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From a methodological and folkloristic perspective, the article explores attitudes toward older people and aging in Slovene and Estonian proverbs based on archival paremiological material collected from the second half of the 19th century to the present day. Various aspects of old age and ageing are also reflected in the rich tradition of proverbs. As can be seen from the examined material, proverbs related to the elderly and to ageing reflect established cultural stereotypes or attitudes that are full of controversy and ambivalence. On the one hand, there are many negative stereotypes that emphasize the vulnerability and needs of the elderlz and portray them as a passive group in need of help. This stereotype is extremely common in proverbs, where young people are portrayed as capable of learning and adapting to change, while the elderly are not. On the other hand, some proverbs reflect a highly positive attitude towards older people, suggesting that they deserve respect and are to be regarded as full members of society. The other extreme approach is active ageing, which suggests that the solution lies in older people acting young. The proverbs analysed stem from two different languages (Estonian and Slovene), two different language families (Uralic and Indo-European), and two different regions of Europe (northern and southern), but their embedded stereotypes and messages are similar – emphasizing physical decline, wisdom, mental decline, grey hair, walking canes as well asrespect. If the understanding of universal signs and stereotypes of old age in proverbs often varies across cultures, it can also be argued that it is often actually rather similar, especially in countries that were historically connected to and influenced by the same “centre,” i.e., the historical area of German culture in the case of Estonian and Slovene.

Written as a response to professor Simon Bronner’s critical analysis of the concept vernacular and its uses, published in the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics (2022), the article highlights the functionality of the term ‘vernacular’. It has become a folkloristic category, binding conceptual domains such as ‘folk’ and ‘institutional’, ‘folkloric’ and ‘authored’, ‘oral’ and ‘literary’, ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’, which have often been set apart in former scholarship. The main focus of the article is on vernacular religion as a concept and methodology, introduced by Leonard N. Primiano in the 1990s, which opened up a new perspective in the study of religions. The article considers ‘vernacular’ as a flexible concept, instrumental in developing folkloristics in its trans-disciplinary dialogues. Projected on the history of folk-loristics as a multilingual field of studies with roots in multiple national, regional and ethnic traditions, vernacular as an outlook enables us to think of folklore as a transcultural concept and disconnect it from colonial legacies.

Interview with Professor Simon J. Bronner (Penn State University).

The paper examines heavenly letters by combining folkloristic, historical, and anthropological perspectives. First, it analyses and compares variations collected by Hungarian folklorists, critically evaluating their findings. Secondly, to reframe these interpretations and explore the character and late modern uses of the letters, the paper traces the origins of this tradition, and looks at the early medieval counterparts of the letters. Based on this brief review of their original form and function, the paper offers an anthropological reading of the communicative role of the letters. My central argument is that through the mere act of copying the metonymic relationship between the letter and the divine power is metaphorically altered, and that the act of copying gradually became an expressive, rather than a technical action. As a result, the changes in their character, the various protective functions incorporated into them or associated with their possession, can be understood as part of a process in which heavenly letters shifted from being indexes to signals.

The paper examines heavenly letters by combining folkloristic, historical, and anthropological perspectives. First, it analyses and compares variations collected by Hungarian folklorists, critically evaluating their findings. Secondly, to reframe these interpretations and explore the character and late modern uses of the letters, the paper traces the origins of this tradition, and looks at the early medieval counterparts of the letters. Based on this brief review of their original form and function, the paper offers an anthropological reading of the communicative role of the letters. My central argument is that through the mere act of copying the metonymic relationship between the letter and the divine power is metaphorically altered, and that the act of copying gradually became an expressive, rather than a technical action. As a result, the changes in their character, the various protective functions incorporated into them or associated with their possession, can be understood as part of a process in which heavenly letters shifted from being indexes to signals.

I first encountered the tied quilts of the Johnsburg United Methodist Women (UMW). Not overly structured in design, these tied quilts were made of lots of little scrap pieces of material, somehow coming together into a colorful whole.

Examples of how Spiritism merged with local beliefs have been the subject of research in religious studies, ethnology, and folkloristics. Serbian Spiritism can also be viewed as such, but its history is an under-researched topic. We examine the syncretic product we will call ‘folk Spiritism’, being different from the ‘high Spiritism’ of elite and middle-class intellectuals. Folk Spiritism was part of a grassroots movement for Church reform in the first half of the 20th century. The difference between folk and high Spiritism is also confirmed in the emic perspective. Based on a closer reading of its texts, we can discern a better image of the dead and communication with them in the practice of folk Spiritism. We conclude that the difference between the traditional and Spiritist image of the dead is that the former causes fear, while the later brings comfort; folk Spiritism gave preference to communication with heavenly forces (God, Christ, Holy Mother, angels, saints) while retaining the traditional view of the dead.

The Nordic Institute of Folklore, internationally well known by its abbreviation NIF, left a lasting imprint on the history of Nordic and international folkloristics despite its relatively short operation period of less than four decades. The present article, first in a series of forthcoming articles on NIF, examines Lauri Honko’s directorship in the 1970s and 1980s and focuses on the changing of the institute’s field of operation from folkloristics to ‘tradition science’. The term ‘tradition science’ (traditionsvetenskap in Swedish, perinnetiede in Finnish) was never clearly defined in NIF, but was used – and it has continued to be used in folkloristics and ethnology in Finland – in three meanings: an approximate synonym for folkloristics, a joint term for folkloristics and ethnology, and (in plural) an umbrella term for an unspecified number of fields in the study of history, vernacular religion, and culture. The possible earlier history of the term is beyond the scope of this research, but there are indications that the term came into use in both Finnish-language and Swedish-language folklore research in the early 1970s, while the similar term ‘tradition research’ (traditionsforskning in Swedish, perinteentutkimus in Finnish) has a longer history. The term ‘tradition science’ was adopted into NIF’s statutes around the same time as the Nordic Council of Ministers – through which the inter-governmental funding of NIF was administered – initiated the expansion of NIF’s profile to cover folk culture “in its entirety”, suggesting specifically the extension of NIF’s field of operation to include ethnology. Whether NIF implemented this expansion or not, and to what extent, is a matter of debate, and the topic of this article.

From a methodological and folkloristic perspective, the article explores attitudes toward older people and aging in Slovene and Estonian proverbs based on archival paremiological material collected from the second half of the 19th century to the present day. Various aspects of old age and ageing are also reflected in the rich tradition of proverbs. As can be seen from the examined material, proverbs related to the elderly and to ageing reflect established cultural stereotypes or attitudes that are full of controversy and ambivalence. On the one hand, there are many negative stereotypes that emphasize the vulnerability and needs of the elderlz and portray them as a passive group in need of help. This stereotype is extremely common in proverbs, where young people are portrayed as capable of learning and adapting to change, while the elderly are not. On the other hand, some proverbs reflect a highly positive attitude towards older people, suggesting that they deserve respect and are to be regarded as full members of society. The other extreme approach is active ageing, which suggests that the solution lies in older people acting young. The proverbs analysed stem from two different languages (Estonian and Slovene), two different language families (Uralic and Indo-European), and two different regions of Europe (northern and southern), but their embedded stereotypes and messages are similar – emphasizing physical decline, wisdom, mental decline, grey hair, walking canes as well asrespect. If the understanding of universal signs and stereotypes of old age in proverbs often varies across cultures, it can also be argued that it is often actually rather similar, especially in countries that were historically connected to and influenced by the same “centre,” i.e., the historical area of German culture in the case of Estonian and Slovene. Članek z metodološkega in folklorističnega vidika raziskuje odnos do starejših in sta­ranja v slovenskih in estonskih pregovorih na podlagi arhivskega paremiološkega gra­diva, zbranega v drugi polovici 19. stoletja pa vse do danes. Različni vidiki starosti in staranja se odražajo tudi v bogatem izročilu pregovorov. Kot je razvidno iz kategorij, pregovori, povezani s starejšimi ljudmi in staranjem, predstavljajo uveljavljene kultur­ne stereotipe ali odnose, ki so polni kontroverznosti in ambivalentnosti. Po eni strani obstaja veliko negativnih stereotipov, ki poudarjajo ranljivost in potrebe starejših ljudi ter jih prikazujejo kot pasivno in odvisno skupino. Ta stereotip je globoko zakoreninjen v pregovorih, kjer so mladi prikazani kot sposobni učenja in prilagajanja spremembam, starejši pa ne. Po drugi strani nekateri pregovori odražajo zelo pozitivno stališče do starejših, saj nakazujejo, da si starejši zaslužijo spoštovanje in so polnopravni člani družbe, oz. kažejo na spodbujanje t. i. aktivnega staranja, tj, da starejši ljudje delujejo mladostno in aktivno. Analizirani pregovori so iz dveh različnih jezikov (estonski in slovenski), dveh različnih jezikovnih družin (uralski in indoevropski) in dveh različnih regij Evrope (severne in južne), vendar so si njihovi vgrajeni stereotipi in sporočila po­dobni – poudarjanje fizičnega upada, modrosti, duševnega upada, sivih las, hoje, palice in spoštovanja so le nekateri ključni izrazi, ki izhajajo iz analize. Če se razumevanje univerzalnih znakov in stereotipov starosti, obravnavanih v pregovorih, razlikuje glede na kulturo, lahko trdimo, da je razumevanje znakov starosti v Evropi precej podobno, zlasti v državah, ki so bile v preteklosti povezane z istim »centrom« in so bile pod nje­govim vplivom, tj. nemško kulturno-zgodovinsko okolje.

What happens to a Norwegian traditional folktale when told by a Large Language Model (LLM)? As machine-generated text becomes increasingly omnipresent, the need to understand such texts through analysis using literary scholarship and seeing them through the lens of folkloristics becomes apparent. For the purposes of examining basic structures of LLM narrative, this article uses the folktale “The Sweetheart in the Forest” (ATU 955) to examine how the style and telling of folktales is adapted by LLMs, including how LLMs display a tendency towards “floating” motifs and imagery, and how the LLMs relate to the cultural specificity of the Norwegian variant.