Dancing on Blades: Rare and Exquisite Folktales from the Carpathian Mountains by Csenge Zalka (review)

Csenge Zalka's Dancing on Blades offers a unique look into a tale collection native to the Transcarpathian region of Hungary. It is an important and valuable contribution to oral literatures of Europe because it positions the tales of one storyteller, Pályuk Anna, in the context of other European folktale types and traditions while preserving the storyteller's originality. Additionally, in her notes, Zalka provides not only context with which to better understand the folktales, but content suggestions for future storytellers. Thus, this text represents not only an academic work documenting a single storyteller's repertoire, but a mode through which the storytelling tradition of Pályuk Anna is passed on.

Zalka's work begins with introductory material explaining how she came to find the repertoire of Pályuk Anna and a brief biography of the nineteenthcentury storyteller, whose stories were collected by Szirmai Fóris Mária between 1915 and 1950. If one is familiar with Linda Dégh's Folktales in Society: Storytelling in a Hungarian Peasant Community (1969), they would find Pályuk Anna's profile to be reminiscent of the storytellers studied by Dégh. One of the most folktale-esque features of the storyteller herself is that, "after moving from her Rusyn village to her Hungarian one, Anna lived in three different countries between the ages of 60 and 93 without ever leaving her house" (11). This is because Ugosca County, where Anna lived, was claimed at different times by Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, and Hungary due to the tumultuous political landscape of the mid-twentieth century. These matters of national identity, migration, and politics, which were equally as important to the storytellers in Dégh's volume, also affected Pályuk Anna and thus situate the narrator and her collection in a critical moment in history.

Approximately thirty of Pályuk Anna's stories were published in a single volume after being collected by Szirmai, but others were stored in the Archives of the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography. Zalka conducted research in the Archives, leading her to compile this newest collection of Pályuk Anna's stories. However, as she states outright, "This book does not aim to be an academic publication," as she does not consider her credentials as a folklorist sufficient to claim it as an ethnographic work (13). Zalka holds a doctorate in Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University, but in her introduction she identifies herself as a professional storyteller first and foremost and aims to present Pályuk Anna's tales as a contribution to that tradition specifically. Nevertheless, her education and familiarity with folktale scholarship enable her to make insightful connections between Pályuk Anna's tales and existing folktale traditions in Europe.

Zalka divides the collection into five parts, titled as follows: "Spinning Old into Gold," "The Kind and the Unkind," "Questions Big and Small," "Anica's Garden of Rarities," and "Love in All Its Strangeness and Glory." She explains her choices in arrangement at the beginning of each section, but generally the pattern follows from most familiar (that is, most connected to other tale types) to tales that are most specific to Pályuk Anna. The first section includes stories such as "The Shoe-Shredding Princesses" (from which the title of the book, Dancing on Blades, is drawn), which most resembles folktales of ATU 306. Other familiar tales of type 306 include the Grimms' "The worn-out Dancing Shoes" or "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" as found in Andrew Lang's colored fairy books. Zalka describes in her commentary at the end of the tale that type 306 is extremely popular in the Hungarian tradition, which is useful when considering how oral tales spread geographically over time. This first section also includes tales similar to "Rumpelstiltskin" and "The Three Spinners" (ATU 500/501) and "The False Bride" (ATU 403), though one of the most compelling aspects of this collection is Pályuk Anna's creative combinations...