Images, symboles et archétypes dans la légende balkanique du Frère revenant
Images, symbols and archetypes in the Balkan legend of the Ghost Brother

Summary/Abstract: This essay tackles the core mythemes constitutive of the legend of the Ghost Brother. A funeral chant in Greece, Romania, and Albania (including the Arbëresh communities in Italy), a marriage hymn in Serbia and Bulgaria, this Balkan legend has survived to this very day, through troubling transformation or irradiation, by means of fossilized traces which this exegesis explores in depth. Dumitru Caracostea demonstrated how the mythic core goes back to an incest nightmare, which would have undergone a mutation during its diffusion, passing from the Ghost Brother to the Phantom Betrothed. After having analyzed the archetypal scenario, we examine the mytheme of the Living Dead (associated in certain authors with the custom of posthumous marriage), which always signals a return of the archaic, and the mytheme of the Nocturnal Ride which centres on Eros. The works taken into consideration are: Muzgu i perëndive të stepës, Kush e solli Doruntinën and Hija by Ismaïl Kadaré; Vera pa khtim by Besnik Mustafaj; Înviere by Lucian Blaga; Dina by Felicia Mihali.

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