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The perpetration of the offence generales the drama. This may only be "a word in
jest," but its consequences arc always decisive. Most of these narratives turn 10 tragedy,
and the remaining few present narrow escapes, which shows that, in making themselves
responsible for these offences, witlingly or not, the protagonists wager their life and
happiness. Thus, the weighty outcome of these narratives points 10 the initial wrong as the
calise of their demise or, at any rate, frailty. Through this emphasis on the unsuspected
implications of the hero(in)es' actions ("Achtergewicht")I, there appears to be a moral
conveyed: crime will come out, so will error, and their price is death; courage in adversity,
on the olher hand, warrants life and happiness. The remainder of this analysis aims at
demonstrating how the narrative structure underlying this message is borne by the
interaction of the characters acting in three recurrent taleroles.
While the ballad protagonists of this corpus rarely emerge from their trials happily
married or even alive, the offence that causes their demise, or threatens to do so, is always
exposed. In most cases, the offence is explicitly denounced by one of the characters in
reinforcement of the self-evident denouement. whether tragic or not. This underlying
struClllre, which corresponds to the Proppian functions of "violation" (0) and "exposure of
the villain" (Ex.), has suggested a basic talerole pattern consisting of all "offender," an
"offended" and a "denouncer."2 The "offender" is the character responsible for the
offence, the "offended" is the one affected, and the "denouncer" is the agent, character or
other, who reveals the death-dealing nature of the offence.
13.3. The Dislribulion of Taleroles
In commenting on Propp's talerole analysis of the Russian Marchen, David Buchan
underlines that the correspondence between the spheres of action of the taleroles and the
characters can be of any of the following three types. First, one can have a sphere of
action which exactly corresponds to the character; second, a character can be involved in
I This is Axcl Olrik's conccpt with reference to the fact that the centre of gravity in folk
n,lrrative always lies in its "stcrn," in "Epic Laws of Folk Narrative," The Stu.dy 0/
Folklore, cd. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1965) 136.
2 Vlad imir Propp, Morphology 0/ the Folktale. trans. Laurence SCOtl. 2nd rcv. ed. Louis A.
Wagncr (Austin: U of Texas P, 1968.) The symbol and abbreviation arc those used by
Propp to designate these functions. The taleroles chosen to account for this particular
corpus, though distinct from those determined by Buchan in account of the various
subgeneric ballad groups, concord with Ihe three-talerolc pattern, which hc sees as SlOrynorm
for the genre; "Talc" 145.