Laulu ja proosa seosed metsaneenetsi narratiivides
The relations of song and prose in forest Nenets songs

Summary/Abstract: The article treats the song and narrative genres of the forest Nenets with an emphasis on what are or have been the connections between them, how a song is presented in the middle of a narrative or forms the core of one. Analysis is based on material collected by the authors. Since the forest Nenets claim that some of their fairy tales once used to be sung in full, historical material is used for comparison. Since there is very little older material collected from the forest Nenets, the tundra Nenets tradition was used for parallel comparison of contemporary forest Nenets material. It appears that songs that are claimed to be only fragments of longer forgotten texts, correspond in context to the tundra Nenets epic songs and apparently belong to the oldest layer of forest Nenets folklore. The structure of narrative songs reveals the relations between song and prose in them. From the narrational aspect, song depicts either a nodal point in the storyline, a whole episode, or allows for differentiating direct and indirect speech. Linguistically, there are some differences in the language of the song parts as compared to the prose parts of the narrative, where the language is closer to that of the tundra Nenets. A unique form of song is the so-called recitative: on the one hand, recited are only fragments in direct speech, on the other hand, these are used mainly to vocalised the characters from outside the ordinary world. The article includes information about the informants and the transcription of forest Nenets language used in the article.

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