Tale
Otherworldly Tales Collected in 19th Century Macedonia
Македонски народни умотворби
Marko Cepenkov · 1972
Synopsis
The whole of what a tailor from Prilep recorded in the nineteenth century: hundreds of tales and songs, thousands of proverbs, riddles, children's games, beliefs, incantations and dreams with their interpretation. Here we meet the apparitions that lie in wait for those who go out at forbidden hours, the navi that threaten women in childbirth, the narečnici who come to fix the newborn's fate on the third night, the samovili, the female healers and the saints they invoke.
Context
During his lifetime, his notebooks appeared for the most part in Sofia, in the scholarly collection edited by Ivan Šišmanov, up to 1900. The whole was brought together in 1972 in Skopje by Macedonian folklorists, in ten volumes: songs in the first, tales from the second to the seventh, proverbs in the eighth, beliefs, dreams and incantations in the ninth. It contains 681 tales, 5,032 proverbs, 170 songs and 201 dreams. According to his autobiography, he knew by heart more than a hundred and fifty tales and wrote down one or two a week.
Who it is for
About ten volumes, in Macedonian, to be taken in pieces. It is worth knowing that the tales sit alongside lists of proverbs, beliefs and remedies.
Prizes and reception
The folklore institute in Skopje bears his name; the corpus is claimed by Macedonia and by Bulgaria, each of which reads it as its own.