The Power of Words: Studies on Charms and Charming in Europe

Chapter III Charm Indexes:Problems and Perspectives

Chapter III Charm Indexes: Problems and Perspectives Tatiana Agapkina and Andrei Toporkov Introductory Remarks1 In the past twenty years interest in the study and publication of verbal magic texts has increased considerably. Quite a number of collections of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian , Russian, Serbian and Ukrainian charms have been published. But the more frequently new texts in various countries are published, the more difficult it is to see the overall picture. The problem consists not only in the language barriers that prevent scholars from analysing charms from other traditions, but also in the differing ways of understanding problems and methods of research. This last point is largely determined by professional preferences and the divergent scholarly traditions developed in different countries during the past one and a half centuries. For this reason, the situation in the field of charm research can be considered, without exaggeration, to be at a crisis point. The resolution of this situation, as it seems to us, has been outlined in the research and organisational work of the English folklore specialist Jonathan Roper. He proposed an international index of charms (Roper 2004b, 139–41), and created a database of English 1 This article was written with the support of the Basic Research Program “Language and Culture in the Context of Cultural Dynamics” (2012– 2014) (Division of historical and philological sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences). 72 THE POWER OF WORDS charms and on this basis wrote a book (Roper 2005). With support of the Folklore Society and the Warburg Institute, Jonathan Roper also organised several international conferences dedicated to charms in different countries of Europe.2 Our proposals can be regarded as an attempt to further develop Roper’s ideas. At the same time we have to emphasise that we are relying mainly on our own experience of dealing with charms and the problems of their systematisation: that is, the description of the subject matter of East Slavic charms, research into Russian manuscript charms of the fifteenth to the nineteenth century (see Agapkina and Toporkov 1990; Agapkina 2002; Agapkina 2005; Agapkina 2006; Agapkina 2010; Agapkina forthcoming; Toporkov 2010), fieldwork over a long period into the traditions of word magic in the Russian north, in Belarus and in Ukraine. The first time that the authors encountered living charm traditions was during expeditions to Polesia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We published an edition of the material (Agapkina , Levkievskaia and Toporkov 2003). Together with the Nizhnii Novgorod charms (Korovashko 1997) and the Russian charms of Karelia (Kurets 2000) it is one of the few annotated editions of East Slavic charms. In general approach our project considers also the experience of composition of other folklore indexes that dealt primarily with folktale and non-folktale prose. In this connection we would cite the newest edition of Antti Aarne’s and Stith Thompson’s index of folktale motifs, revised by Hans-Jörg Uther (Uther 2004: see the review by Kozmin [2006]), H. Jason’s book, dedicated to the theories and practice of composition of folklore indexes (Jason 2000: see the report by Rafaeva [2006]), and also the collection of papers dedicated to problems of composition of folklore indexes published recently in Russia (Rafaeva, Problemy ukazatelei, 2006b). At the same time we should note that the problems of the composition of a charm motif index in many regards lie in quite another plane from that of folktale and non-folktale prose. As is known, charms are categorised (in Russian) as belonging to the so-called minor folk2 The materials of the first conference (2002) were published in Roper 2004a. The second book is Roper 2009. 73 Charm Indexes lore genres, in relation to which the terminological and taxonomic devices available to modern folklore scholarship are applicable only to a limited extent. This is connected, first of all, with such apparently “technical” points as the length of charm texts, which generally is far shorter than, for example, that of folktales and commemorative or mythological narratives, and secondly, with the evident heterogeneous character of the charm corpora, which has assimilated a whole series of cultural traditions (oral and written) and genre forms, and which as a result combines what are, strictly speaking, very different texts from a genre point of view: very simple narratives, charm formulas and other kinds of magical texts. In many cases the explication of the underlying motif of these texts involves certain difficulties. The...