ETNOASTRONOMIA LITEWSKA
LITHUANIAN ETHNOASTRONOMY

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with Lithuanian views on stars and constellations. Ancient views, reconstructed on the basis of beliefs and certain genres of Lithuanian folklore, especially riddles, converge with ideas about stars held by primitive peoples.More recent views, based on Lithuanian and Lithuanian-German dictionaries from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, as well as nineteenth and twentieth-century folkloristic and ethnographic records, have enabled a compilation of a dictionary of star and constellation names with their denotations or, where applicable, information that the latter cannot. be established. Additionally, an analysis of the aforementioned sourc.es has made it possible to specify what stars look like, what their position and function is and when they appear in the sky.

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