Volume 8: The Cracow Region part 4

The Complete Works vol. 8: The Cracow Region part 4. Wrocław – Poznań 1962, pp. XIV+368. illustrations. Photo-offset re-edition; first edition: Cracow 187S.

The fourth part of the monograph on the Cracow region contains a collection of folk tales (a total of 111 variants of fables) 88 riddles, 1,080 proverbs and information about the language (notes on phonetics, morphology, an extensive dialect glossary, nicknames, a list of names from several dozen places). They were recorded basically by J. Konopczanka, as in part 3 of the Cracow monograph; Kolberg did the final editing. Most of the fables are presented in the literary language (sixty-four), while the remainder is preserved in simplified dialect record or elements of it. These are mainly magic tales; the animal tale is the most poorly represented. Kolberg’s division of the prose into types is not consequently employed by him. That is why both magic fables (he calles them "gadki cudowne”) and facetiae can be found in various systematic groups. Kolberg’s scholarly commentary makes comparison with tales, fable motifs and beliefs from his earlier volumes of ‘The People’ or with the ones published in the collections of his predecessors (K. W. Wójcicki, K. Baliński, J. Gliński, S. Barącz, R. Berwiński).