Hello, and welcome to our webpage “From Storytelling to State-building: Folklore and Poetry in the Development of the Nation”!
We are four Simon Fraser History Honours students in the 2025 cohort, this site is our final project for the Honours Seminar class History 494 under the tutelage of Dr. Bidisha Ray. .
In general, our interests in historic research covers a wide range of topics. Our research interests range from Hellenic Studies and Byzantine history, to Eastern European Narionalism under Austria-Hungary, to Ukrainian History, and even Indigenous Canadian History. With these diverse interests at play, it was a fun and unique challenge to find a common topic that our heads could meet together at and work on.
What you see now is the culmination of our collective work. This page covers fairy tales and folk stories from Eastern Europe across a variety of times. We have included passages from these tales in their original languages, as well as English translations for ease of understanding. In addition to these passages, we are including written analyses by all four members of this project to highlight the context and significance of these stories to nation states as they exist or have existed.
Our hope with this project is that by visiting and navigating around this site, you will be able to develop a greater appreciation for seemingly innocuous fairy and folk tales, and how they can be utilized to foster a specific national identity or feelings of nationalism. Most importantly, I hope that by perusing this site you can learn something about somewhere that you did not know before, and enjoy the overall experience.
Thank you for visiting!