From Traditional Bird to “Nestling ‒ the Work Hero”: Birds in the Songs from the Folklore Collection of the Institute of Ethnography SASA

Folkloristics 8/1-2 (2023):
Author: Nina Aksić
Text:
https://doi.org/10.18485/folk.2023.8.1_2.3

The Folklore Collection of the Institute of Ethnography SASA is a valuable and rich archival artefact, which, after a gap of seventy years from the most extensive collection of material, serves as a kind of testimony to the given time. By choosing the topic of birds, as only one small segment of folk tradition, an attempt will be made at presenting not only the importance of these animals within the framework of the traditional culture among the Balkan Slavs but also showing that songs from the Folklore Collection of the Institute of Ethnography SASA represent important and relevant material for various types of research. In this paper, the bird and the nestling will be presented as general concepts, the forms in which they appear in given songs, alongside their symbolism, significance, context in which they appear, etc. will be enumerated and partially analyzed. Finally, with the announcement of another paper in which individual bird species will be presented in a similar way, a concise account of the symbolic complexity and diversity of contexts in which the bird or nestling concept appears has been given. Moreover, the aim of the paper is to show that the quality of these songs lies in the fact that they represent a document of a time and contain both the motifs stemming from the older layers of folk poetry, as well as those that appear in thematically new layers of people’s liberation songs.

Keywords: : folk songs, songs of National Liberation Struggle in Yugoslavia (1941‒1945), bird, nestling, the Folklore Collection of the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Belgrade), Digital Database of the Folklore Collection of IE SASA.