The role water plays as a border between the worlds in folkore is well known in Slavic folkloristics. We will present some aspects of this role in Serbian oral narratives, paying special attention to different genre rules, fairy tales and belief legends at first place (specially ATU 934).
Paper long abstract
The role water plays as a border between the worlds in folkore is well known in Slavic folkloristics. We will address some aspects of it in Serbian narrative folklore.The interplay between various sets of genre rules and common ethnographic background can provide a new perspective on a water as border. Genres analyzed are fairy-tales and belief legends (singling out ATU 934). Water comes as a border both in horizontal and vertical "projections" and in some cases water is not just a semantic point (border) but plays much more active role in the plot.