Predominant modes of perception and folk narrative

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Tautosaka; Tautosaka; Mįslės; Pasakojimas; Folklore; Folk Traditions; Storytelling; Riddles.

ENThis article was inspired by fieldwork I conducted with a colleague several years ago - a 2011 expedition to the municipality of Rietavas, in the Žemaitija region of Lithuania. Because I am a researcher of riddles and know that it is quite difficult to document them (they often need to be dragged out of people), I began my research by investigating which riddles from this region had already been recorded. This regions riddles have been collected for a long time-more than 150 years. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the publisher of the first Lithuanian calendars, Laurynas Ivinskis, lived in Rietavas. Ivinskiss calendars often contained a considerable amount of folklore, so I anticipated that his collections, which contain riddles, would likely include a good number of such texts recorded in Rietavas and the areas surrounding it. As I perused the collections it became clear that the majority of the riddles he used came from printed sources, as he used a careful system of abbreviations in rewriting them. For example, in Ivinskiss largest collection of riddles, out of 340 riddles only 43 are transcribed without abbreviation, indicating that the majority were rewritten from other authors. Some of these riddles, or variations on them, were recorded from sources in the Rietavas area in later years so they were likely collected by Ivinskis himself. In addition to these, another 150 or so riddles were recorded.The material collected during the fieldwork trip led me in a completely different direction. It did not especially surprise me (I did not expect to record a great number of riddles), but it left me somewhat saddened: only one informant was able to remember a total of four riddles, while other interviewees could only say that, while they remembered knowing riddles and enjoying them in childhood, they simply could not remember any. The results of this trip once more confirmed what many folklorists have stated verbally and on paper about the almost complete extinction of old folklore forms and genres, and the need to begin looking at folklore itself in a new way. [Extract, p. 3]