Ritual dialogues of Yuletide in the Carpathian Region of Ukraine

Abstract

Ritual dialogues have interested several prominent scholars of Slavic folklore as source for reconstruction of proto-Slavic ritual text structure. More recent studies of folklore have a different focus, studying the structure of Slavic societies reflected in folklore. This article introduces a number of ritual dialogues traditionally performed in villages in the Carpathian area of Western Ukraine around Yuletide, recorded by one of the authors between 1987 and 2018, and analyses the dialogues from both these points of view. A number of examined dialogues show specific structural patterns (question-answer-interpretation structure, the positions of the male performer outside the house, and the female performer, inside, etc.) agreeing with Propp’s hypothesis about the Yuletide blessings of the house given by ancestral spirits coming from the otherworld in East Slavic culture, and with Toporov’s hypothesis about Yuletide riddles performed in Indo-European culture to re-create world order at the time of winter solstice. Carpathian dialogs also turn out to reflect and corroborate the gender-age hierarchy of the traditional rural society.