Pre-Christian Eschatological Motifs in the Ukrainian Dumas and Spiritual Verses and Their Germanic Parallels

The Ukrainian folklore genres least studied in a mythological context are the epic songs: dumas and spiritual verses. In particular, it is possible to find concepts of the beginning and the end of the world in these works. In many aspects, they are close to the Old Germanic ones, especially concerning the mythological connection between natural cataclysms and the breaking of family ties, as shown by several archaic examples. This article deals with these cosmogonic and eschatological notions in Ukrainian and Scandinavian epics. The author points to a similar outlook in both epic traditions and a similarity in emotional and evaluative identifications of events. These parallels must be owed to Germano-Slavic contacts in the early Middle Ages.