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Індоєвропейські витоки обрядовості слов’янського епосу
The Indo-European Origins of Rituals in Slavic Epics
Was there a goddess Slava in Slavic pagan antiquity? Though there have been voices that it was possible, the analysis of Slavic folklore texts proved the issue to be more complex.
The present paper shows that Ukrainian folklore as well as the folklore of other Slavic peoples may have preserved stable compositional clichés that can be traced back to Indo-European prototypes. In their turn, these clichés may be explained as the verbal reflections of ritual practices and sacred etiquette. It is stated that the final parts of Ukrainian dumas, Russian bylinas, and Serbian heroic songs that contain praise (slava) of natural forces can be regarded as remnants of pagan beliefs with strongly proved Indo-European background. The common motives of slava in different Slavic epic traditions give us important insights into the Slavic pagan religion.
At the end of dumas, bylinas, and South Slavic heroic songs, there is a distinct part in which the singer, apart from the main story, blesses the audience and the universe. This part had preserved the composition scheme comparable to that of Old Indian stuti hymns, Pindaric, and Vedic poetry: 1) an invocation to the deity or a person with higher social rank; 2) a recounting of the previous (semi)mythological precedent; 3) a request.
The obligatory lexical element of the final part of Slavic eposes is slava. As it is mentioned in the context of mourning over the dead or calming the natural forces, it is very likely that the concept was connected to the cult of ancestors and natural forces - one of the most archaic forms of religion. It is proved by two non-neighbouring cognate folklore sources. In Hutsul funerals up to the beginning of the 20th century, slava used to serve as a taboo name of the soul of the deceased. Meanwhile, at least up to 19th century, the Serbs preserved the holiday of slava that is interwoven with the cult of the dead (e.g., kolyvo was eaten during the rite).
Thus, though we cannot claim the existence of the personified goddess named Slava, we have strong evidence about the notion of slava (praise, fame) that could have been current in Common Slavic religion. It is even more likely due to the underlying Indo-European tradition, in which the notion of fame was not personified though crucial for the ideology of warring elites (like in Pindar's lyric).
Such evasive notion of slava that was not always personified though praised comforts very well to the picture of ancient Slavic religion handed down to us by Procopius of Caesarea. He claimed that ancient Slavs praised natural forces, rivers, and forests. Likewise, in the fragments preserved in some of Ukrainian dumas and songs from Kirsha Danilov's collection, the praise (slava) was sung not only to the heroes but also to rivers and fields.
According to the oldest tradition of the Inner Asian steppe, the nomadic empires legitimised their rules by ethnogenetic myths, in which the zoomorphic phenomena played a determinative role. The Chinggisid Empire followed the traditional wolf-deer ancestorship as means for strengthening their power over the Inner-Asian nomads. At the time of the decline of the Eastern Mongolian (Chinggisid) empire the Western Mongolian tribal confederation came to power and tried to extend its power over the whole traditional Mongolian territory. The attempt to turn the political rule required a new mythical ideological background, which, in the case of the Oirats, also roots in an ancient Inner-Asian tradition. The motives of the myth of the Coros (Cors), the Junghar ruling clan spread in the folklore as well and became a common Oirat ethnogenetic tradition. The paper discusses different literary and lore variants of the myth and its main motives, indicating the possible political role of them.
Abstract
The role of charms in Iranian belief narratives remains largely unexplored. Hereby, I attempt a preliminary survey. First, I examine the text of the Iranian national epic, the Shahname of Ferdowsi (X–XI century A.D.), in which the word afsun denotes charm or magic spell. In contemporary folktale texts (I mainly rely on the voluminous Dictionary of Iranian Folktales), an Arabic loan-word verd (which also means a kind of prayer) is used to mean a charm which facilitates supernatural results such as shape-shifting, transformation or miraculous healing. Ritual prayer (namaz) and supplication (do’a) also function as charms in folk narratives. I also give a brief overview of the Iranian folklore scholarship.
The beginning of the 1950s marks a turning-point in György Ligeti’s early career. By that time Ligeti had become disappointed regarding his rather marginal position in Hungarian musical life, and he might well have felt some dissatisfaction with his own artistic output, as well. He recognized that he should leave his former style and build up his own expressive means and musical language from elementary material. For this purpose, he set himself certain compositional tasks, and imposed restrictions on pitch content, intervals, and rhythms ‘as if to build up a “new music” from nothing’. Accordingly, Musica ricercata , which is the first fruit of his experimental project, marks a renewal of Ligeti’s musical thinking primarily on terms of the compositional technique. The present study examines the main problems of compositional technique raised in Musica ricercata (primarily that of chromaticism and dense polyphony) and points out significant influences shown in the work (such as those of Bartók, Stravinsky, and Romanian folklore).
Any scholar devoted to the study of the witch figure in Early Modern Spain will soon realize that the Iberian bruja is a peculiar character in European folklore. The Spanish bruja was a malevolent agent specialized, almost exclusively, in the murder of newborn babies. Her infanticide compulsion was associated with vampirism. She possessed the extraordinary capacity to enter rooms through the smallest chinks in doors or walls. She had amazing metamorphic powers. When she attacked the sleeping adults, she threw herself upon them, crushing them with her weight. On occasions, she was considered the victim of a tragic destiny from which it was impossible to escape. Some specific behavior, such as drinking the wine kept in cellars or washing clothes at the side of rivers, was also attributed to her. In these traits, the specialist in Mediterranean folklore and comparative mythology inmediately discovers the basic characteristics of a series of clearly identified mythical figures: the child-killing demon, the vampiric revenant, the fairy society and the Nightmare, specific avatars of the archaic mythology of the Double and the nocturnal spirits of the mahr -type. We can postulate, then, that the Spanish bruja , before embodying in Spain the figure of the satanic worshipper at the sabbat, gave name to a Pyrenean variant of the pan-European nocturnal demon. The evidence provided by diverse peninsular testimonies about the original meaning of the terms bruxa and xorguina , between the decades of 1280 and 1480, cover in an almost perfect way the spectrum of activities attributed to those fiends of the night. The historical evidence reinforces, then, the elements provided by the morphological analysis and by comparative mythology.
Abstract
The author of the article wishes to compare Hungarian textual and musical folkloristics at the turn of the 20th century with regard to changes in fieldwork methodologies. Hungarian folklore studies in the 19th century preferred text-oriented recording of performances, while by the first half of the 20th century the need for a performance-centered study of folklore with the help of audio recording emerged. Owing to a fundamental change in the method of folklorecollection, Hungarian folklorists studying folk music and folk dance by the middle of the 20th century applied the method of participant observation. In the meantime extensive collection gave way to intensive collection focusing on the repertoire of a given local community or of an outstanding performer. In this process Béla Vikár had a distinguished role as he was the first one to use phonograph in collecting folk poetry and folk music in Hungary, besides which, with the help of stenography, he has a remarkable manuscript legacy of folktales and folk customs as well. The approach and objectives of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály differed from those of Vikár's, since for them quantitative considerations were still important, while Vikár's approach borrowed elements from social sciences as well. The break-through in this respect was marked with the oeuvre of László Lajtha, a disciple of Bartók, who dealt with vocal and instrumental folk music alike. During five decades Lajtha as a collector shifted paradigms a number of times and on the peak of his folklorist oeuvre he published monographs on the vocal and instrumental musical repertoire of bands and villages. His studies inspired György Martin, dance folklorist as well as the revival folk dance movement in the 1970s. The performer-centred study of narration that Gyula Ortutay elaborated on at the beginning of the 1940s proved to be successful primarily in the study of prose epic genres and it unreflexively followed the method of folk musicologists.
Network. He primarily explores legends, storytelling repertoires, Hungarian folklore, folk religion and rituals, and the classification of folklore texts. He is the author of ninety independent volumes and numerous studies, and since 2011 he has been the
has been added to the Új magyar népköltési gyűjtemény [New Collection of Hungarian Folklore] series founded by Gyula Ortutay. Péter Villányi published the prose folklore repertoire of a village near Budapest, Galgamácsa, a result of forty years of
Károly Viski (Torda, 1882-Budapest, 1945) was an outstanding figure in European ethnology in the years between 1920–1945. He was born in Transylvania and trained as a secondary school teacher of Hungarian and Latin at the university of Kolozsvár. As a young teacher he taught in schools in Transylvanian towns and did research on the history of the Hungarian language and dialectology. In 1920 he joined the staff of the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest and became an expert in decorative arts, material culture and European ethnology. His book on the folk art of Transylvania written in the early 1920s was published in many languages. He played a role in the choice of a European, Scandinavian orientation for Hungarian ethnology and in strengthening ties with Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Poland. He was the spiritus rector and editor of the big four-volume synthesis published in the 1930s which presented traditional Hungarian material culture and folklore in a broad European context. He devoted special attention to research on the cultural heritage of the peoples of Transylvania, the co-existence of the Hungarian, German and Romanian ethnic groups and the history of cultural exchange processes. He did a great deal for museums, collections and exhibitions of ethnography. Between 1940–45 as professor at the university of Kolozsvár and later of Budapest he trained a whole series of outstanding students (e.g. Károly Kós, János Kodolányi, Ágnes Kovács, Mária Kresz, Károly Gaál, László Vajda).
The article is based on the online database “Estonian Droodles” (available at http://www.folklore.ee/Droodles , containing 7,200 droodles collected from 1963 up to the present), which includes a number of longer visual narrative riddles (about 430 text variants, 79 types, i.e. different droodles). The question component of the so-called ‘narrative droodles’, or ‘droodle tales’, is a verbally transmitted tale visualised by means of a pictorial image. The performer of a droodle sketches the image during narration and the story ends with a punch line question.Among narrative droodles there are variants built on a specific scene and plot, which may even resemble a miniature fairy tale. The extremely condensed plot centres on only one or two characters. For the purpose of distancing from reality, a princess, king, prince, witch, Little Red Riding Hood, etc. may be chosen as protagonists; the more popular characters are represented as the following character pairs — girl/boy, brother/sister, woman/man, grandmother/grandfather. The narrative droodles are not comparable to the majority of fairy tales in length, but the fast pace of modern life seems to favour the use of such illustrated narrative riddles. An analysis of the structural composition and function of narrative droodles of this type reveals the shared common features with the structure and function of fairy tales.
