Slovak National Fairy Tales - A Tribute to Pavol Dobšinský (Dobsinsky)

Folk tales, legends, riddles, proverbs, sayings, customs and superstitions as products of folk, first oral and later written activities, have always existed among Slovaks for centuries. It might be said that they often had been the only witnesses of the Slovak national identity and existence, especially during the hard Hungarian persecution and the suppression of Slovaks within the Austria-Hungarian Empire, which existed up to 1918, when an independent Czecho-Slovak Republic was established.

The Slovak folk tales have always been considered to be a jewel of Slovak folk verbal arts. As noted previously, they first existed in the oral form and spread in the different regions of what is now Slovakia. During the period of Romanticism (1830-1880) the representatives of Štúr's Young Generation tried to keep the national spirit alive by collecting folk tales, legends, proverbs, folk plays and other forms among common people and they tried to publish them in Slovak. Being a writer, reviewer, educator, publicist and a deputy to the Hungarian Parliament for a short time, Štúr was the chief cultural representative of the Slovaks in the 19th century.

Among the first collectors of Slovak national fairy tales were such personalities as: Francisci, Čipka, Daxner, Reuss, and others. The attempts of these remarkable Slovak intellectuals was crowned by Pavol Dobšinský in the 1880's.

The late Vladimír Mináč, an important Slovak writer and publicist of the 20th century, called Pavol Dobšinský "a Slovak Homer". Pavol Dobšinský succeeded not only in creating the largest and most complete collection of Slovak folk tales, but he also published this huge collection at his own expense from 1880-1883.