Some Early Motifs in European Folklore

Abstract

For a long time, the age of the plots and motifs attested in folklore and mythological tales was evaluated on the basis of their content. This content had to correspond to particular sets of cultural traits thought to be typical for particular epochs. History, however, is not limited to strata and periods but consists of unique processes and events. The latter produce global changes and not vice versa. One of the major challenges of comparative folklore studies is to reveal the historical context of the spread of particular episodes and images. Here we analyze the area distribution of some motifs that can have early origins. They have been selected thanks to the systematic processing of thousands of publications on the Eurasian and American folk traditions. There are motifs in Europe, a very few of them, found almost exclusively across the western part of the continent. This pattern of distribution is much different from the predominant patterns found elsewhere. The evidence suggests that the motifs in question could have spread during the Bronze Age, if not earlier. The dating of the Eurasian-American parallels must be compared with the time of the peopling of the New World. The rationale of their distribution can be understood if we address the genetic data on the “Siberian wedge”: the replacement of the earlier Eastern Siberian populations by the Mongoloid groups in the Holocene.