13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

BREDNICH, Rolf

Where They Originated: some contemporary legends and their literary origins

Research into contemporary legends has hitherto had its focus mostly on the actual functions and meanings of storytelling in modern society. Comparative studies of urban legends, though not totally neglected, are relatively scarce. Many of the stories that form the genre should be more thoroughly researched with respect to their age and the origins of themes and motifs. Some of them are looking back to a long tradition. Under favourable conditions, they could be traced even further back to their first appearance in remote literary sources.

A good example of a comparative study of contemporary legends is The Spanish Adventure that I have published in one of my collections of Sagenhafte Geschichten von heute (Huhn No. 26). It tells the story of a sinful girl (nun) who is buried alive by members of the Spanish Inquisition under the altar of a medieval cathedral, a pair of visitors from abroad being the unobserved witnesses of the gruesome scene. In the commentary to the text from oral tradition, I was only able to follow the roots of this story back to a Bavarian author writing about this legend in the 1930s. Further investigation into its literary origin traced it back as far as a romantic novel of the early ninteenth century (Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura, anonymous 1804), upon which the later literary and oral versions of the story are obviously dependent. The main motif, the punishment of a pregnant nun, which Umberto Eco may have borrowed for his novel Foucault’s Pendulum, may be even older.