Article

Name: The story of Noah and the Flood in the narratives of the folk Bible and handwritten booklore

Authors: Vera S. Kuznetsova

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The theme of the Great Flood is present in East Slavic legends from various times and places of recording. Folklore narratives do not repeat the biblical account (Genesis 6–8, 9:1), but rather adapt it, supplementing it with episodes and motifs not found in the biblical text. Some of these motifs are presented in folklore indexes, either independently or as part of “The devil in Noah’s ark” plot complex (AaTh 825; SUS 825). The motifs of the Flood legends noted in the oral tradition are know to Russian manuscript literature as part of apocryphal compilations — in the Abridged Paleia of the Russian edition of the 16th century, the Revelation of Methodius of Patara in its original Russian reworking of the 15th century. A comparison of the narrative variants allows us to assume that the apocryphal version of the story of the Flood events, which developed at the intersection of oral and handwritten traditions, combines elements of both these forms; the apocryphal version, however, owes its form as a complex, specific contamination precisely to manuscript literature. Oral tradition is not characterized by such multi-episode structure. In cases where the narrator conveys a version of a known book source, secondary folklorization occurs — a simplification of the bookish narrative by omitting certain episodes and an approximation to oral tradition by introducing “non-bookish” episodes.

Keywords: East Slavic folklore, handwritten books, folk Bible, legends of the Flood

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