Predaje o vilama u tradiciji Hrvata Bosne i Hercegovine
Fairy Tales in Tradition among the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Summary/Abstract: Tradition and oral literature of the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina is rich with storytelling, primarily spoken tales, which are distinguished by the variety of their forms. This paper deals with those which are told even today among the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In these tales, fairies are depicted as young beautiful girls, with golden hair, wearing white dresses. Only one thing about them was horrible – they used to have a horse, donkey or a goat leg. At night you could hear them singing, dancing or laughing. Fairies’ love to horses was well-known, they would visit horse stables at night to play with them and plait their mane. They liked to help the weak and disliked injustice. On the other hand, they mercilessly punished evil people who did bad things or who betrayed them. In the 19th century, Ivan Kukuljevic Sakcinski classified fairies according to the place where they lived into: air fairies, earth fairies and water fairies. Earth fairies were further classified as mountain fairies and field fairies. Mountain fairies’ homes were in caves and grottoes. In the fairy tales told by the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the fairies lived mostly in the mountains, where the fairies astral world and the world of the mortals used to intersect. An overwhelming opinion of the modern science is that the fairies were originally the personification of natural phenomena, and only later did different notions about fairies appear in the folk beliefs. In the tales told by the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there were different explanations on the origin of fairies: some saying that God cursed conceited girls, turning their legs into hooves, which was so embarrassing for them that they had to hide in forests and mountains, the others saying that fairies were Adam and Eve’s children not blessed by God. Regardless of their origin, fairies have always symbolized freedom and tamelessness, which cannot be replaced by any human virtue.

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