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Tumėnas V. The codification and transformations of rue’s image in Lithuanian tradition

V. Tumėnas
The Lithuanian Institute of History
Vilnius, Lithuania
ORCID: 0000-0002-0035-5253
E-mail: vytaut.tumenas@gmail.com

 

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ABSTRACT. The popular Lithuanian folk cultural image of rue as a symbol of bridal virginity, having controversial and paradoxical intercultural parallels and origins (botanical, medical, hydronymic, mythologic, folkloric, and religious), becomes transformed in modernity into a marker of boundaries between one’s own and other cultures. Its ideologized symbolism, narrowed to national identity, displaced the folk cultural meanings linked with broader mythologic concepts. From the ethnosemiotical and iconological perspectives, the study aims to reveal the code importance, complexity, multimodality, and diachronic changes of the rue image symbolism and communication in Lithuanian culture, including customs, names of rivers, settlements, religious-cultural organisations, companies, and human surnames, folkloric, mythopoetic images, professional music, and pop-music motifs, folk art and modern design patterns. It also explains how the image of rue is involved in the processes of ‘heritagisation’ and how it is related to the borders of the semiosphere. Rue’s image was revitalized in modern cultural life in recently shaped contents and communication on the basis of modern ideologic, aesthetic, scientific, and social concepts.

 

KEYWORDS: Lithuanian rue symbolism, rūta, logos, folklore, mythopoethics, iconicity.

 

DOI 10.31250/2618 -8600 -2023-2 (20) -189 -214
UDK 39

 

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