The types of folk legends: the stuctural-semantic classification of lithuanian aetiological, mythological and historical legends

Abstract

Lithuanian scholar of folkloristics Bronislava Kerbelyte appeared in the very first issue of E.L.O. , in 1995, with a paper expounding, in an inevitably condensed form, her new concept of classification of folktales, stemming from a specific system of analysis and description of narrative tex ts. 1 Professor Kerbelyte’s model was translated into Russian (“Historical Development of the Structure and Semantics of Folk Tales”, 1991) and has been successfully tested with her classification of a huge corpus of Lithuanian folktales.