The present article discusses the situation of a hunt in the aveture 16 of the Nibelungenlied and provides a lexical and semantic analysis of certain lexis related to the hunt. The aventure (chapter) 16 marks the border between two logical parts of the poem, the first of which ends with the murder of Sigfried (Sigird of the Norse Völsunga Saga ). Burgundian royal court initiates the hunt in order to get an opportunity to murder Siegfried after the conflict between Kriemhild (Siegfried’s wife and Gunther’s sister) and Brunhild (Gunter’s wife). With the hunt being merely a pretence to bring Siegfried out of the city of Worms and leave him without his armour, the episode of the hunt does not provide many details on the of chasing the game. The armour and weapons draw more attention from the author. The murder in the forest is a mark of the German version of the tale, while the Norse one has him killed in a bedroom. However, the author of the forest episode followed an older text which had described Siegfried killing the dragon. It is possible to presume that the author have used this disappeared episode to create the hunting episode and Siegfried’s murder as it is depicted in the Nibelungenlied.

The article is devoted to the evolution of the “plot about the Swan Knight” in the French and German epic and romance traditions. The transformation and functioning of motives borrowed from folklore and included in the narrative at a certain stage in the existence of the plot are considered. The borrowing of folklore motives is associated with the presence of a marriage theme in the plot. In the French epic tradition, which has received a book existence, the story of the Swan Knight expands due to the motive of the search for the lost spouse. In the German tradition, you can see the influence of the fairy tale plot about the snake fighter. It is concluded that the appearance of folklore motifs in the narrative entails a plot transformation, in many respects similar to the development of the corresponding plot types in folklore (for example, the transition from an archaic myth to a classic fairy tale about a fantastical spouse). At the same time, in the literary tradition, there is a partial destruction of the opposition “friend or foe”, which has a different semantics in medieval books, different from folklore. In the French tradition, the spatial opposition of the “historical” and the sacred world is of particular importance; in German monuments, the opposition “friend or foe” is interpreted from the point of view of the conformity or inconsistency of the characters’ behavior with courtly values.

The paper analyses the structural changes introduced by A.S. Pushkin into the original text: the description of prophesying “death by the horse” to Prince Oleg in Russian Primary Chronicle. The author points out that, in contrast to the chronicle, the ballad’s text depicts not the Prince’s own prophet but an ethnically alien Slavic wolkhv. Thus the prophecy through the mouth of a foreign magus can be regarded as a kind of a curse. Apart from this, in contrast to the depiction of the episode in Russian Primary Chronicle, Pushkin describes encountering the wolkhv who appears on the marching troops’ way. The paper provides parallels to this model found by its author and also describes similar episodes from both the history of Rome and epic texts (“ Nibelungenlied ”, Irish sagas). As Pushkin’s ballad’s major differences from the given episodes which do not contradict the clusters of motifs of the narrative scheme, the paper points out the following: 1. In all the given examples the encounter takes place at a ford. 2. In all the given examples the prophet is of feminine gender. The author attempts to find sources for Pushkin’s text outside the actual Russian history. The question of possibility of unconscious realising of motif schemes is posed as a preliminary conclusion.

The article addresses the issue of the way in which the narrator’s figure is represented in Albanian epic texts. One of the characteristics of the Albanian epic is the ethical dative ( dativus ethicus ) - the dative of “moral participation” indicating the inclusion of the narrator in the described situation. It allows the narrator to act as a direct witness of the described events and to present himself as if he was a passive participant (who observes, reflects and empathises). The narrator’s explanatory remarks are intended to make his narrative more understandable to the reader; they summarise the described event or orient the reader towards perception of the subsequent action. The numerous rhetorical interrogative and exclamatory (imperative) remarks are used in the construction of the epic text, drawing the boundaries between the two episodes. They also demonstrate the narrator’s personal interest in the depicted epic world, which is generally characteristic of epic traditions; however, this is especially apparent in Albanian texts.

The purpose of this article is to show the downward evolution of the epic heroes, from the gods to the heroes of joke. The great heroes of the first Armenian epic - ethnogonic tradition, Hayk, Aram and Ara, are obviously epicised images of ancient native gods, who, after changing the religious system of people - the introduction of Iranian pantheon, moved to a lower level of epic heroes. The same phenomenon is observed after the adoption of Christianity: the god Vahagn in the second ancient epic “Vipasank” appears as the son of King Tigranes, and a variant of the name of the god Mihr (Mher) are worn by two heroes of the third epic “Daredevils of Sasun” (“David of Sasun”). Some gods and heroes, especially after Christianisation, were demonised, and some passed into a fairy tale. In the Hellenistic era, in Armenia, as in some other countries, kings were deified: e.g., Tigranes the Great was deified as Vahagn. Strangely enough, this phenomenon was repeated in the USSR: Lenin and Stalin, one might say, were deified. At the same time, they became the heroes of epic works and fairy tales. However, the era of Khrushchev and the condemnation of Stalin’s “cult of personality” put an end to the Soviet heroic epic: Stalin was demonised and then another genre of folklore became relevant - political joke (anecdote). The new leaders of the USSR were its main target, but Lenin and Stalin continued to stay as important characters.

The paper studies the attitude of storytellers to the fairy-tale tradition. In a number of cases, storytellers consider the fairy tales they know to be a “priceless legacy” that they must preserve and pass on to others. In some cases, this is one’s memory from a favourite relative who used to tell this or that tale. Sometimes a fairy tale functions as a sign of ethnic identification of a person, his connection with a particular ethnic group. Some performers use the fairy tale in their repertoire along with other genres to show the richness of the local tradition and its diversity. A fairy tale can be just a saved text, if the performer considers it necessary to preserve the tradition of a particular place. At the same time, a fairy tale becomes a mean of attracting attention to its teller, if it has drawn attention of employees of cultural institutions, of folklorists and ethnographers. In this case, the person begins to work on his repertoire, to replenish it with the help of books, to create or combine tales and motifs.

The paper contains excerpts from interviews with the modern performers of the Yakut epic Olonkho. Their practice is characterised by reliance on written records of the epic, the fragmentariness of the texts being performed, the predominance of performances in the format of competitions on massive platforms, the formation of individual performing styles under the influence of the “censorship” of experts and senior members of the performers’ community, a tendency to level dialect differences. The major topic of the interviews was the situation of the “return” of the local epic genre, the traditions of which were practically lost in the second half of the 20^th century, the “horizontal” relationships among the modern performers of the epic and their communication with the members of the expert community (folklorists, ethnomusicologists), new contexts of the existence of the reconstructed element of folklore. The revitalisation of the practice of performing and listening to the epic is part of a more general process of reconstruction of the Yakut traditional culture, the actualization of local artefacts that can become the support of the ethnocultural identity of the Yakuts in the new conditions. The experience of modern performers of the Yakut epic is indicative in the context of contemporary practises of actualising traditional forms of folklore and makes us rethink the specifics of the professionalisation of folklore performance in the post-traditional era.