TREE SYMBOLISM IN SLAVIC FOLK CULTURE: APPLE TREE

Abstract

The essay focuses on the mythopoetic image of the apple tree and its ritual use in traditional culture and folklore of the Slavic nations. The work employs folklore material alongside ethnographic and linguistic data that accentuates and develops the folklore symbolism of the apple tree. I argue that this image is comprised of a number of relatively autonomous fragments. The apple tree and its apples are a family metaphor of a kind symbolizing a mother and a child. In wedding folklore, the apple tree stands for a bride as the wedding ritual testifies; apple tree branches are widely used in the ritual itself (as a ritual tree or as material used in the making of a wedding banner, wedding wreaths, decorations for a wedding loaf [karavai], etc.). Another manifestation of the apple tree in folklore is the tree of knowledge; it relates the image to a large number of legendary etiological plots such as: Eve’s temptation by the Serpent, fall of Eve and Adam, the origin of Adam’s Apple (adam), prohibition to eat apples before the church holiday of Transfiguration and some others. At the same time, their autonomy regardless, the fragments of the mythopoetic image of the apple tree form part of the solid folklore universe and counteract with each other within this framework.

Keywords

• apple tree
• symbolism
• ethnobotany
• Slavs