ABSTRACT
Philologists, folklorists, and cultural historians in particular have occupied themselves for a long time with tracing the origin, history, dissemination, and meaning of individual proverbs and their variants. One could go so far as to say that there is a “story” behind every proverb, and it is usually a sizable task to deal with just one text in this diachronic and semantic fashion. For some proverbs whole books have been written, while others have been treated in journal articles or mere notes. Archer Taylor (1890–1973), the doyen of twentieth-century proverb studies, wrote numerous essays on regional or internationally disseminated proverbs which have been collected in Selected Writings on Proverbs by Archer Taylor, ed. by Wolfgang Mieder (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1975). For literally hundreds of investigations see Wolfgang Mieder’s International Bibliography of Explanatory Essays on Individual Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions (Bern: Peter Lang, 1977); and Investigations of Proverbs, Proverbial Expressions, Quotations and Clichés (Bern: Peter Lang, 1984).
