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The Ethnology Notebooks. 2024. № 4 (178), 810—822

UDK [398.88:27-534.3-853](=161.2)”18/20″:801.81

DOI https://doi.org/10.15407/nz2024.04.810

UKRAINIAN FOLKLORE PRAYS: TERM, CONTENT OF THE CONCEPT, GENRE ECLECTICISM

HUNCHYK Ihor

  • ORCID ID: https//orcid.org/0009-0008-6448-5461
  • Ph.D. of Sciences in Philology, Associate Professor, 
  • Ivan Franko National University of Lviv,
  • the Department of Ukrainian Folklore Studies named after Academician Filaret Kolessa,
  • 1, Universytetska street, 79000, Lviv, Ukraine,
  • Contacts: e-mail: hunchyki@gmail.com

Abstract. The article is the first attempt to outline the scope of the use and semantic content of the term «folk prayer» and related concepts. This is the relevance of the study. To this end, the author analyzed the most important works of researchers on this topic and relevant folklore and ethnographic material from different regions of Ukraine in the nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries, which gave grounds to assert that the concept of «folk prayer» was used not only in the scientific field but also in the folk terminological tradition to denote folklore texts correlated with incantations, spells, sayings, curses, and other typologically related formations.

The purpose of the proposed article is to consider folk prayer in contemporary scientific discourse as a separate original ethno-cultural phenomenon that belongs to the occasional ritual or magical-sacred folklore and has a Christianized religious basis. The term «folk prayer» was first used in the early twentieth century by V. Miloradovych in one of his ethnographic works on the life of the peasants of Lubny. At the end of the nineteenth century, Ivan Franko published a genre-specific folklore text in the Ethnographic Collection of the National Science School, calling it «a prayer for the mornings of God». The author points to the pan-Slavic context of the spread of folk prayer as an ancient ethno-cultural phenomenon, the existence of which is characteristic of Polish and Czech oral national traditions, which have not yet been sufficiently studied.

To realize this goal, the article uses general scientific and linguistic research methods: historiographic, comparative, descriptive, and typological.

Keywords: folk prayer, folklore, conceptual field, oral tradition, term, Slavs.

Received 25.07.2024

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