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Sommeils et Veilles dans le Conte Merveilleux Grec. By Marilena Papachristophorou. FF Communications 279. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2002. 337 pp.
This work taps into two impressive sources of folktale scholarship. First, the main source of Greek collected material is the note cards of the G. A. Mégas archive of twenty-three thousand classified items. Gaining access to this archive is difficult, but fortunately FF Communications has agreed to publish an English version of A. Angelopoulos and A. Brouskous catalog of Greek Magic Tales, based on the archive. Second, this is the revised version of a doctoral thesis written in 1997 at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), under the supervision of Nicole Belmont, one of the most remarkable and inspired fairy-tale scholars in France. In Papachristophorou's bibliography (237-46) we find confirmation that her academic background is mainly grounded in Greek and French scholarship. This double legacy should stir the interest of the mainstream English-based community of folktale studies.
The main body of this book (55-234) deals with seven folktale types as they appear in Greece, more or less linked to the themes of sleep and vigil (sommeils et veilles; please note that from now on quotations are the reviewers translation from French). The first part consists of two introductory chapters: a presentation of the themes of sleep and dream (the latter is discarded, as it does not seem to appear in fairy tales connected with sleep), and a work plan, as well as a general view of folktale studies and collecting in Europe, leading to the Aladdin's cave of Greek folktales. In the last section of this introduction the author offers the names of M. Lüthi, M. Eliade, and V. Propp of The Historical Roots of the Folktale as a panel grounding her purpose to study fairy tales from an initiatory perspective (50-52). The three remaining parts of this study-"Slumbers," "Leisure Vigils," and "Work Vigil"-are taken up by the analysis of seven fairy tales. In the first category we have "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty" for women's slumbers, and for men's slumbers we have two little-known subtypes of The Search for the Lost Husband: the Greek-Turkish ecotype of The Disenchanted Husband (AT 425B) and The False Bride Takes the Heroines Place (AT 425G)....
