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  EPIC AND THE DEPHTS OF HISTORY :
(texte français: cliquez ici)   The night of epic songs

 

The night of epic songs : how V.K. passes down his repertory of epic pieces to the ethnologist, by singing all night long in the Bulgarian mountain.
INTRODUCTION
FOREIGN LOOK, INNER LOOK
TECHNIQUES, EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGES
TERRITORY AND MEANING OF THE PLACE
KINSHIP AND SOCIAL ORGANISATION
CUSTOM, CEREMONIAL AND RITE
TALE, LEGEND, ART OF NARRATION
EPIC, DEPHTS OF HISTORY
1 Topicality of epic
2 Living Homer
3

The night of epic songs

4 An epic hero : Royal Marko
WHAT IS CALLED VAMPIRE
IMAGINE AND THINK THE NEXT WORLD
The rhapsode V.K. sings the feats of Royal Marko accompanied on the gadulka. Panivceri, Bulgaria, 1994.  
Piece 5 of V. K. 's repertory (...) poses in epic terms the problem, well identified in historical anthropology of kinship, of the hypogamic marriage to which the king's daughter is reduced if her parents do not succeed in arranging for her isogamic marriage through political alliances. From the first verses the cosmological horizon of the subject is traced. The vili and samovili, those familiar figures of Bulgarian popular mythology, inform Marko that a divitsa, a divinely beautifull princess, is waiting for him at Nikjup (Nicopole) and urges him to come, since valliant knights are proposing to her and the Black Arab (the Ottoman Turk) risks of obtaining her. Marko leaves without delay with his adopted brother Semo (...). Semo hears that the princess will announce her choice to his pretenders at the horo, the "fiery round" that will be held on the same day. She will ask Marko and the Black Arab to leave the horo, because she will decide in favour of one of them. The Black Arab appears brandishing his war spear. Marko appears with his spear in the hand and the two vaillant knights prepare to fight, but the princess (...) forbides them to do it. She replaces this destructive ordeal by a constructive one : for Marko, to build a tower that reaches the sky, for the Black Arab, to make the Danube flow in Nikjup. But, contrary to Marko who fights loyally with his own forces, the Black Arab is disloyally assisted by three hundred slaves and wins the fight. The princess gives herself to the winner during the wedding banquet that is celebrated at the court of Nikjup. But the supplanted pretender, Marko, suddenly appears after having accomplished his feat.

He unsheathed his spear
Turned left, turned right
and cut the Arab in two
and cut down the princess of Nikjup.
next
    J.C.: Les Noces de Marko, Le rite et le mythe en pays bulgare, Paris, PUF,1998, pp.187-188
   
 
 
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