in 1967. The site Latvian Literature ranks it among the first prose works of the imaginary in the Latvian language.
Who it is for
Mythological tales in a carefully wrought language, which are best read with some idea of Latvian mythology.
Prizes and reception
Awarded a prize in 1944 by the Latvian Cultural Foundation, and for a time its author's most popular book.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.