On the mythological songs of the “Elder Edda” as a system

Abstract

This article is a systemic linguistic and stylistic analysis of the corpus of mythological songs of the “Elder Edda” in a wide cultural and historical context: folklore, ritual, literary. This approach made it possible to propose an interpretation of the mythological songs of the “Elder Edda” as a system and take a fresh look at their semantics, composition, structure, style and lexical organization. The most relevant results of the study of the linguistic and stylistic features of the Eddic songs of the mythological cycle can be considered the definition of linguo-stylistic features of various genre structures in their composition, the explanation of their coexistence, the identification of their source and the building of a hierarchy of mythological songs of the “Elder Edda” depending on the degree of representation in them of various genres. For the first time, the study of the mechanism of cultural dynamics makes it possible to use genres, plot, structure, images, motives of the Eddic text in the reconstruction of the mythopoetic model of the world. The author singles out the most representative genres (tula, cosmological and epistemological song, vision, memory, conspiracy, competition in wisdom, travel, afterlife poetry) and markers (the time of creation, the substance that served as material for the creation of the universe, subjects and objects of creation), allowing to evaluate their productivity and give a comparative description. On the basis of a detailed linguostylistic analysis of the mythological cycle of the “Elder Edda”, a different degree of closeness between mythological songs is established and their plot-genre classification is proposed. The author’s scientific hypothesis consists in the assumption of the deduction of linguostylistic methods of the Eddic cycle from the mythological situation of primordial creation, the dominance of the sacred sphere, which determines the strategy of the characters’ behavior and the results of their activities, anthropocentric orientation, which is expressed in the description of cosmogenesis in genealogical terms.