The Joiks in the Context of the Northern Karelian Wedding Rituals: The Semantics and Functioning Peculiarities

Abstract

The article deals with the joiks as a genre of North Karelian folklore, which in traditional culture marks the transitional, crisis situations in the life- and calendar cycles and is an element of the wedding ritual’s musical code. In terms of the poetic text content, the joiks bear a typological similarity to the reprobating (korilnye) songs from the folk music of Slavic peoples. The lack of research on the semantics and functions of the joiks in the context of wedding rituals, as well as on the correspondence between the joik poetic texts and ritual tunes makes this study relevant. The task for this article is to identify the ritual and non-ritual functions of the joik musical and poetic texts based on ethnographic data and the study of the etymology and the semantic field of the term’s meanings. Another aspect examined in the article is that of the features of functioning of the joiks when they are performed with wedding song tunes. The material for the study was provided by a set of published and archival texts and audio records made by folklorists and musicologists predominantly in the mid-20th century.

Keywords: Karelian joiks, North Karelian wedding rituals, Karelian laments, runic type wedding songs, North Karelian wedding songs