Croatian folktales selected for this edition defy easy description and point of origin. This should not come as a surprise because it is hard to find an umbrella term for tales that include, for instance, a talking rosemary bush, a little frog turning into a girl, or a young bandit who solves problems with his wits and not with any magical help, especially when we know that these tales have no author and do not necessarily function as literature. Rather, they were written down a century ago as told by Croatian informants who had heard them from their grandparents and these had heard them from their grandparents, and this chain could go on and on without the possibility to pinpoint either the first storyteller or the subsequent ones who modified the story in the process of retelling.
So, the beauty of Croatian and other folktales lies in their apparent yet misguiding simplicity. They have been around for such a long time capturing our imagination and yet we are still struggling to talk about them. Many scholars have been tackling this problem. The earliest study to offer a more general terminology for stories originating from the belief and lore of the people is André Jolles’ Simple Forms (1929). The Dutch literary scholar divided folk narratives into the folktale, saint’s legend, saga (legend), myth, riddle, proverb, case (example), report and joke. Every genre comes from the characteristic attitudes animating them while the very term “the simple form” is borrowed from Jacob Grimm’s distinction between “nature poetry” (Naturpoesie) and “art poetry” (Kunstpoesie). Forms emanating from the customs and lore are simple because they occur spontaneously and correspond to “nature poetry” unlike “art poetry” which has the author and craves for artistic pretence. However, the criticism soon pointed out that Jolles’ simple forms are not mere precursors of more complex literary forms, especially folktale, which is far more complicated to be described as simple in any way. The latter is especially true if we know that folktale is more often than not presented as fairy tale, the form whose style and creation is far more literary in its nature.
Croatian scholars studying Croatian folktales and oral tradition in general have also come across the same problem. The most distinguished scholar in the field, Maja Bošković-Stulli, whom we owe most of the stories in this edition, claims that “genres” or types of oral tradition are usually classified according to their topic and form. Aware of the misleading notion of the term “fairy tale”, she states that the term “tale” can accommodate legends, adventurous and funny tales from everydayness, and even fables, all of which may or may not have supernatural elements. What connects these tales is their style and a very complicated way of how and why they came to be.
Obviously, there is nothing simple about folktales. There is no easy-going continuity from “a long long time ago” until nowadays. Triggered by the desire to store, organize, and communicate much of what the societies have known and experienced, folktales have undergone changes from one storyteller to another, from one generation to another, shifting their functions, forms, geographic locations and adapting to social changes, one of which was the transformation from belief to disbelief, which is why a huge part of oral narratives has been subsequently unjustly adapted to children’s literature.
In their overwhelmingly long and stubborn continuity, folktales have found their way into literature and history because the oral and the literate intersect revealing the need to tell a story and the power of storytelling. The Trojan War in Homer’s Iliad, Odysseus’ long journey home in Odyssey, the Anglo-Saxon warrior slaying the dragon in Beowulf, Chaucer’s collection of the European medieval oral forms in The Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s appropriations of the tales from all over the world in The Decameron, all testify to the early presence and nuanced interweaving of oral narratives in the works that we today regard as literature. In the Croatian context, the Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja, written by a catholic priest in the 12th century in the town of Bar and subsequently modified and translated from Latin into Croatian in the 14th century in the Split area, exemplifies the same complexity. Not only does the work represent the oldest preserved historical document relevant for Croatians and other South Slavs, but it is one of the oldest written evidence of Croatian oral tradition, containing folktales and legends, and is additionally studied as a literary text.
With the emergence of a more focused interest for oral tradition in the early 19th-century European Romantic movements, it soon became quite clear that a proper methodology dealing exclusively with this corpus would be hard to find. From the Brothers Grimm’s early collection, adaption and subsequent mythological theory about the common source of the tales, via migration theory, attempts to demarcate tales geographically and historically, structuralist theories, psychoanalytic approaches, comparative studies, to the very interaction with live informants and emphasis on the context and process of storytelling, studying oral tradition became a vibrant field drawing together scholars from various disciplines. What their research in effect reveals is that oral tradition does not only tell a story about the imaginary past but that it also reveals the story about the imaginary present.
The folktales in this edition present just a fraction of the abundant Croatian oral tradition. Distinctiveness of this tradition, according to Bošković-Stulli, lies in its diverse and different contact points with the Central European, Mediterranean, Pannonian and Balkan traditions since Croatian culture has been shaped by heterogenic socio-historical factors. On the other hand, it is also quite impossible to define distinctiveness of these tales according to their presumed, often uncertain original source. So, the procedure to claim them as Croatian is based on the fact that these tales were told at one point by Croatian informants in their often very versatile local idiom, and that the informants had heard them in their local community.
However, what has been lost in this transfer from body to book lies in the very deficiency of writing, in Plato’s pharmakon: neither a remedy nor a poison, but both at once. Writing rendering immortality which comes at a cost mutes the storyteller who uses a specific prosody to fill in what is not being said by the words themselves. So, bear in mind that the tale about the grumpy cat, the gluttonous daughter, the rooster’s “brave” company, the young man who tricks the devil’s emperor and many others that await the reader, have once been accompanied by mimicking, pauses, whispers and gestures of the keen storyteller.
And while the original storyteller has long since gone, the need to tell as well as the need to hear the story remains. So, the listener or the reader of these stories is anyone who is willing to suspend disbelief and enter into the world which unveils the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the world which ultimately teaches us how to cherish and enjoy our present moment.