What do dragon-riding weather-magicians, the Alexander Romance, the Trojan War, the Buddha legend, heavenly letters, apocryphal gospels, biblical legends, and medieval books of magic have in common?
According to Moses Gaster (1856-1939), they all formed part of the same vast process through which stories travelled across Europe, passed from one language to another, and gradually entered popular tradition.
First delivered as the Ilchester Lectures at Oxford in 1886, Greeko-Slavonic Literature and Its Relation to the Folk-Lore of Europe During the Middle Ages remains one of the most ambitious early attempts to explain how folklore is created. Challenging the notion that Europe's traditions are merely isolated survivals from a remote pagan past, Gaster argued that written literature played a decisive role in shaping popular belief. Through Byzantine and Slavonic intermediaries, legends, romances, saints' lives, charms, and apocryphal texts crossed frontiers and acquired new life among ordinary people.
In these seven lectures, Gaster explores:
- Bogomilism and the influence of apocryphal literature;
- Old and New Testament legends beyond the biblical canon;
- Antichrist traditions, saints' lives, heavenly letters, and popular religious texts;
- Exorcisms, charms, and magical practices;
- The Alexander Romance, the Trojan cycle, and the epic of Digenis;
- The journeys of Barlaam and Josaphat, Akir, Syntipas, and other wisdom traditions from East to West;
- The origins of Slavonic literature and the work of Cyril and Methodius.
Supplementing the original volume is a complete English translation of Gaster's rare study:
The Scholomonar: The Garabancijas Dijak in Romanian Folk Tradition
(Archiv f slavische Philologie VII [1884], 281-290)
In this remarkable essay, Gaster examines one of Europe's most extraordinary supernatural traditions: the Romanian Scholomonari, feared weather-makers who were said to learn their craft in the Devil's hidden school, summon dragons from bottomless lakes with golden bridles, ride through the clouds, and bring hail upon the fields of those who had offended them. Juxtaposing Romanian, Hungarian, and South Slavic traditions, Gaster traces the interplay of Solomonic lore, medieval legends of magical schools, and local folk belief in an attempt to explain the origins of these mysterious figures.
Together, these works offer more than a collection of curious medieval tales. They reveal a Europe connected by networks of translation, storytelling, and imagination-where books became legends, legends became folklore, and the boundaries between East and West proved far more porous than later generations often assumed.
This edition brings together one of Gaster's most important theoretical works and one of his most vivid folkloric case studies, offering modern readers an opportunity to rediscover a forgotten vision of how Europe's stories came to be.
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