Romani Folk Tales from Transylvania: Heinrich von Wlislocki and the Spirits of the Gypsy Camp

Heinrich von Wlislocki walked out of the Transylvanian city of Kronstadt in the summer of 1883 with a tent and came back months later with sixty-three folk tales. He had lived with bands of tent-dwelling Roma in southern Transylvania and south-east Hungary. He wrote the tales down in Romani and translated them into German. Published in Berlin in 1886, the collection is the fullest early record of the spirits that filled the world of the Transylvanian Roma: the fate fairies called the Urmen, the devil O Beng, the Sun King and his mother. It has now appeared in English for the first time.

This new English translation by Rade Kolbas brings all sixty-three tales and legends of Wlislocki’s book into English. They open a different door than the vampire stories of the same region. Here the sky has kings and mothers, the devil can be outwitted, and fate fairies decide what a life will be.

The people who told these tales lived on the borderland where the Habsburg and Ottoman worlds met, in the same Transylvania that Emily Gerard and Bram Stoker turned into the landscape of the modern vampire. Wlislocki was recording in the 1880s, the same decade Gerard published her essay on Transylvanian superstition. The Folk Tales by Mijat Stojanović edition on this site comes from the same years and the same Austro-Hungarian frontier, gathered a few hundred kilometres to the south. Read together, the two books map a region where the supernatural was a working system.

Romani Folk Tales from Transylvania: Who Was Heinrich von Wlislocki?

Wlislocki trained as a linguist. He was born in Kronstadt in 1856, the son of a Polish-descended finance official and a Transylvanian Saxon mother, and he studied German philology and Sanskrit at the university in Klausenburg. Two of his teachers, Hugo von Meltzl and Sámuel Brassai, turned him toward the Roma. His doctorate examined the rare words of an Old Norse poem, the hapax legomena of the eddic Atlamál. Nothing in that training pointed toward the people whose stories made his name.

He never held a university position. He worked as a private teacher and later as a gymnasium teacher in Rozsnyó, and the fieldwork that defined his life happened in a single summer. In 1883, for several months, he traveled with tent-dwelling Roma through southern Transylvania and south-east Hungary. The foreword to his 1886 book is signed Mühlbach, August 1884, the town in southern Transylvania where he lived through most of the decade.

Around eighty works came from him, including roughly twenty-two monographs, and he wrote regularly for the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society in Liverpool. His wife, Fanny Dörfler, was a teacher and folklorist in her own right. From about 1897 illness and poverty closed in, and he died in 1907 in Klosdorf. He is buried in Mühlbach.

What Are the Urmen, the Fate Fairies of the Camp?

Wlislocki defines the Urmen in a footnote to the tale called “The Sun Tree”: Urme is the fairy of the Romani. There are good and bad Urmen who live in mountains, lakes, and caves. The footnote is the clearest statement in the book, and the tales fill it out.

In “The Fisherman and the Urme,” a young fisherman shares his bread with three kings in disguise, the King of the Winds, the King of the Sun, and the King of the Moon, and each gives him a flute. A beautiful maiden appears by the lake at midnight and tells him she is a good Urme. She takes him to her castle on one condition: he must let her go where she pleases at night and never spy on her. He spies. The bird Tscharana, which lives 999 years and must suck at the breast of one and the same woman every night or die, carries her off. The three kings return to help: the Sun King melts her sevenfold chains while the Wind King keeps her from burning, and the Moon King lends his cloak for the flight home. The bird dies when it misses a night. The couple comes home, and the tale closes with a phrase that runs through the book: “because they died just yesterday, my tale ends too.”

The Urmen have a harsh side too. “The Dog and the Girl” opens with a white dog who turns out to be a man cursed by an Urne for trying to steal one of her golden apples. A girl kisses the dog, and he becomes a man for a single night. She bears a little white dog. When she dies in despair, the dog nurses at her breast and calls her back, and the little dog becomes a human child.

The three women in white who stand at the cradle in “The Three Golden Hairs of the Sun King” are the tale’s fate women, bestowing fortune and misfortune on a newborn. Readers have taken them for the same white women the Roma called the Urmen; the site’s Urmen entry traces the trio across the Balkans, from the Romanian Ursitoare to the Greek Moirai.

How Does O Beng, the Romani Devil, Walk Through the Collection?

The devil in these tales is called O Beng, and he is the most memorable figure in the book. His entrance is a mirror.

“The Creation of the Violin” is the tale the collectors reached for first. A girl named Mara loves a hunter who will not speak to her. She calls on the devil, and he comes holding a mirror. The hunter sees himself in it, cries that the devil has done this, and runs off. The devil tells Mara that whoever stands in the mirror belongs to him, but he will help her for a price: her four brothers. He makes violin strings from them, one thick, one thinner, the third thinner still, the thinnest of all. Her father becomes the box. Her mother becomes the bow, her hair the horsehair. The devil plays, and Mara rejoices, then weeps. After nine days he returns and says, “Worship me, I am your lord.” They refuse, and he carries them off. The violin stays in the forest, and a poor Rom finds it and plays so that whole villages laugh and weep as he chooses.

Groome translated a version of the tale into English in his Gypsy Folk-Tales of 1899, and it appears in Wlislocki’s own book among the opening tales. The site’s O Beng entry reads the story as the origin myth of the Roma fiddlers, the lăutari. The first instrument made from a sacrificed body has a parallel at the other end of the Indo-European world, where the Nart trickster Sirdon strings a harp from his sons’ sinews.

The devil in the collection is also a creation figure, and an unlucky one. “The Creation of the World” begins on a great water with God alone. He throws his stick into the water, and it becomes a great tree. Under the tree sits the devil, who offers friendship. God sends him diving for sand to make the earth. Each time the devil speaks his own name, the sand burns him, and by the ninth day he is completely black. He finally brings the sand, God makes the earth, and people spring from the leaves of the tree.

The book even records the devil’s tell. In “The Seven Brothers and the Devil,” a sister who sets out to break her brother’s curse is warned to look at every helper’s left foot, because the devil has a duck’s foot that he must always keep, whatever his disguise.

What Is the Sun King and Moon Mother Cosmology?

The sun in these tales is a king with a mother, and the pair runs through the whole collection.

“The Sun Mother” explains the day. The Sun King flies out in the morning as a little child, becomes a man at noon, and returns in the evening as an old man who sleeps in his mother’s lap. Without that sleep he stays old and weak. The Cloud King, jealous of the Sun King’s power, turns himself into a grey horse, persuades the Sun Mother to ride him, and locks her in a cave. The sun stops rising properly. The Sun Mother lets her fingernails grow, digs herself out, and hurries home, and the next morning her son flies out with fresh strength.

A line of one-eyed men sets out in “The Sun Tree” to fetch a branch from the tree that grows at the Sun King’s court. The branch has leaves that are little stars and blossoms that are little suns and moons, and it can wake the dead. The king who receives it brings his queen back to life, and from that time no one dies in the land.

The book’s version of an international tale, catalogued as ATU 461, is “The Three Golden Hairs of the Sun King.” In most countries the hero travels to the devil for the answers; here the all-knowing figure is the Sun King. His mother hides the hero, plucks three golden hairs from her sleeping son’s head, and the answers come out of the king’s mouth: a toad blocks the spring of youth, a snake gnaws the root of the golden apple tree, and a ferryman on a black lake can be freed only by handing his oars to the next passenger.

The cosmology runs deeper than the tales. Yaroslav Vassilkov, in a 2023 study, reconstructs the creation myth behind Wlislocki’s record: Father Sky and Mother Earth locked in an embrace, five sons, the Sun King, the Moon King, the Fire King, the Mist King, the Wind King, who quarrel and try to part their parents. Only the Wind succeeds. In a variant Wlislocki recorded elsewhere, the Sun King devoured his children, while the Moon King refused to eat his own and threw them down to earth, which is why there are shooting stars. The site’s The Sun King and the Sun Mother entry gathers the whole family.

The map from Wlislocki’s 1894 book traces the routes of the Roma across Europe. The Indian question runs under the whole collection: the Roma carried their language and stories west out of India in the medieval migrations, and the Romani word for the sun, kham, descends from the Sanskrit gharma, heat.

Beyond the Spirits: The Range of the Sixty-Three Tales

The collection is wider than its cosmology. Wlislocki’s own notes map the social world. A footnote to “The White Flame” names the four tribes of tent-dwelling Roma in Transylvania: the Leïla, the Kukuya, the Aschani, the Tschale. A footnote to “Anrus and Raveka” describes the wedding custom: a week before the marriage, the bride and groom place blessed wax candles on the shore of a lake, and if the wind blows them out, the couple throws apples and eggs into the water to keep the water spirits friendly.

“Anrus and Raveka” itself is one of the strangest tales in the book. An old man with red hair and a red beard rises from a frozen lake. He blows out the bridal couple’s candles and carries the bride down to a golden house at the bottom of the water. The apples and eggs the groom throws in fury turn into horses, pigs, oxen, and cattle. The son born to the couple has an umbilical cord that grows down into the lake. When his parents cut it, the boy lifts them in his arms and leaps into the water. They are never seen again. Groome counted the tale among the distinctively Gypsy stories of the collection, one of fourteen he singled out.

Not everything is spirit-work. “Why the Moon Waxes and Wanes” is a comic tale in which an old man eats a poor Rom’s cornmeal mush and turns out to be Saint Nicholas. He banishes the Rom to the moon for his greed, and the Rom eats the moon away until God lets it grow back. “Death as Godfather” gives a doctor the power to see where Death stands, at the sick man’s feet or his head, and Groome noted that the tale sits close to Grimm’s number 44 while missing the sick princess episode.

Tales and legends run through the book in one continuous sequence. The English edition keeps the count, numbers 1 to 63, and sets the twenty-one sung passages as verse.

Can We Trust What Wlislocki Wrote Down?

The question has followed the book since 1899. Groome, who knew the collection better than anyone in England, called it different from all other continental collections because its sixty-three stories were published for their intrinsic interest. He also saw the problem: the tales were given in German only, not in the original, which opened them to a suspicion of having been touched up. He believed the improvements, if any, applied to the language and not the subject matter, and he pointed to the lacunae, the missing pieces, as the mark of honest record.

Critics since have gone further. Jiří Lípa called Wlislocki not a very strong linguist. Wim Willems, in his 1997 history of gypsy studies, described him as filtering and smoothing the material for a European audience. Iulia-Karin Patrut placed his work inside the Aryan discourses of the turn of the century. The standard objection is that almost everything survives only in German translation, with no Romani originals and no named informants.

The strongest defense is the Indian material. Vassilkov argued in 2023 that the cosmogonic myths in Wlislocki’s record find their closest parallels in the mythologies of India’s tribal peoples, and those parallels were recorded only decades after Wlislocki died. He could not have borrowed them. What he could have done, Vassilkov says, is look in the wrong place: Wlislocki searched the Sanskrit libraries, when the parallels sat in tribal oral lore.

There is also a second, independent witness. About 1955, Rudolf Daniel, an early Romani teacher in Moravia, set down the same five-sons creation story in a manuscript, from the tales of his own people, with no dependence on Wlislocki. Whatever Wlislocki embroidered, the story was in the mouths of Czech and Slovak Roma a century after he published.

The honest position stays open. Wlislocki was a self-taught outsider who published in a language his informants did not speak and left no originals behind. His collection is also the reason these stories exist on paper at all. The tales survived, whatever their editor’s flaws. The argument over him does not touch that.

About the Translation

Romani Folk Tales from Transylvania is the first complete English edition of Wlislocki’s collection. The original German title, Märchen und Sagen der transsilvanischen Zigeuner, uses the word of its time, and the historical title is kept on the copyright page and in the sources. The translation itself follows the principle of the Folk Tales by Mijat Stojanović edition: the storytellers spoke of themselves as Rom, so the English text says Roma and Romani. Where Wlislocki’s own words appear, they stay as he wrote them.

The edition keeps the continuous numbering 1 to 63 and sets the sung passages as verse. It carries Wlislocki’s own footnotes, which name the tribes and the customs. A note on Romani words explains the Urmen and the Prikulic, and lists the four tribes, all drawn from Wlislocki’s annotations.

The book is available on Amazon: Romani Folk Tales from Transylvania, translated by Rade Kolbas (ISBN 9783039900329).

In the opening tale, God throws his stick into the great water, and it becomes a tree. Under the tree sits the devil, black from saying his own name over the burning sand. God makes the earth from the sand the devil fetched, and people spring from the leaves. Everything else in the book happens between those two figures, and they are both still there.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Wlislocki, Heinrich von. Märchen und Sagen der transsilvanischen Zigeuner (Fairy Tales and Legends of the Transylvanian Gypsies). Berlin: Nicolaische Verlags-Buchhandlung (R. Stricker), 1886. 63 tales, collected summer 1883, foreword signed Mühlbach, August 1884.
• Wlislocki, Heinrich von. Die Sprache der transsilvanischen Zigeuner. Leipzig, 1884.
• Wlislocki, Heinrich von. Vom wandernden Zigeunervolke: Bilder aus dem Leben der siebenbürgischen Zigeuner. Hamburg, 1890.
• Wlislocki, Heinrich von. Volksdichtungen der siebenbürgischen und südungarischen Zigeuner. Vienna, 1890.
• Wlislocki, Heinrich von. Volksglaube und religiöser Brauch der Zigeuner. Münster: Aschendorff, 1891.
• Wlislocki, Heinrich von. Aus dem inneren Leben der Zigeuner: ethnologische Mitteilungen. Berlin: E. Felber, 1892.
• Wlislocki, Heinrich von. A cigányokról (About the Roma). 1894.
• Groome, Francis Hindes. Gypsy Folk-Tales. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1899, Introduction (on Wlislocki and the 1886 collection).
• Vassilkov, Yaroslav. ‘The Folklore of the European Roma and the Mythologies of the Indian Tribal World.’ Romani Studies 33/2 (2023). DOI 10.3828/rost.2023.12.
• Lípa, Jiří. Critical assessment of Wlislocki, 1968 (via Vassilkov 2023).
• Willems, Wim. In Search of the True Gypsy: From Enlightenment to Final Solution. London: Frank Cass, 1997.
• Patrut, Iulia-Karin. On Wlislocki and the Aryan discourse. Romani Studies 17 (2007).
• Daniel, Rudolf. Housle a kůň (Violin and Horse). Manuscript, Moravia, c. 1955.
• Berger, Hermann. ‘Mythologie der Zigeuner.’ In Wörterbuch der Mythologie, ed. Hans Wilhelm Haussig, vol. 6. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984.
• Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon, s.v. ‘Wlislocki, Heinrich Adalbert von.’
• Szinnyei, József. Magyar írók élete és munkái, s.v. ‘Wlislocki Henrik.’
• Kolbas, Rade (trans.). Romani Folk Tales from Transylvania. 2026. ISBN 978-3-03990-032-9 (paperback), 978-3-03990-033-6 (hardcover).