Is Immortality a Blessing or a Curse? Crisis in the Natural Cycle of Birth and Death in Polish and the East Slavic Magic Folktale (original) (raw)

In a magic folktale, the personified death, who often acts as an antagonist, is one of the most popular demonic characters. The main hero comes into conflict with her because, despite reaching old age, he wants to avoid parting with the mundane world. The protagonist’s actions are based on deceit and involve, in particular, trapping a gullible death or constructing a rotating bed in order to deceive God’s emissary, who kills or spares the life of the sick man, depending on her position relative to his body. The paper will aim to present the struggle of a fairytale trickster with the above-mentioned otherworldly being, as well as the consequences of his tricks resulting in the cessation of deaths in the world, which leads to significant overpopulation and, thus, numerous social quarrels caused by the lack of food and a place to live. This crisis that regards various aspects of life prompts many characters to change their worldview, namely, to recognize the validity of God’s arrangement of the world, according to which each person is allocated a specific number of years of life. Thus, the moralistic aspect of the title narratives is emphasized. Moreover, the question will be asked about the scope of death’s transformation into a mythological creature under the influence of the genre rules of fictional texts. As ethnographic material, variants of the following tale types will be used: T 330A “Kowal i diabli (Śmierć na gruszy)” / SUS 330A “Soldat (kuznets) i chert (Smert')” (ATU 330 “The Smith and the Devil”), T 330B “Stary żołnierz i diabli” / SUS 330B “Cherti i Smert' v rantse (meshke)”, T 331B “Śmierć w dziuple” (ATU 331 “The Spirit in the Bottle”), T 332 “Kuma-Śmierć” / SUS 332 “Smert' kuma” (ATU 332 “Godfather Death”), T 336 “Śmierć oszukana” and T 338 “Baba i śmierć”. Recordings of beliefs and mythological narratives devoted to death will be used in an interpretative context.