Kalmückische Märchen

Juha Janhunen, Retrospective notes.
G. J. Ramstedt is widely recognized as the founder of modern Mongolic and Comparative Altaic studies. In his scholarly heritage, a particularly prominent place is occupied by the Kalmuck language. His first major publication in this field was his collection of Kalmuck folktales, of which the present volume is a reimpression. Ramstedt's folktales were published without dialectological information. Therefore, there is no immediate information as to where, when, and from whom each particular tale was originally recorded, though it is obvious from Ramstedt's remarks elsewhere that the material derives almost exclusively from the Volga Kalmuck sphere and was recorded largely during the expedition of 1903. Some of the tales may, however, have been slightly reworked later with the help of other informants, and in any case, the normalized transcription used in the publication differs considerably from the original field notes.