Images of Weather in Polish Folk Tales

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the images of weather in Polish folk tales collected by the Polish ethnographer Oskar Kolberg (1814 – 1890) over the course of his decades-long field research. His research covered the territory that had belonged to Poland prior to the Partitions at the end of the eighteenth century. Kolberg’s research re-sulted in a monumental body of work representing the entirety of Polish folk culture, expected to reach 86 volumes when the publication process is complete. Empirical materials for the paper comprise texts from all regions of the former Kingdom of Poland that incorporate a wide variety of weather-related themes. The leading hypothesis is that the representation of weather in folk tales is associated with the state of folk knowledge about weather phenomena. This knowledge was based on the observation of nature and on folk belief imagery, which relates it to the domain of the “sacred” (Mircea Eliade). The paper demonstrates that religious beliefs are manifested in three thematic areas: (1) weather phenomena as agents of trial, assistance, or bounty; (2) means of protection against the force of weather phenomena; and (3) weather phenomena as the work of the devil.