The Сoncept of a House in Karelian Wedding Lyrics

Abstract

The study is devoted to the description of the house as one of the basic concepts of folk culture and folk mentality. It includes ideas not only about housing, but also about a person’s life and death, about family and intergenerational connections, about a person's attitude to society and to himself. In this article, the concept of the house is examined from the point of view of linguo-folkloristics, which allows to identify the features of its representation not only as a material asset, but also as a spiritual basis of peasant life. In addition, the image of a house revealed in the entire complex of Karelian wedding lyrics dedicated to the rite of “transition” is examined. The analyzed texts describe the dwelling from the positions of both the bride and the groom. The work uses lexical material from a number of dictionaries (dialect, etymological, phraseological), as well as published and archival recordings of folklore texts made mainly in the first half of the XX century in Karelia. The focus is on a wide range of vocabulary included in the semantic field of the concept of “house”, texts of Karelian lamentations, wedding runes and eigs, examples from the paremia. The involvement of various linguistic and folklore sources, as well as an integrated approach to the analysis of the identified material, allows us to recognize a wide range of lexemes and stable poetic formulas and structures that denote home and are included in the “friend-foe” opposition.