Par kādu mūsdienās populāru bērnu folkloras naratīvu
On the Currently Popular Narrative in Children’s Folklore

Summary/Abstract: The article is focused on a popular, but not much addressed topic in recent studies of Latvian children’s folklore nowadays – the intimidation of children for the purposes of guidance and protection. Parent discussions on the social network Facebook and the texts of contemporary folklore obtained through the questionnaire were used as a source for the research. The aim of the article is to investigate how and with what kind of characters children are being intimidated today, what determines the creation of exactly such characters and what in general is characteristic of these stories of intimidation, highlighting the position of the narratives of intimidation in the corpus of children’s folklore. In the examples of the analyzed texts two specific thematic groups of characters can be distinguished: mythological characters (a witch, water spirit, forest spirit, the big fish, etc.) and mythologized characters (a stranger, an aunt, a policeman, etc.), which allows us to speak of the persistence of the traditional characters and the mechanism of inheritance, as well as to characterize intimidation as a sustainable and still long-standing and prominent tradition of the classical folklore. Each generation contributes to this tradition and helps to determine how children’s literature, media and mass culture influence the creation of intimidation narratives.

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