Ancient people, ancestors, or demons? The mythonym chud (‘the Chuds’, ‘evil spirit’) in the Komi-Permyak language and folklore

From the Russian folklore, ideas about the Chuds – an ancient people, as well as their name, were borrowed into foreign oral traditions. In the Komi-Permyak language, the word Chud’ underwent not only a phonetic (chud, pl. chuddes), but also semantic transformations. The authors of the article were attracted by the development of the meaning of ‘evil spirit, demons’ in this word. We analyze hypotheses explaining this semantic shift, and also characterize the current state of the oral tradition. The work highlights mythological and linguistic factors of two types – both those that contribute to the convergence of the images of the Chuds and chuddes, and those that prevent their contaminations. As in Russian dialects, in the Komi-Permyak language there is an “attraction” of the word Chuds to other loanwords with the initial component chud- (chudo, chudotvorets, chudichchyny ‘to wonder’, etc.). As bilingualism spreads, adjectives such as chudlivöy, chudsköy, etc. are incorporated into this morpho-semantic field, which are used in mythological chrononyms denoting the ancient era when the Chuds lived or when evil spirits were more active than they are now. In the Komi-Permyak language, the number of nominations based on the component chud increases (banya chud, kuznecha chud, övin chud, etc.), the word develops special demonological meanings (‘spirit of the bathhouse’, ‘spirit of the house’, ‘spirit of the forest’, etc.). Among the northern Komi-Permyaks, the word Chud in the meaning of ‘ancient people’ is included into a special mythological and ritual traditions presupposing the collective commemoration of ancestors, and stands in a series of special names for the dead (vazh otir, pöris’ otirrez, etc.), capable of punishing for the absence of the required rites. Such mythological ideas are one of the factors that prevent the mixing of the images of the Chuds – the ancient inhabitants of the region and the chuds – evil spirits in this territory.

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