The Sea and the Sea-Flood Motif in Romanian Folklore

Adrian Poruciuc (Romania)

Abstract

Romanians, unlike the Greeks, cannot be said to be a nation of navigators. The traditional culture still functional in today’s Romanian villages reflects a system of subsistence based mainly on tillage and stock breeding. Nevertheless, a nameless sea―or the Black Sea, in particular―plays a central role in some of the most archaic Romanian carols and dirges coming from pre-Christian times. In a paradoxical way, their sea symbolism is most potent where they have been recorded farthest from the sea. Today’s land-bound Romanians have inherited, from a very deep substratum of traditional culture, an image of a catastrophe produced by the rush of a huge mass of roaring sea water, whose destructive power (according to mythic expression) reaches as far as the tops of wooded mountains.

Such a peculiar image, long perpetuated by oral transmission, cannot merely be a mythical-imaginary projection. The preservation of a distinct sea-flood motif in orally transmitted carols, like those in Romania, may well have been caused by a traumatic experience of certain ancestors of today’s Romanians. Those miraculously surviving carols recall very archaic social and mythologic-ritual features of times during which the Flood, as a natural catastrophe, had not yet come to be regarded as punishment for a sinful mankind, but rather as part of the cosmic order.

As a linguist who studies both archaeology and folklore, I have come to think that certain Romanian carols, as obscure as they may look now, contain prehistoric matter that is worth analyzing by specialists concerned with the roots of Southeast Europe, and of Europe in general. The most important parts of this article are not my comments, but the illustrative texts, which speak for themselves, even in translation.