E-mail: madonna1990.piliya@mail.ru Tel.: + 7 (940) 916-99-44
1, Universitetskaya str., Sukhum, 384904, Abkhazia Republic Researcher, Center of Nart Studies and Field Folkloristics, Abkhazian State University
This article examines fairy tales involving wonderful assistants. After the hero buries a dead person, stands guard at his father’s grave, or saves a fish, miraculous helpers appear, who, help him marry a princess, save him from death, and so on, sometimes as a token of gratitude (e. g., for setting a fish free). In Abkhazian fairy tales, this plot appears in several versions. With the help of severed heads of snakes, the hero recognizes his helper, and thanks to a scarf and a mark the sovereign himself learns about the hero’s deeds. At the end, wonderful helpers (a dead person, a fish or specifically a salmon) propose that the hero “separate” a girl: they point their sabers in her direction, and when she screams in fright, snakes (or parts of them) come out of her mouth and they kill them. In this way they “cleanse” the girl from the snakes that had killed all of her suitors.
After someone’s death, Abkhazians from ancient times to the present have performed various rituals in order to placate the deceased, so that the soul does not fret and can find eternal peace. Traces of some of these rituals are reflected in the plots of Abkhazian fairy tales about wonderful helpers.
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