Rural Stories about Parental Malediction (based on field materials from Novgorod and Vologda regions)

Abstract

The narrative repertoire of many folk traditions features stories of children cursed by their parents. These stories can be divided into several groups with adjacent but independent plots: 1) “the substituted child:” here an unclean spirit steals a human child, replacing it with a log, a broom, or a changeling; 2) “the careless promise:” parents make a thoughtless pledge in time of crisis to give their child to the devil, who claims it when the time comes; 3) “redemption through marriage:” a child who has been cursed lives under the floorboards, in the bath house and so on until the time comes to marry. This article will concentrate on the fourth type of story, the child, who as a result of a parental curse disappears into the forest. I will be analyzing its constituent motifs and discussing the popular ideas that inspire them. The discussion is based primarily on field recordings of about seventy texts, as well as printed and archival sources. This group of stories may be defined in two different ways. According to a literal reading, these are narratives where a curse prompts the ensuing narrative, even if the maledictory formula actually appears at the end of the story, causally connecting the motifs in the tale. The second, broader interpretation encompasses all stories about children who wander or are led into the forest, even though an actual malediction may not be mentioned. These expanded subject parameters are possible because informants often tell stories about those who have been cursed in reply to questions about children lost in the forest [e.g. Belozer.-01:14. LMP],(1) or confirm that such children were described as “cursed” [Khvoin.-99:2]. I will examine the theme of children who have been cursed as a collection of related motifs, the quantity and hierarchy of which can vary from one tradition to another and be conditioned by the peculiarities of the performer’s individual narrative repertoire. Let us examine motifs of primary importance before those of secondary significance. The Inciting Incident: The Formula of the Curse