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Paper short abstract

This presentation deals with a Seto folk song in which a girl who desires a magical plant condemns her home. Although the ideology of the song is patriarchal and moralizing, the song's genesis refers rather to the connection between fertility and death, in which the plant element has symbolic value.

Paper long abstract

This presentation deals with a mythological Seto folk song in which a maiden who goes to the forest finds a plant called lemmeleht (the love-leaf) and aupapõr (the paper of honor), and wishes to have it for herself. A dialogue follows between the maiden and the plant, in which the plant sets out its conditions. In order to obtain the desired plant, the maiden promises to renounce her brothers and her home. She gets the plant, but when she returns, she finds a lake instead of her home. In this song, the earliest versions of which were written down at the end of the 19th century, the plant has clearly taken on a demonic character, while the maiden can be described as selfish and vain.

In this presentation, I will examine various possibilities for explaining the agency of the plant. The song intertwines a maiden, a plant (nature), sexuality (fertility), and death. One possible explanation is based on the Finnic concept of lembi. According to this, the song could reflect a summer ritual associated with plants, during which the sexual attractiveness of girls was magically rised, ensuring their success in finding a husband. Another explanatory framework could be the East Slavic rusalnaya nedelya cycle, which features girls (dangerous rusalkas) who have died prematurely, who are simultaneously associated with both fertility and death, and whose attributes are related to plants and water.