The Der Alte Hildebrand Anecdote and the European Dimension of Romanian Folklore

The current study highlights the European dimension of Romanian folklore by resorting to an anecdote from Grimm Brothers’ collection: Der alte Hildebrand. During the inter-war period, the Estonian professor Walter Anderson studied the European alternatives of the anecdote that were available to him at the time. Ion Mușlea, a Romanian folklorist, analyzed the Romanian alternatives of the same anecdote by taking into account Anderson’s conclusions. After WWII, another Romanian folklorist, Gheorghe Cernea, discovered an inter-war dramatized alternative of the anecdote in Transylvania. The comparative analysis of all these materials calls attention to the Romanian features of the anecdote as compared to common European folklore motives.

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