Plots and Motifs of Matvey Korguev’s Runosongs in the Context of Karelian Epic Tradition

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the Karelian runosongs of the bilingual storyteller of the White Sea, Matvey Korguev. The tasks of the study include the identification of runosongs recorded from Korguev in archival and published sources; determination of their genre affiliation, range of plots and motifs; analysis of their features in the context of the Karelian epic tradition. The texts of 29 runosongs containing the plot “Searching for a tree for a boat” and 271 runes with the plot “Feast in Päivölä” from published collections and the Scientific Manuscript Archive of the Karelian Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences were used for comparison. It has been established that three runosongs were written down from M. Korguev, one of which (a handwritten version of 1938) is introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. According to a comparative textual analysis, the records of 1938 and 1941 are variants of the epic runosong with contamination of the plots “Search for a tree for a boat” and “Feast in Päivölä,” while the text of 1935 contains only the plot “Feast in Päivölä.” All texts have an original composition, complicated by interspersing motifs from the plots “Competition in matchmaking” and “Journey to Pohjola.” The text of 1935 contains the motif of the birth of the sun from the yolk, which belongs to the plot “Creation of the World.” Most of the identified motifs are traditional for Karelian epic poetry. Unique are the motifs for setting off to marry on an ahkivo and the marriage of an uninvited guest who killed the host of the feast, as well as some details of the narrative.