CROATIAN FAIRY WORLD-THE DWARF LONGBEARD MANNIKIN

In the course of the recent decades, both in Croatia and the rest of the world, an exceptional growth of interest for the fabulous fairy world has become evident, so the fact that the Croatian Post has put in motion a series of postage stamps under the title The Croatian Fairy World need not be surprising, as this fact proves that this literary genre is not only part of the European traditional narration, but that it has become the basis upon which contemporary narrators and poets have elaborated in their own works of art. The luxurious Slavonic mythological world unquestionably determines the Croatian fairy-tale fiction (etre imaginaires), though in the area of literary science it was developed under the influence of the German Romantics, the brothers Grimm, particularly in the wake of the major work of Jacob Grimm “German Mythology” (Deutsche Mythologie) from the year 1835. What was so wonderful in the case of the brothers Grimm was the fact that they refused to be “seduced” by the monumental mythological creatures from the Germanic oral literary tradition alone (like the deity creature of Wotan, particularly powerful in Wagner’s tetralogy “Der Ring des Nibelungen”), but that they have also revealed to the world all those fabulous fantastic characters lower ranked by their importance and prominence in the German folk perception. The professional literature on Croatian fairy-tale literature was established by Ivan Kukuljević-Sakcinski in 1846, when he published his study “Fairy-tales and the Church” (Bajoslovlje i crkva)and “Fairies” (Vile) in the journal “The Croatian-Slavonian - Dalmatian Danica” (Danica hrvatsko-slavonsko-dalmatinska). Indeed, most of the attention was paid to fairies, so it will be interesting to mention that a fundamental disagreement on the issue of their manifestation and characteristics developed in the explanations of Vuk S.Karadľić and Ivan Kukuljević-Sakcinski: the former thought they had come to our literature from the Greek mythology (nymphs, nereids), the latter considered them as creatures born from “the living oral folklore”, naturally the south-Slavonic one. The way Ivan Kukuljević-Sakcinski described and classified the fairies (“air fairies always good, lake fairies always evil, earth fairies now good – now evil”) is “very much in harmony with almost all the later collected material” (Ljiljana Marks). Our contemporary expert on folklore, Maja Boąković-Stulli, has studied the town of Cavtat, the area exceptionally important for Croatian fairytale literature, and noticed “the well-known mythical fairies originating from the Balkan and south-Slavonic regions”, or other “fairies from Italian stories” which indicated mutual permeation of the European oral tradition. Summing up our national folklore, there are three different types of creatures: fairies (also elfs found in Samobor, Poljica, Karlovac, another type of elfs in Ivanić-Grad that are not male variants of fairies but are men who have special connections with fairies), witches (but also male witches – wizards, sorcerers, magicians, warlocks found on the island of Brač, and also in Lobor), and vampires (called different names in Lika and Slavonija, all referring to demons causing nightmares like an incubus). On the other hand, contemporary film art succeeded, both in the world and in our country, to impose the fairy Tinkerbell from “Peter Pan” and the dwarfs from “Snow White” as hallmarks of the whole of the fairyland. Nevertheless, what fills us with enthusiasm when it concerns the mythical world of the Croatian folk perception is the fact that the Croatian fairy-tale literature continues living in the present, both in the oral tradition, though maybe “only as a torso of the erstwhile richly told stories” (Ljiljana Marks), and in the literary works (Ivana Brlić-Maľuranić, Vladimir Nazor, Miroslav Krleľa, Ivan Goran Kovačić...), particularly in the literature of the so called folklore preference. The two new stamps from the series The Croatian Fairy World concern the fairytale literature of Vladimir Nazor. The dwarf named Longbeard Mannikin (Lakat brade-Pedalj muľa) has a “beaked nose, big eyes, short legs and a long beard, holding a pitchfork lance in his hand”; he has been taken from the story “Pionir Grujo” (Grujo the pioneer). The fairy Halugica, “the daughter of a sea fairy and an earth-bound fisherman, with long blonde hair cascading like a wave down her back, and with coral-red lips and big green eyes that glitter gently like two stars sunk in the depth and with a magic embroidered kerchief wrapped round her neck” has been taken from the story “Halugica”.