25 Albanian Folktales and Legends.pdf

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ALBANIAN FOLKTALES AND LEGENDS
selected and translated from the Albanian
by
Robert Elsie
Second amended edition
For Hillary and Cameron Ward, and Erin and Ross Springinotic on Vancouver Island,
and for Lea and Jack Pengally in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta,
and for all other children and adults who have never heard of Albania
First Edition: Naim Frashëri Publishing Company, Tirana (Albania) 1994. Second edition:
Dukagjini Publishing Company, Peja (Kosova), 2001. Copyright © by Robert Elsie. All rights
reserved.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Albanian folk tales
1.
The boy and the Earthly Beauty
2.
The scurfhead
3.
The three friends and the Earthly Beauty
4.
The three brothers and the three sisters
5.
The youth and the maiden with stars on their
foreheads and crescents on their breasts
6.
The shoes
7.
The girl who became a boy
8.
The maiden in the box
9.
The tale of the youth who understood the language
of the animals
10.
The Stirrup Moor
11.
The king’s daughter and the skull
12.
The bear and the dervish
13.
The snake and the king’s daughter
14.
Gjizar the nightingale
15.
Half Rooster
16.
The boy with no name
17.
The barefaced man and the Pasha’s brother
18.
The foolish youth and the ring
19.
The princess of China
20.
The jealous sisters
21.
The grateful snake and the magic case
22.
The maiden who was promised to the sun
Albanian legends
23.
Mujo’s strength
24.
Mujo and the Zanas
25.
Halil’s marriage
26.
Mujo and Halil visit the Sultan
27.
Mujo avenges Halil’s death
28.
Gjergj Elez Alia
29.
Aga Ymer of Ulcinj
30.
Scanderbeg and Ballaban
31.
Shega and Vllastar
32.
Rozafat Castle
Notes
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
Folk tales and legends are still very much alive in the mountains of Albania, a land of
haunted history. They are recited in the evenings after a day’s work or out in the fields, are
learned by heart and pass, as if immortal, from one generation to the next. Whose imagination
could not be captured by the cunning of the Scurfhead, by the demands of the Earthly Beauty,
by the heroic feats of Mujo and Halil or by the appearance of a fiery Kulshedra in the forest?
The fundamental theme of Albanian folk tales, as no doubt of folk tales everywhere, is
the struggle between good and evil, a reflection of social values as we perceive them. The
cautious reader may rest assured from the start that in the fantastic world of Albanian folk
literature the good always win out.
Oral literature is known to preserve many archaic elements. Albanian folk tales reveal
not only a number of oriental features from the centuries when Albania formed an integral part
of the Ottoman Empire but indeed also the occasional trace of the ancient world of
Greco-Roman mythology. Pashas and dervishes abound in an otherwise eminently European
context. The evident patriarchal structure in the tales and the passive, secondary roles attributed
to female characters reflect Albania’s traditionally Moslem society. In the first half of the
twentieth century, about 70% of the Albanian population was Moslem, 20% Orthodox and 10%
Catholic.
Yet despite their oriental background and the remoteness of Albanian culture, one of the
last in Europe to withstand the onslaught of our high-tech monoculture, many of the tales will
have a surprisingly familiar ring to the Western reader.
Albanian folk tales were first recorded in the middle of the nineteenth century by
European scholars such as Johann Georg von Hahn (1854), the Austrian consul in Janina
(Ioannina), Karl H. Reinhold (1855) and Giuseppe Pitrè (1875). The next generation of scholars
to take an interest in the collection of Albanian folk tales were primarily philologists, among
them well-known Indo-European linguists concerned with recording and analysing a hitherto
little known European language: Auguste Dozon (1879, 1881), Jan Jarnik (1883), Gustav Meyer
(1884, 1888), Holger Pedersen (1895), Gustav Weigand (1913) and August Leskien (1915).
The nationalist movement in Albania in the second half of the nineteenth century, the
so-called Rilindja period, gave rise to native collections of folklore material such as the
‘Albanian Bee’ (Albanikê melissa / Bêlietta sskiypêtare) by Thimi Mitko (1878), the ‘Albanian
Spelling Book’ ( Albanikon alfavêtarion / Avabatar arbëror ) by the Greco-Albanian Anastas
Kullurioti (1882) and the ‘Waves of the Sea’ ( Valët e Detit ) by Spiro Dine (1908). In the last
thirty years, much field work has been done by the Institute of Folk Culture in Tirana and by the
Institute of Albanian Studies in Prishtina, which have published numerous collections of folk
tales and legends. Unfortunately, very little of this substantial material has been translated into
other languages.
The only substantial collections of Albanian folk tales to have appeared in English up to
the present, as far as I am aware, are Tricks of women and other Albanian tales by Paul
Fenimore Cooper (New York 1928), which was translated from the collections of Dozon and
Pedersen, and Albanian wonder tales by Post Wheeler (London 1936). The present volume of
Albanian tales endeavours to be as faithful as possible in style and content to the original
Albanian texts which were recorded from word of mouth in a relatively unelaborate code.
Included in this collection are not only folk tales but prose versions of a selection of

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