Concept of «death» in Ukrainian fairy tales
PDF (Українська)

Keywords

death
concept
image
motive
locus
folk tale
prose
folklore

How to Cite

Naumowska, O. (2021). Concept of «death» in Ukrainian fairy tales. Bibliotekarz Podlaski, 49(4), 69–86. https://doi.org/10.36770/bp.546

Abstract

The article analyzes the concept of «death» in folklore (fairy tale) text at three levels: 1) as an object (embodied in a concrete character); 2) as a process (implemented through a motive); 3) as a spatial concept (expressed through the locus). 1) The anthropomorphic image of death in folk fairy prose functions in many samples of novels. In the Ukrainian folk fairy tale tradition, the character of death is only represented as feminine in gender. Unlike the western European tradition of depicting Death in the form of a skeleton with a scythe, in the Ukrainian tale it is an anthropomorphic character without any signs of decomposition (the scythe as its attribute occurs very rarely in texts). The fairy tale emphasizes features such as death’s inevitability, justice, courtesy and nobility. 2) The motive of death as a the protagonist is frequent for magic type fairy tales. The motif of dying mainly concerns the protagonist and is realized through the motives of the hero’s journey to the otherworld. It is noteworthy that such a trip is stratified according to the gender principle: the voluntary journey of the hero, connected with the conflict in which the woman is mostly involved, and the forced journey of the heroine, who often does not suspect its true reason - the intention of the antagonist / evil stepmother who wants to see her perish. The motif of the death of the protagonist is predominantly in the enchanting heroic fairy-tales, where it is realized: a) through the swallowing of the hero by a monster, often a fish; b) petrification of the hero as a result of violation of speaking when forced to stay quiet made by demonological beings; c) the murder of a hero by a traitor or antagonist (as a rule, with resurrection of the protagonist with the help of «healing and living water»). 3) The analysis of the texts confirms the presence of both vertical and horizontal planes with semantics of the space of death. The horizontal plane does not have any vector (the fairy tale does not emphasize the eastern, western, southern or northern directions of the hero’s movement to the otherworld), but these planes always belong to the boundary space (the most frequent point is the forest). The vertical plane of death’s location is underground (lower projection of the vertical vector ) and the celestial (upper projection of the vertical vector ) worlds with the domination over the lower projection. 

https://doi.org/10.36770/bp.546
PDF (Українська)

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