New Perspectives on the Early Slavs and the Rise of Slavic: Contact and Migration

0552759 - SLÚ 2022 DE eng M - Část monografie knihy
Dynda, Jiří
Religion with no voice: Literary Construction of Slavic paganism.
New Perspectives on the Early Slavs and the Rise of Slavic: Contact and Migration. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020 - (Klír, T.; Boček, V.; Jansens, N.), s. 127-150. Empirie und Theorie der Sprachwissenschaft, Band 6. ISBN 978-3-8253-4707-9
Klíčová slova: Slavic paganism * religion * written sources * deities * theonyms
Obor OECD: Religious studies

The paper focuses on the most peculiar aspect of the written sources on Slavic pre-Christian religion: the lack of indigenous reports on the topic and its consequences. Since the Slavic paganism had been described only by Christian and mostly non-Slavic clerics, the depiction of its gods, rituals, divination systems and other features is fundamentally blurred behind the ideological filters of so called interpretatio Christiana. The paper therefore presents some of the issues connected with this problem. By analyzing the literary terms for Slavic “religion” itself and by the case study of comparison of possible pan-Slavic theonyms in these sources it shows the general difficulties of studying the Slavic paganism and its medieval literary construction. In the background of these efforts there is also an attempt to set a solid ground for historical reconstruction of the system of pre-Christian Slavic religion that in the sources has no voice of its own and it is known only by means of the Latin and, later, the Old Church Slavonic literary traditions, both emerging from a cultural contact situation, either contact of different cultures (Frankish and Saxon Christians vs. Slavs), or of different layers of the same society (Russian Christian clergy vs. popular religious syncretism and survivals)
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0328158