The thesis deals with fairy tales and legends told by Peter Jakelj - Smerinjekov (1886–1979), a storyteller from Kranjska Gora, to folklorist Milko Matičetov in the 1950s and 1960s. A large part of the material, contained in manuscripts and tape recordings, was transcribed by Anja Štefan, M. A. in the late 1990s. This part of the transcriptions, 80% of the repertoire, required numerous corrections and standardisation, while 20% of the entire repertoire was completed by the author of this thesis, partly as part of her diploma thesis and partly now. With this thesis, I have supplemented the transcriptions, which now comprise 182 pages, and upgraded them with analysis.
In the first part of the thesis, I introduce the narrator, Peter Jakelj, explore the context of the meetings between him and Milko Matičetov, and present the history of the work done so far on the material collected by Matičetov. Between 1952 and 1967, folklorist visited Peter Jakelj eight times and recorded approximately 19 folklore meetings, in which a total of 89 narrative units were collected, in addition to 32 songs and 81 short folklore forms.
The material is examined from several perspectives: it is divided into individual units according to the source from which it was transcribed and according to the sequence of folklore events; each unit is identified by the narrator, the source (when known), and the date of origin. The focus of the research is on genre and content analysis. Peter Jakelj's repertoire includes 63 different stories, taking into account stories without variants, of which 27 are folktales and 36 are legends, ranging in genre from realistic, magical, and animal tales to historical, legendary, mythical, humorous, explanatory tales, and anecdotes. As many as 25 stories have parallels in the international ATU type index. Themes about the devil, Pehta, and King Matjaž predominate, two stories are Jakelj's own work. The repertoire provides insight into the transmission of folklore between generations, as Peter Jakelj's daughter, Marica Globočnik, continued the storytelling tradition.
In the future, it would be useful to supplement the work with a dictionary of dialect words and a map of the locations where the stories take place. The material is an important source for further research into motifs, their prevalence in Slovenian literary folklore, for comparative studies of the transmission of stories from storyteller to storyteller, and for adapting stories to the contemporary context. Wider accessibility would be enabled by the publication of a monograph of Peter Jakelj's repertoire in the Slovenski pravljičarji (Slovenian Storytellers) collection.
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