ПРЕПОДНОВЕНИЯТ БРАК В БАЛАДАТА „МЪЖ ПРОДАВА ЖЕНА СИ“
THE RENEWED MARRIAGE IN THE “MAN SELLS HIS WIFE” BALLAD

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the problem of the calendar mythological basis of a popular Bulgarian folk ballad. In it, the transition from one time cycle to another is described through a series of semantically isomorphic situations-clichés of a realistic and logically possible plot – a shortage of Time, presented as a lack of money for a cosmological “construction”; the sale of the wife to an ethnically and religiously foreign buyer who turns out to be her brother. When the same brother realizes that he has bought his sister to be his wife, he returns her to her husband and does not claim the money (leaving it as a gift). The total inversion of signs and situations characteristic of the ritual allows the introduction of the supposed threat of incest while the typical for the Bulgarian wedding “bridal ransom” paid by the groomsman (brother or fellow man to the groom) is attributed to the wife’s brother. In the end, the plot of the First Marriage, which must be renewed at every subsequent calendric transition, is of biggest importance to the song’s invariant. Essential to the analysis are the names of the characters that are related to certain dates in the mobile model of reconcilement of the lunar and solar cycles in the earliest period of formation of Bulgarian folklore (IX–X century).

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