ABSTRACT
Since the turn of the century, folklorists’ work on oral prose narrative has proceeded along two major lines, deriving respectively from historical philology and structural linguistics. The European scene was dominated, for the first half of the century, by the historical-geographical or Finnish school, which studied folktale texts as chains of detachable and to some extent interchangeable parts, designated ‘motifs’. The second line of inquiry, growing out of structural linguistics, attracted the interest of a variety of anthropologists and linguists. Structural analysts see each narrative as a series of transactions, proceeding toward a final transaction which offers a possible resolution of conflicts between opposing ideas. As might be imagined, category identification in structural analysis and the description of narratives as series of repeated transactions are generalizing processes which can lead to extreme reductionism. Relations of transmission are simply assumed to exist between narratives which share some features and do not share others.
