Romanian cultural expression remained predominantly oral into the 20th century: in 1900, over 80% of the population of Old Romania were unable to read and write, with slightly higher levels of literacy among Romanians in neighbouring Hungary, but even lower among those in the Russian Empire.
Despite this, oral literature was perhaps less central to the construction of a modern literary culture than in other European nations such as Estonia or Serbia. To be sure, literary standardizers from Ion Heliade Rădulescu to Titu Maiorescu invoked the speech of ordinary people as an important yardstick for establishing norms; and the language of periodical and political discourse remained significantly informal, referencing popular speech frequently. However, the specific collection of folk songs and tales took place relatively late in Romanian, and postdated the editing of grammars, historiographical publications and religious texts. The Moldavian Gheorghe Asachi reported having collected Romanian folk songs after the example of Vuk Karadžić in the 1820s, but that these were destroyed by fire in Iaşi in 1827. The first published book-length collection was actually published in Stuttgart: Wallachische Mährchen (1845), by the brothers Albert and Arthur Schott, from the Banat region.
More important than these were the ballads edited (and embellished) under the title Poesii poporale and published by Vasile Alecsandri in Iaşi in 1852-53, and in a French edition two years later (Ballades et chants populaires de la Roumanie, Paris 1855). Interest in Romanian culture around the time of the Crimean War led to several translations into English, German and other languages. Particularly the ballads Mioriţa (“The ewe lamb”) and Meşterul Manole (“Master-builder Manole”) became central elements of national mythology, often reworked in other cultural expressions (e.g. Lucian Blaga’s play Meşterul Manole, 1927); vast numbers of variants were collected and analysed in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Despite critiques of Alecsandri’s collecting methods, his stylized versions remained the standard texts taught in schools. Likewise in the field of folk tales, the versions published by Bucharest printer Petre Ispirescu, especially in the 1882 collection Legendele şi basmele românilor (“Legends and folk tales of the Romanians”) remained standard. Especially through the work of Mihai Eminescu, the “literary folk tale” (basm cult) became an important genre in Romanian, essentially a free synthesis of oral elements with those taken from European literature.
