Folk Narratives and Legends as Sources of Widespread Idioms: Toward a Lexicon of Common Figurative Units

The subject matter of this article is widespread idioms originatingfrom folk tales and old legends that once were elements of the folklore of various European language communities but later fell into oblivion. The motifs of these tales survived in currently known idioms of many languages of Europe and beyond and thus contribute to constituting a part of the Lexicon of Common Figurative Units.