Die christlichen Grundgebete im Altlitauischen I. Das Ave Maria
The Basic Christian Prayers in Old Lithuanian. I. Hail Mary

Summary/Abstract: This article is the first part of a series of publications covering the basic prayers of the Christian denominations. The series will cover the Hail Mary (Ave Maria), the Apostles’ Creed (Credo or Symbolum Apostolicum), and the Lord’s Prayer (Paternoster). The aim of the articles is to collect all Lithuanian variants of these prayers translated before 1700, to compare their lexical and syntactic structure, and to show their dependences and connections. The first part of the series introduces the concepts and methodology; furthermore, it analyses the shortest and most rarely attested prayer Hail Mary. The authors avoid the traditional term poteriai ‘prayers’ because of its multiple meanings: the Lithuanian term poteriai may refer to all three prayers at once, or just to the Lord’s prayer, or even more – the Rosary and smaller prayers. Rather, ‘basic prayers’ are understood as the prayers that each Christian should learn by heart according to his denomination, usually in their own language. The Hail Mary was included in Luther’s earliest prayer books but was later abandoned by the Lutherans; it is no longer found in the earliest Lithuanian translations (i.e., those by Martynas Mažvydas and Baltramiejus Vilentas). Therefore, this comparison includes the corresponding verses in the Protestant translations of the Bible (Lk 1,28; 42). The comparison of the structure of the ‘Hail Mary’ shows a connection between Jurgis Kasakauskis’s Rožančius (Rosary) and the hand-written collection of prayers in the Samogitian dialect (although weaker than in the other prayers, which will be analysed in the following articles). It reveals that the formation of the canonical text came to an end with the publication of Pranciškus Šrubauskis’s prayer book. Since then, the textual structure hardly changed.

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