engleski

Charming Elements in Croatian Folk Prayers

Charms have seldom been analyzed as a specific rhetorical genre of the Croatian oral tradition. Relatively significant attention has been given to the practice of charming but there is still no classification of the Croatian verbal charms either in terms of their structure or their function. The general view on European charms from the Middle Ages onwards is that they can not be treated separately from the vernacular Christian tradition and this provides the basis for tracing charming elements in oral genres close to Christian spirituality. In the Croatian oral tradition folk prayers represent a specific genre which is still productive in performance (especially in the southern regions of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina). One of the largest collections of Croatian folk prayers is the one compiled by the friar Jerolim Šetka (1231 records made by three independent collectors in the first half of the 20th century) and this collection served as a corpus for this research. Charming elements in folk prayers were recognized through the following features: spatial markings, syntactic parallelisms, phrasal repetition, etymological figures, evocation of God and saints, use of nonsense words and numbers with a symbolic meaning. The marking of space by means of verbal expression is found to be the most frequent charming element in Croatian folk prayers. This marking is often signified with syntactic parallelisms and etymological figures. This provides the basic scheme (formula) which is (in slight variations) found in most of the analyzed examples.

charm; etymological figures; folk prayer; parallelism; rhetoric; spatial marking

Izlaganje je održano 27. lipnja 2013. u sklopu sekcije Charms Studies.