Short narratives and folktale variation in Greek folk culture

The study of folktale variation in Greek folk culture shows that, in the process of their oral
transmission, certain plots and themes are transformed into shorter and more stereotyped
narratives. Thus, stories which belong to different subgenres of the folktale (the fable, the
magic tale or the anecdote) can evolve to a shorter or simpler form, like a proverb, a parable
or an allusion. This is, for example, the case of the paroimiomythoi (proverbs derived from
tales) to use the term coined by Demetrios Loukatos. It is also the case of international folktale
types which are presented in the Greek corpus not as tales but as proverbial phrases. The main
objective of this paper is, therefore, to study some examples of these short stories and analyze
not only their explicit images and allegorical meanings but also their adaptations to modern
social and cultural conditions. The paper is based on the findings of the Catalogue of the
Greek Folktale as well as micro-data recently collected during field research mostly on the
Aegean islands and in northern Greece.