Gottscheer Folk Myths: Aspects of Space

Abstract

The myths of the Gottscheer Germans, included in Gottscheer Volkstum in Sitte, Brauch, Märchen, Sagen, Legenden und anderen volkstümlichen Überlieferungen, a work of central importance for the collection and transmission of Gottscheer folk poetry published in 1932 by Wilhelm Tschinkel, a Gottscheer himself, show extraordinary primitiveness of the literary material and topics, which reflects the nature of the Gottschee area as a linguistic and cultural enclave. In terms of aesthetic spatialization, magical actions, objects and plants play a central role in Gottscheer myths, and are associated with the natural environment typical of the Karst region. The spatial practice of referring to the past engenders mood creating recurrent actions, ranging from challenging the supernatural to conquering it. They result in shifting borders between the frightening and the familiar on ancestral soil and reveal the unfathomable nature of human life. From the perspective of the internal spatial dialectic, the Gottscheer appear as individuals characterized by pre-modern as well as modern practices of behaviour and action, located within a dynamic communicative space and marked by multiple transgression of geographically, socially, culturally and gender encoded spaces. While the myths, represented as a component of German folk poetry, place the Gottscheer within both a universal and national representational space, the moral spatial transgressions related to intruders such as the French and Turks, but also Slovenes, unambiguously point to cracks triggered by a foreign Otherness.