Comparative research in folk narrative since long has been aware of the vital importance the Iranian cultural area bears in regard to the supposed international migration of narratives, itself sonstituting an ancient “melting pot” of cultural values of various origins. Even so, only very few reliable documents of the region’s oral narrative traditions have been published. This state is all the more deplorable since oral tradition has an increasingly difficult stand against modern media of mass communication. The narratives published here for the first time rely on the authentic and largely uncensored oral presentation of an illiterate old Iranian woman. The constitute a unique document in various respects: First, the tales and narratives originate from the 1940ies; thus were written down at a time when scientific interest in folklore and popular narrative was just beginning. Second, they comprise by far the largest narrative repertoire yet published told by an individual story-teller in any country of the Near East. Third, the publication has been prepared without any major changes directly from the collector’s manuscript, now comprising almost 500 pages of texts in the simple and unrefined Teheran vernacular of teh 1940ies; thus it presents the largest corpus of texts in the Persian vernacular ever published.In addition to htese aspects relevant for scholarly research, Mashdi Galin’s tales and anecdotes are narrated in a fascinating and charmin manner, highly netertaining to read. There style is not the linguistic refinement of classical Persian literature, they rather constitute modest and unpretentious, nevertheless unique and extremely precious pieces of art. As such they are bound to fascinate the Persian native speaker and anyone interested in the Persian narrative tradition. Moreover, they constitute ideally appealing text material for Persian language tuition. Also, considering their wealth of folklorist details, they would offer themselves to be read by Iranians.The publication is presented in two wolumes. The first volumes besides a general introduction in German and Persian as well as concise bibliographies contains the Persian texts of 117 narratives told by Mashdi Galin Khanom, supplemented by one story told by an Iranian journalist. The companian volume consists of notes on the criteria of editing the text, various commentaries on points of linguistic relevance and content, an extensive documentation listing narrative types, ans several indices. For purposes of demonstration, a juxtaposition of differing versions of two specific texts in transcription is appended.weiterlesen