ФОЛКЛОРНА ВОДА
THE IDEA OF WATER IN FOLKLORE

Summary/Abstract: The goal of this paper is to point at the universal image of water in different genres of oral literature, and to accentuate the huge significance it has as a literary motive. As a primordial element, one of four which were used to make the world (fire, water, earth, and air), water always shows its ambivalent nature of “a good servant, and an evil master”, mild rain and catastrophic flood, both pure and impure cultic instrument. Because it existed before anything else, all kinds of service it ever had had in the human world left some traces in the history of language. And the very linguistic (poetic) material of folklore served as a basic ground for analysis of everything that is presented here.

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