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Berezkin Yu. The Magic Wife: Variants of the Motif in the Context of Ancient History

Yu. Berezkin
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera)
of the Russian Academy of Sciences
St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
ORCID: 0000-0001-6001-7339
E-mail: berezkin1@gmail.com 

 

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ABSTRACT. The motif of magic wife (a man deliberately marries a woman from the nonhuman world) is one of the most common in folklore. However, its occurrence is low in subSaharan Africa and especially in Australia. Like other motifs that do not reflect worldviews but are used in adventure narratives, the “magic wife” apparently appeared not in the African homeland but already in Eurasia. The “dog-wife” and the “star-wife” motifs must have been known before the settlement of the New World began, as evidenced by the parallels between the Indo-Pacific margin of Asia and the Americas. The spread of the “dog-wife” motif coincides with the spread of a “restored forest” variant (people cut trees, but in the morning the forest grows back again) typical for Indochina and Yunnan — Mesoamerica. The “dog-wife” is also common across the Circum-Pacific region, where the motifs that explain the appearance of cultivated plants are widespread and mostly identical. In Africa, the etiology of plants is practically absent. The “swan-wife” motif (also goose, duck, and crane) was known in Eurasia before 7000 BP but not before 12–10,000 BP. It is registered across the American Arctic and the northern part of the Northwest Coast but absent across the rest of the territory of the New World. The “fox-wife”, being typical of the Inuit, Yupiks, and Aleuts, finds parallels in China, Japan, and Sakhalin. Its spread across the Arctic can be related to the recent peopling of the region by Tule Eskimo. The “dove-wife” was hardly known before 2000 BP. There is no direct evidence linking the magic wife motif to totemic representations.

 

KEYWORDS: comparative folklore studies, peopling of the New World, big data in humanities, Circum-Pacific mythology, Trans-Eurasian parallels in mythology

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8600-2024-2(24)-6-33
UDC 398

 

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