The Liminal Beings of Oral Lyric Poetry – on the Crossing of Spatial and Existential Boundaries of Lyrical Heroines and Heroes

Abstract

The paper discusses the complex position of lyric heroines and heroes as liminal beings in limited situations. They are observed as the figures of the Other and the alien. Since the oral lyric comprises both the “female” and “male” text, the radical Other cannot be identified with the woman, even if female otherness is more emphasized in a patriarchal community. The songs tell of the maidens and youths who meet their bodily boundaries in rituals, as part of the motif of doubling or looking at their reflections on the water surface. The new identity is contested in contact with the Other. This is the case with the maiden who comes from afar, crossing the boundaries, leaving her family home, ceasing to be a daughter and a sister, and becomes a bride — a wife. Masks mark the liminal identity of youths and maidens. Wearing the masks, they gain zoomorphic characteristics (wolf hats, other zoomorphic attributes), or their gender identity is relativized. When maidens get dressed as lads or take some of the heroic attributes (most often the saber), they are marked as powerful, they enter the male social sphere or meet a beloved youth. The inversion of the dominant order during the ritual creates the space of freedom, which provides a utopian potential of an alternate reality. This kind of reality is possible during the restricted time and space, marked by occasionality, similarly as the liminality of maidens and youths is occasional. Both the nature of liminal beings and the relationship of the community therewith is marked by ambiguity. The maidens in the queen’s ritual are at the same time unknown (different from who they are in profane times) and their plain old village maiden selves. The unknown lad is alien, strange, but desirable as well. They are both dangerous and in danger, and accordingly, the taboos that refer to them (the prohibition of speech, looking back, revealing the face/identity, isolation, etc.) aim not only to protect endangered beings from evil eyes and spirits but to protect the community from mighty liminal beings. The oral lyric songs accompany people during the limit-situations and serve to show the complexity of liminal identities.