Get Hold Of The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, And The Origins Of European Dance Narrated By Elizabeth Wayland Barber Available As Readable Copy

need this book. Just saw it last night at Pegasus, Think I'm going to go back with my store credit and get it, Another good and comprehensive analysis of a particular part of history in this case folk dancing, While the subject focusses mostly on thr Russian and slavic traditions, she also discusses the Celts and other european cultures and traces the history back through Romany, Indian, Roman and Greek influences, all the way back to paleolithic times.
Besides dancing, there is discussion and theories based on linguistics, archeological finds, clothing, fairy tales and numerous other interesting tidbits, I would recommend this book to any student of dance, slavic cultures or with an interest in her other publications, What I will remember from this book: hobby horses and princess frogs, mother and maiden embroidery, and birdwomen with long sleeves, The overall connection between the earth, human fertility, and dance is interesting and beautiful, as well, but the details and particularities of different traditions are what I enjoyed most of all.


I came to this book as a folk dancer, and I enjoyed the connections to dances that are still being danced today, I had hoped the final chapters might be more constructive, in terms of pointing a way forward within the world of folk dance since the author has created some folk dance performances herself, but the book is more of an exercise in history.
fascinating compilation of traditions and legends, especially from Russia and all of eastern Europe, a lot to wade through, even more to digest, found myself wondering if the "string skirts" are somehow related to the corn dollies, etc, . . From southern Greece to northern Russia, people have long believed in female spirits, bringers of fertility, who spend their nights and days dancing in the fields and forests, So appealing were these spiritmaidens that they also took up residence in nineteenthcentury Romantic literature,

Archaeologist and linguist by profession, folk dancer by avocation, Elizabeth Wayland Barber has sleuthed through ethnographic lore and archaeological reports of east and southeast Europe, translating enchanting folktales about these “dancing goddesses” as well as eyewitness accounts of traditional rituals texts that offer new perspectives on dance in agrarian society.
She then traces these goddesses and their dances back through the Romans and Greeks to the first farmers of Europe, Along the way, she locates the origins of many customs, including coloring Easter eggs and throwing rice at the bride, The result is a detective story like no other and a joyful reminder of the human need to dance, If you read this book, you will be enlightened about history, anthropology, folkways, language, the lives of women, and dance, Barber takes us from currentday Balkan people back through medieval times to the Romans and Greeks back to Bronze and Neolithic times, This is a readable, though scholarly treatment, It is extensively researched, and the detail and various versions of the practices and folktales can be either tedious or engrossing, depending on one's interest level, Will read anything she writes, she is brilliant, Having studied Middle Eastern culture and history extensively, I didn't think that Ms, Barber's tome would have many surprises for me, I was wrong! From the earliest civilizations, we learn that dance was used to promote unity among farming communities, that dancing spirit maidens living in deep woods were said to promote prosperity and abundant crops in nearby villages, and that indeed dance was a means of communication long before language evolved.

Rater than separating cultures and ideas, Ms, Barber seeks to find connecting threads between communities and civilizations, even those living in different times and across continents, She is successful, using evidence from potsherds, paintings, writings

and peoples whose oral traditions have preserved a long and enduring practice of dancing rituals,
As a dancer, this book had particular interest to me, Throughout my studies in dance, I never understood that the particular pattern on a costume held deep cultural significance, or that a movement in a dance I performed had been passed down for generations to have a physical effect in the outer world.
Therefore, this material utterly fascinated me, My understanding of why I and other peoples have and have always had an insatiable need to dance has been greatly furthered due to Ms, Barber's research and work. I am indebted to her and her willingness to cross cultural borders, to journey to the beginning of civilization where dance first began, Absolutely phenomenal. One of those books that puts together all the pieces you've been puzzling over for years and one you wish more people had read, Add to the mental list of 'books that should be required in school/college' because seriously so much good stuff in here, Have you ever wanted a commentary on Russian fairy tales rather like Maria Tatar's on Grimm I did, but I'd concluded there was no such thing in English, and had given up on it, until I stumbled serendipitously into Part Two of this book.


I was led to Dancing Goddesses by quotes about prehistoric string skirts from here and from an earlier book of the author's which had a sense of joy and sexiness and revelling in one's subject quite the antithesis of the tone of much recent historical discussion to be found online among younger scholars and graduates from the Anglosphere where one is expected to be critical of this sort of attitude in a politically rigid style.
Barber is now, which will have something to do with the different approach, Reading bits of it on impulse as I often do with nonfiction books that these days rarely make it on to my GR shelves I soon noticed connections with many topics I love.
It's difficult to get scholarly books on Eastern European folklore and customs in English, and there's material here that I can relate to the Rig Veda and After a while I decided to read the whole thing, in the same informal way I read articles online rather than "I Am Reading A Book" mode.


It's one of those books which, like The Golden Bough as at least one other reviewer has mentioned, and the sort of prehistory written by secondwave feminists, makes a plethora of connections and tangents.
It's kindest to understand the whole as an interpretation rather than a definitive work, And there is a good reason for this approach: "Analogy, in fact, forms the backbone of most mythical and magical thinking, " Therefore to understand myth and magic, Barber frequently uses analogy, This orgy of apophenia produces some fascinating links which truly elucidate their subjects especially some of the Russian fairytales, But also some things which seem too much of a stretch, or merely arbitrary or, occasionally, there are bits missing fertility of game and forage would have been pretty important not only to early farmers but also to those who directly preceded them or just a bit wrong, as can happen when academics are out of their area and overreliant on one or two outdated or partial texts Barber's suggestion that benandantilike groups inspired the earlymodern witchhunts.
I've no doubt that someone from southeast Europe or Russia where may of Barber's examples are drawn from and who knows the folklore and archaeology, would have further nitpicking to do.


However, fairytale and folklore interpretation is one of those domains like personal and literary essays, where there is licence to make just such a a swirl of associations and call it scholarship.
And indeed, Barber's interpretations of the Russian Frog Princess, of the related Animal Bride tales considered sitelinkone of the oldest European folktale types and of Koschkei the Deathless seemed to me the strongest and most definitive arguments here.
I feel I can read Afanasyev 'properly' now!

Unfortunately, perhaps especially for UK readers, the book is blighted by a ridiculous word choice, Barber may also be showing her age in forgetting how ruinous to concentration and credibility a doubleentendre can be to young people,

The dancing spirit maidens have several names, In English one might call such a creature fairy or nixie or sometimes mermaid, Willy, an archaic word lurking in expressions such as “Dark corners give me the willies!” and possibly in willothewisp, is probably originally the same as the widely used Slavic vila.
The various Slavic groups call her vila, wilła, samovila, samodiva, rusalka, rusavka, mavka, and other names besides, Among the Greeks of today, she is a neráïda

Since all these names carry much cultural baggage in each little region of Europe, however, I will use the relatively uncluttered because forgotten word willy as a general designation, although in translating local descriptions I will sometimes use the local term.


So not only is that "creative" etymology "will othe wisp" etc appears to originate from an unconnected English folktale and "willies" in the sense of "heebiejeebies" is only known from the lateth century but throughout this book the commonest childish/ nonsweary slang word for penis is being used as the generic term for young female spirits.
Yes, the world of traditional folk culture loves its filthy little innuendos, but the correspondences are more appropriately shaped they are analogous to the thing itself, not to what the culture desires it is paired with as this example from later in the book shows:
This same imagery, patently sexual, occurs sometimes on traditional wedding chests containing the linens and woolens the bride has made up ahead for her married life.
For example, a symbol of the female vulva on the front edge of the lid would fit down over an arrow painted on the chest, Storeroom door locks also often took a vulvalike lozenge shape inserting the key gave access to the goods, Little fell to the imagination, Arrows, too, were placed in each corner of the room in which the nuptial bed had been laidlaid, in fact, on sheaves of grain, to augment the fertility of the marriage act.


She should have just called the spirits veelas assuming Rowling hasn't copyrighted the word or nymphs or one of the other wellknown terms,

So, the central thesis:
Willies, in Slavic lore especially, are the spirits of girls who died “before their time” and returned to live as spirit beings in our world, near where they had once lived and died.


Dying “before their time” meant specifically that, although these girls were daughters of the ancestral line, they had not yet become mothers, Hence they had no descendants, had not become ancestors of anyone, and thus had no stake in the problems of those who still lived, So people could not count on these spirits, unlike those of dead mothers, fathers, and grandparents, to help their living offspring in a crisis, They represented loose ends on the family tree, andworse yetif they had died disappointed or abused, they surely carried a grudge and might behave spitefully,

But the farm folk also saw these dead maidens as possessing a precious commodity that was very much needed and in this worldview thought to be transferable: the ability to reproduce that all females have by nature but that these particular girls had not “used up” yet.
Perhaps, by understanding their ways, one could persuade them to bestow that unused fertility on ones family, flocks, and fields

Thatis Zelenin, and it's doing a heck of a lot of work.
Too much work, in the eyes of someone who sees Ronald Hutton's careful scholarship as the gold standard for this sort of thing,

Though this understanding of them was apparently widespread enough that Gogol used it too:
At the hour when dark fades, . . from the waves of the Dnepr the maidens who destroyed their own lives i, e. , committed suicide come forth in flocks hair cascades from their green heads onto their shoulders, and water, plashing noisily, runs from their long hair to the ground, while the girls shine through the water as though a glass shirt their mouths smile wonderfully, their cheeks blaze, their eyes bewitch the soul.
She would burn with love, she would kiss passionately, Flee, Christian man! Her lips are poison, her couch cold water she will tickle you mercilessly and drag you off into the river,

Which sounds like the crazy/hot girl archetype and associated diagnoses at least as much as Christian demonisation of older pagan lore, There's a story from Simbirsk that Zelenin again! of Marina who actually got her man after death, having become a rusalka, quite the worst thing for girls inclined that way to hear.
I wondered if one of them, or her friend or sister left behind, originally invented it, But how did it work in local lore when one of these girls had died recently and a lot of the people had found her annoying because she created so much drama In Heathers, after the first Heather was thought to have killed herself, she acquired 'depth of character as far as the interesting gothy kids were concerned.
But what about if it was the intense obsessive gothequivalent girl, how did the village Heathers respond to the idea of her become a veela/rusalka they were now obliged to propitiate This should be a historical lowfantasy story, though not sure it would get published these days.
Barber includes among these beings, though, not just girls who killed themselves, but all girls and young women who died from puberty but before first childbirth,

What isn't considered here and which I would expect to find in a historian's scholarly account of folklore is to consider whether, and when and where, lore of female nature/water spirits may have become conflated with memories and legends of dead young girls.
Instead she just assumes the dead girls were the origins of the tales of supernatural beings as a form of collateral ancestorworship, without examining if they perhaps became merged over time and/or were influenced to do so by lore from adjacent regions.
At least some of the sources she quotes are rigorous over a century ago, Bulgarian ethnographer Marinov conducted interviews with people who experienced trance states or cures during folk rituals, and the insights from these are amazing.
There's some wonderful evidence quoted in the book about customs when they were still active, about how participants felt and thought, not just eyewitness accounts but Barber gives more credence given to old interpretations than one might expect these days.


Now, on to those Russian fairytales, 'The Frog Princess' is a series of bridetests, Which, in the way of a really good interpretation, seems obvious now I've heard, though the intricate relationship of this to other folk customs and archaeology is exhilarating, The hero may be a prince, but Vasilisa the frog has to have all the capabilities of a good peasant wife and which, noticeable having read the Odyssey this year, most of which were still expected of an aristocratic woman in the Homeric age.
Some are obvious: she has to make cloth and clothing well even better if it is beautiful and likewise bake great bread, Her physical strength for farm and household work is tested by strenuous dances, Examples are given of Balkan dances which are a particular test of strength and agility for the woman, And she was expected to be fertile and produce the next generation of workers: this is where it's significant she's a frog it means the prince made her pregnant the metaphor for which was shooting the arrow at the beginning.
Frogs were a fertility symbol both because of their shape and because they produced eggs, like birds another fertility symbol in the Christian era offerings of model frogs were made to Mary in some regions and Barber shows a prehistoric figurine of a frogwoman from Anatolia and froglike shapes in Slavic art suggesting women squatting to give birth.
Peasants often would not get married before the woman was pregnant, Barber says, as reproduction, along with work, was the most important requirement of the marriage, This generalisation which I've seen plenty of times about British history is broken down somewhat, albeit in a slightly confusing manner, saying that girls in the northern part of the region she discusses especially central and northern Great Russia were not necessarily expected to be virgins at marriage, but had less say over who they married, whereas the further south you went, into Bulgaria and Greece, there was a stricter requirement of virginity, but more say in the choice of husband.
Even a passing awareness of some Balkan cultures, and of Ancient Greece, shows this needs a more granular time/place breakdown,

There's still more to it than that, In a sideline that requires less explanation, variants on the story also include another of the most ancient tale types, AarneThompson type, the Grateful Animals, who help out the groom in the later part of his quest.
But another of the great interpretations here works for any birdbride tale type, Barber noticed these coalesced in regions bordering the Arctic the region where many migratory birds spend the summer and raise their young, The supernatural bride who dons her feathers and flies away again must have been inspired by these, Yet one of the closesttooriginal forms of this tale type is found in Bulgaria brought, she says, by Ugricspeaking Bulgars who had moved gradually southwards during the Migration Period.
And then there is the mysterious sleeve dance or wing dance, a sacred dance with very long sleeves covering one's hands a motif Barber observes in this fairytale and in artwork going back from medieval Kievan bracelets toBC northern Greece.
In recent decades there's been a lot of deliberate covering of hands with sleeves that seems to be about trying to look cute and little in my twenties there were girls who often did this in front of men in the winter now it'll become one of those unwitting echoes, like when a poncho accidentally resembles a priest's chasuble.


And Koschkei the deathless is a shaman in the Siberan tradition! It makes so much sense now and he may have been made into more of a villain in the Christian era though another clan's shaman could be a danger anyway.
Barber has a small website with further notes to the book, and one of the stronger notes on it is sitelinkfurther supporting evidence for this theory,

But even after these revelatory insights, Barber doesn't have a key to Baba Yaga in the same way: she appears as mysterious and large a force as she always did.


There are small ones: the South Great Russians, Barber says, didn't have bathhouses, unlike their northern counterparts, but used their ovens as a sort of halfbody sauna frustratingly unreferenced she hypothesises from this that tales of Baba Yaga shoving people in the oven came from outsiders seeing this.
This is the sort of point on which the book could really benefit from reviews from the regions she discusses,

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Read amp reviewed November,