Acting on Magic and Winning with Words in Märchen Worlds (and Beyond).

Folk narrative scholarship valorizes the selfhood of us, the observers, at the expense of the narrating communities. We scholars celebrate our own subjectivity, in spite of the fact that the traditional narrators whose art we study elevate the concerns of their communities over their personal concerns. Because all attempts to deny the observer's subjectivity will fail, the only way we can bring the study of folk narrative into closer harmony with the values of the narrating communities is to outnumber our subjectivity. Holbek's Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Uther's Types of International Folktales, and the recently completed Enzyklopädie des Märchens outnumber our subjectivity by addressing the measurable facts of traditional narrative. They have created the foundation for our current challenge - to outnumber our subjectivity in our fieldwork, while listening to and interacting with Märchen narrators to understand how the everyday world and the Märchen world constantly reshape each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]