Wild Wassermann. The ballad and mythological beliefs about water spirits
https://doi.org/10.28995/2686-7249-2022-4-186-200
Abstract
The author analyses folk-ballad about water spirit and his human wife (“schöne Hannalee”). One of its versions is telling about merman threatening to split their child in two halves. Some motives and images (generally connected with children of merman and human) of the ballad are compared with those of folklore narratives. Some scholars had already suggested that the Ballad about Hannalee was inspired not only by the Danish ballad “Agnete and the Merman” but also by certain Slavic folksongs. The article inspects the motif of splitting the child in texts of Russian North and Slavic lands. The motif appears in texts of different genres in Asia and Europe, in Scandinavia, but it seems to be unknown in Denmark. In addition, the author notes that woman’s anxiety about the future of her children probably influenced the ballad’s plot as well as it probably have influenced mythological texts.
Supporting agencies: This paper was financially supported by the Russian State University for the Humanities, project “Mytho-ritual and discursive practices in the context of living traditions”. The author would like to thank S.Yu. Neklyudov and O.B. Khristoforova for the advice and the help with the selection of sources.
About the Author
A. E. Kalkaeva
Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Russian State University for the Humanities
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Anna E. Kalkaeva, postgraduate student
bld. 51/21, Nakhimovsky Av., Moscow, 117418
bld. 6, Miusskaya Sq., Moscow, 125047
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Review
For citations:
Kalkaeva A.E. Wild Wassermann. The ballad and mythological beliefs about water spirits. RSUH/RGGU Bulletin: “Literary Teory. Linguistics. Cultural Studies”, Series. 2022;(4(2)):186-200. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.28995/2686-7249-2022-4-186-200
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