Abstract
This paper examines mythonymy — the naming of mythological figures, legendary heroes, deities, and supernatural beings — as a structurally and culturally significant sector of the onomastic space in English folk tales. The study is prompted by an observable gap in existing research: while the formal and thematic properties of English folk narrative have been extensively studied, the onomastic dimension — and specifically the mythonymic sub- system — has not been subjected to systematic corpus-based analysis. Drawing on a corpus of 50 tales selected from Joseph Jacobs's English Fairy Tales (1890) and Haase's Oxford Dictionary of Fairy Tales (2017), the research classifies 83 identified mythonyms by type (deity, hero, supernatural creature) and by narrative role (protagonist, antagonist, helper/guide), using a dual-method design combining frequency analysis with functionally grounded qualitative interpretation informed by Propp's morphological model and Greimas's actantial framework. The findings show that supernatural creatures are the most common mythonymic type (n = 43, 51.8%), followed by heroes (n = 29, 34.9%) and deities (n = 11, 13.3%). Across tale genres, Wonder Tales contain the most varied mythonymic distribution, while Animal Tales concentrate heavily on supernatural creature naming and Cumulative Tales are relatively mythonym-sparse. Functionally, antagonistic roles account for the largest share (n = 37, 44.6%), though the gap between protagonist (n = 24, 28.9%) and helper/guide (n = 22, 26.5%) roles is narrower than might be assumed. These results confirm the strategic deployment of names as narrative and semiotic resources in English folk tradition, while also raising questions about the limits of purely functional classification of mythonyms.References
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