The Land Acquisition Motif in the Irish and Russian Folklore Traditions
Authors: Fomin Maxim 
Published: November 2021

The paper is devoted to a treatment of later narrative forms from Irish and Russian folklore traditions that preserved some archaic cognitive structures to do with the notions of space, territory and its domestication.

The Irish tale ‘St. Columcille on Tory’ (‘Colm Cille i dToraigh’, Béaloideas 21 (1951-52) 196-198 cf. Betha Colaim Cille by M. Ó Domhnaill, ed. Kelleher & Schoepperle, §111) describes St. Columcille’s visit to the island of Tory. The saint has to overcome the determination of the other two saints, Begley and Finnian, who desire to step onto the island before him, and the resistance of the local king. In order to succeed with his mission, firstly St. Columcille wins a conquest over the saints and throws his staff so that it miraculously transforms into a spear and reaches the island, and, secondly, conquers the territory of the island by laying his cloak which covers the whole ground. The king of the island sets a malicious hound against the saint, but the latter makes the sign of the cross over the dog which is thus killed.

The Russian tale ‘The Frog Princess’ (‘Царевна-лягушка’, А. Н. Афанасьев, Народные русские сказки, IV, М., 1912, № 269, 264-7) represents a wide-spread type of a fairy tale The Frog as a Bride (= АТ 402). In the tale, the king sets his three sons on a quest to find their future wives. The sons shoot three arrows who are taken by a merchant’s daughter, by a boyar’s daughter and by a frog – to whom the youngest of the three is married. The king then sets three difficult tasks to his daughters-in-law, one of which is the weaving of a carpet. The frog princess succeeds in her completion of the tasks, finally taking a form of a beautiful ‘supernatural wife’. While she is still in this form, the youngest prince burns the frog skin in the stove. Having done that, he loses his wife to the Otherworld and has to win her over again.

I shall argue that both accounts preserved a well-attested ancient motif of the domestication of the territory, later treated in terms of the acquisition of kingship. The motif can be reconstructed on the basis of internal evidence survived in the sources under discussion. Both tales account for similar number of suitors for kingship (three saints in the Irish source vs. three princes in the Russian tale). The metaphorical conquest of the land is represented by (a) throwing/shooting of a weapon (the magic spear-staff of the saint vs. the arrow of the prince) and (b) spreading of a cloth (saint’s cloak vs. frog skin cf. weaving of a carpet symbolically representing the whole kingdom). (Needless to say, topics (a) and (b) above correlate as vertical vs. horizontal types of domestication of space.) The conquest of the land is finalised by overcoming the resistance of the land’s malevolent aspect. In the case of the Tory legend, the aspect is represented by its degraded prototype – a malicious dog that the king sets upon the saint. In the case of the Russian fairy-tale, the aspect is developed into a plot of the hero’s visit to the Otherworld where he has to fight his opponents.