Tag Archives: seasons

Vecchione

Nationality: Italian
Age: 89
Occupation: --
Residence: Bologna
Performance Date: 04/07/2021
Primary Language: Italian

Main piece:

L.S.: Il Vecchione is a representative figure made of wood which at the end of the year, is burned, metaphorically representing the destruction of the old and of the bad things which happened during the year, so to begin the new year with novelty, curiosity and…and some sort of positivity. 

Background:

My informant was born in the Tosco-Emilian Apennines (Italy) in 1931. While she spent the majority of her childhood there, she moved to Bologna, Italy, when she was about 13, and she has been living there ever since. She members going to Bologna’s main square, every year of her adolescence to witness this ritualistic performance with the whole city’s community gathered there.

Context:

The informant recounted me this while having a tea in her living room and taking about traditions which have been carried out, throughout time, in the city of Bologna. 

Thoughts:

Since antiquity, many were the ritualistic traditions related to the time cycle, and, in particular, New Year’s Eve has alway represented the liminal day par excellence, it being the relatively short period of time between the end of the old year and the advent of the new. 

The tradition of burning a pile of wood, in this case portrayed with human features and appearances, is common to quite a lot of cultures and it plays the role of keystone in the natural and social cycle of seasons. As a matter of fact, as my informant pointed out, il Vecchione, which in Italian translates into ‘the super-old’, is lighted up on fire in the attempt of destroying what is old, past and to-be-forgotten -eliminating also all the bad and negative events the year which is ending has brought with it-, so that from its ashes a new, glorious and successful year -and consequently man- can rise and flourish. A type of ritualistic passage is committed, that is, the passage between one cycle of time and the next one is, through the burning, fulfilled and completed. 

Saint John’s Tide

Nationality: American
Age: 63
Occupation: Teacher
Residence: Austin, Texas
Performance Date: 03/12/19
Primary Language: English

Content:
Informant – “Saint John’s Tide is on Midsummer, the eve of June 21st. There’s a big fire. Everyone gathers around the fire and one at a time they throw their intentions for the new year into the bonfire. Where you want to be in the coming year, what you want to do, whatever. Then you leap over the fire.”

Context:
Informant – “It has very pagan roots. It’s the longest day of the year. After this, the days get shorter. As winter approaches, our thoughts move away from the external. We begin to self contemplate more. It’s a good time to think about your plans for the coming year.”
The informant learned about this ritual in the 70s, but she doesn’t remember exactly where. She thinks she was invited to one.

Analysis:
Throwing your intentions into the fire is very reminiscent of Greek prayer burning. Jumping over the fire sounds like a trial, a way to prove yourself worthy of your desires. It sounds like a test, a purging of old weaknesses and fears before the dark, scary winter comes.

Myth of the Creation of Seasons in Maui

Nationality: Hawaiian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Maui
Performance Date: 4/22/19
Primary Language: English

Informant: The ancient Hawaiian myth of Maui straining the Sun is basically that Maui is an ancient chief and his mom was complaining that the days were not long enough because her kapa, which is like a cloth made out of bark, didn’t have enough time to dry in the Sun, so he took his sister’s hair and made a rope out of it and used it to lasso the Sun’s rays. When he caught the Sun with the rope that he made, the Sun was begging for her life and they came to an agreement that the days would be long in the summer and short in the winter, and so that’s the Hawaiian story of how seasons happened.

Context: The informant is a USC student who is from Maui, and has lived in Maui their whole life. They heard this story growing up on Maui, and they remember it because it is the myth of how their home was created. To the informant, this piece is reminiscent of home and the place in which they grew up; this is how they interpret it. This piece was performed in a traditional, face-to-face, storytelling interview, where the informant told me the story and I recorded it.

Analysis:

This narrative piece of folklore is a myth, and it is very indicative of the genre of myths as it is a creation story for a specific location, in this case Maui, taking place outside of this world (in the sky), as it involves the Sun. This myth is intended to tell the story of the creation of the seasons of the island of Maui, and it tells the story from beginning to end, involving the primary character of Maui, whose interaction with the Sun leads to the creation of the world as they know it in Maui. This conveys not just how this story is a traditional myth in that it displays the characteristics of traditional myths: that it is sacred truth, has no relation to our world, and is a creation story that sets up the weather seasons of everyday life, but to me, it also conveys how myths relate to the physical characteristics of the location they are placed in. The climate of Maui is tropical and therefore very sunny, so it only makes sense that the Sun is a central part of this myth about Maui. The physical characteristics of the location observed by the people of Maui translate into their myths, and this is very indicative of a characteristic of myths that I have noticed throughout this class: myths often reflect the world surrounding them in ways that may not have been previously thought of, such as climate, geography, physical surroundings, etc. I know that I did not realize how much this aspect contributed to myths until interviewing the informant and analyzing the story of Maui, and it conveys the way in which geographical locations affect myths. This myth gives a way for the Hawaiian people to pass on the story of the creation of seasons through generations, in a way that sounds familiar to them because of the characteristics that come from the geographical location they are in. This conveys how this myth can create a sense of identity among the Hawaiian people, through the commonalities they will recognize in this myth. Overall, the myth of Maui conveys both a traditional and nontraditional way of analyzing the myth.

Annotation: For another version of this myth, see Chapter XVI, Section 1 (Kalakaua, 63-65), “Hawaiian Mythology, Chapter XVI, Maui the Trickster.” Ulukau,

www.ulukau.org/elib/cgi-bin/library?e=d-0beckwit1-000Sec–11en-50-20-frameset-book–1-010escapewin&a=d&d=D0.18&toc=0.

The Myth of Persephone

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC
Performance Date: 4/12/2018
Primary Language: English

The following was recorded from a conversation I had with a friend marked EAL. I am marked CS. She shared with me a religious myth she grew up learning in school.

 

CS: “So how did you learn this myth?”

EAL: “I was really into Greek mythology as a kid and my mom bought me like a big book of Greek mythologies and we’d read them together as bedtime stories when I was really young.”

CS: “Can you tell me the story?”

EAL: “So basically Persephone is the daughter of Demeter, the god of harvest. She was very carefree, beautiful, and like vibrant. And so Hades, who is the God of the underworld, who is like dark and depressing, saw her and said he wanted her to be his wife. So she was playing in the field and his chariot comes up out of the ground and he abducts her and takes her to the underworld. And then because she was in the underworld and Demeter was so upset, winter came because she was heartbroken about the abduction of her daughter. And while Persephone was in the underworld she ate six seeds so like she has to stay in the underworld since she ate the food of the dead for six months, so that kind of explains the seasons. So the summer she can be with Demeter and its like the harvest season, and then the winter she has to be with Hades and that’s why it’s winter.”

CS: “Did you ever hear varied versions of this myth?”

EAL: “Yeah I’ve heard it before, maybe without the season aspect, so I think there’s definitely variations that leave that out. In others they’re married, but in the version I’ve read she doesn’t love him at all and is just kind of stuck with him.

 

Background:

The participant is a freshman at the University of Southern California and was raised in Chicago, Illinois with a strong Christian religious background. Her mom introduced her to mythology, mostly Greek and Egyptian, at a very young age.

Context:

An in person conversation recorded while walking to an event.

 

Analysis:

I found this myth really captivating because I also used to love Greek mythology and was an avid reader of myths such as this one. I hadn’t heard this version before in regards to how that is where seasons originate. I believe when I used to read Greek mythology it was from a children’s book so it makes sense why details such as that would be left out. It is interesting to see how folk myths, even when tied to religion, still have variations from one to the next.

 

The Snowmaiden, Snegurochka

Nationality: Indian, Spanish, USA
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Saratoga, CA
Performance Date: 4/20/16
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Folklore Piece:

“Ok, so, there’s these two parents. Well, wait, not parents. There’s this couple, and they can’t have kids, and they’re, like, pretty old now. So it’s snowing one day, and the husband goes outside, and has an idea to build a snowgirl…? So like a little girl instead of a snowman. They made her look really realistic and then a stranger comes by one night, and he, like, does some sort of magic and then he leaves. Then, at night, the snowgirl comes to life. And so they’re really excited, because now they have a daughter, so they take her inside. But, she’s, like, snow, so they keep her from going outside as it becomes spring and summer, and in the summer the girl wants to go outside, um, and her parents always tell her ‘no’, and they don’t tell her why, they don’t tell her why, they don’t tell her that she’s snow. Um, so, the parents go to like the market, or they leave the house one day, and the girl goes outside, and she melts. And the parents come back and she’s, I guess, dead.”

 

Background information

“I mean, I like it. It’s stuck with my all of these years. I don’t know, I didn’t do, like, a great job of telling it. I think the message is to always be honest, I guess? And I like that, I think if the parents were, um, more honest with their daughter they could’ve saved her.”

Context

“My parents got, like, a little set of stories from India. It’s not an Indian story, but they used to read it to me at night. Sure enough, I actually met the informant’s mother later that day. I asked her about the story and she said, “Oh yes, we used to have plenty of books filled with little stories that we’d tell the kids before they went to bed. Not necessarily Spanish, or Indian, just some fairy tales and little stories.”

 

Analysis

I had originally asked this informant to participate because I knew that her and her family were very much still in touch with their roots. She visits India nearly every year, goes to Indian weddings, lived in Spain near her family for half a year, talks about all the traditional Spanish food her mom makes. So when I asked her to share with me some form of folklore, be it a proverb or a cultural event, or a story, that this is the one she thought of.

To be honest, it could have been because she had been around a previous informant who was also telling a tale, but I still believe it is telling. Out of all the stories that her mother told her over the  years, and I’m sure countless relatives had told her, she remembered “the one about the snow girl.” She couldn’t remember exactly what the story was for some time, and I suggested that maybe she think of something else. But she was adamant about teling this story; she called her mom, called her dad, called the house, and finally it clicked.

After more of my own research, I found the origin of the “Snow Girl” tale to be, in fact, Russian. The Snow Girl, or Snow Maiden, is formally known in Russian folklore as Snegurochka. There are many tales of Snegurochka, and many variations of this same story that the informant had told me. Here is a variant where she melts, but does so intentionally, after her parents compare her to the value of a hen when a fox brings her home from being lost in the woods. However, in this story, she refuses to leave with the fox, and her once banished dog brings her home and is rewarded, and she remains in tact and happy. To read yet another version, you may want to check out The Snow Maiden and Other Russian Tales by Bonnie Marshall. (Marshall, Bonnie C. The Snow Maiden and Other Russian Tales. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004. Print.)

Beyond the interest of all these variations, however, is the context of this informants nationality telling this story. Clearly, with so many stories, the Snegurochka is something that Russian’s identify their culture with. Yet, here is a girl, whose parents are from countries that don’t even traditionally see snow, retelling the tale in Southern California as the one piece of folklore that she would like to share. This just goes to show that while one’s heritage and self-proclaimed culture are important, they are not all encompassing of the folkloric artifacts that they hold dear.