Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The “Walled-Up Wife” ballad, found across Eastern Europe, tells of a structure that will not stand until a woman is immured in its foundations. This paper highlights Ukrainian variants, showing how the ballad form reveals the cosmological rationale of foundation sacrifice.

Paper long abstract

The ballad of the “Walled-Up Wife,” attested in more than 700 versions across Eastern Europe (with notable parallels in India), situates narrative at the intersection of human initiative and nonhuman forces. In its core plot, a group of men attempts to construct a vital structure – a fortress, a bridge, a monastery, or city walls – yet whatever is built during the day collapses by the next morning. Only when a young woman, most often the wife of one of the builders, is immured within the foundations does the structure endure. Beliefs in the necessity of human sacrifice at construction sites, corroborated by archaeological discoveries and by their long afterlife in ritual, superstition, and children’s folklore, are defined in anthropological and folklore studies as foundation sacrifice. This paper revisits key interpretations of the foundation sacrifice and argues that the ballad tradition provides a distinct perspective on its cosmological rationale. Alongside representative international variants of the “Walled-Up Wife,” the analysis foregrounds Ukrainian material, particularly the ballad "Zamurovana myla" (“The Immured Beloved”), in which immurement is not tied to construction. The paper suggests that the ballad form refracts the foundation sacrifice as an expression of the conflict between human initiative and the natural order, a conflict that the genre reveals as irreconcilable.