A Comparative Approach to European Folk Poetry and the Erotic Wedding Motif

Abstract

In her article, "A Comparative Approach to European Folk Poetry and the Erotic Wedding Motif," Louise O. Vasvari posits that while the corpus of folk poetry in any one area of Europe always differs from neighboring traditions, of greater interest is the existence of a large amount of related material across the continent. Nevertheless, while research in folk poetry has been rich in field collecting and cataloguing, there exists little in-depth comparative study of folk poetry. Doubtless, this is owing in part to the fact that the great majority of the texts are accessible only in the original language or dialect. In this study, Vasvari offers a case study as a model for such investigations. The comparative analysis of examples from a German, Hungarian, and Spanish corpus show how in folk poetry women are often depicted as potentially transgressive. On the one hand, being titillating, the songs are appropriate to the occasion of the wedding festivities, and, on the other, they represent a warning to young women about the sexual and, consequently, social dangers always present in their interaction with men.