There are many oddities in the fairy tale "Frost". The stepmother tells her husband to send his stepdaughter to the next world (where, by the way, is patriarchy?). But excuse me, the rural community will surely learn about this. And he won't be happy: besides the fact that this is a crime, it is minus one bride and minus one pair of working hands. But for some reason the community does not react in any way.
Further, the stepdaughter does not want to fight for her life at all. She resignedly puts it on the altar of her stepmother's madness and father's spinelessness. The girl could ask people for help, but she doesn't.
I am modestly silent about the fact that the stepmother will get rid of the stepdaughter so soon - the girl will get married. Why commit a crime? It is very difficult to imagine that it will go unnoticed and unpunished.
Vladimir Propp explains all the oddities by the fact that the fairy tale actually describes the initiation rite. And here everything seems to fall into place: the girl (obviously, in ancient times, still a young man) does not resist, because she (he) goes to trials, and not to death. And the "evil stepmother", to whom the father submissively obeys, appeared later.
The people who retell the fairy tales no longer understood the essence of the ancient rituals and changed the plot: in ancient times, it was the parents who sent the children to the forest (to obtain a "certificate of maturity"), but then they were replaced by an "evil stepmother" in order to somehow explain cruelty, and forest rituals - to the famous dialogue of the stepdaughter with Morozko.
Thus, the outer canvas remained, but the inner content was distorted.
This is a really beautiful and logical theory.
But I still have my own vision of this tale. It seems to me that it could reflect the idea of the afterlife. It is possible that this is some kind of "instruction" on how to behave properly after death - to talk culturally with otherworldly forces, for example, in order to bargain for better conditions in a new place.
Promotional video:
The scenery for this tale is too specific:
1. Sleigh
It was on a sleigh in ancient times that they set off on their last journey - not only in winter, but also in the warm season. In Vladimir Monomakh's Instruction, there is an expression “sitting in a sleigh”, which is analogous to the modern “to be with one foot in the grave”.
2. Wood
Among other things, tree-dart thorns were placed in Slavic burials. Perhaps there were ideas that you need to climb a tree to get to the next world. The forest is a metaphor for the afterlife kingdom (see Propp), it is not for nothing that they call it "dense", that is, "Sleeping". The other world opens up to the main character under a tree.
3. Names
Researcher Valery Panyushkin in his playful book "The Gorynych Code" notes quite serious details: in one of the versions of the tale, the stepmother's name is Yaga, and her own daughter is Yagishna. By the same Propp, Yaga is a dead man, a ghost … What kind of strange family does Marfushi have (in Nastenka's film)?..
There is no doubt that the rite of passage into adulthood is reflected in fairy tales. But ancient folklore legends could have other functions.
All ancient peoples in relation to the afterlife thought the same way: you need to carefully prepare for it. Therefore, the dead were supplied with equipment - transport or "fare", food, clothing … In cultures with developed writing, this was also accompanied by a "tourist memo" - the same Egyptian "Book of the Dead".
Our fairy tales also contain these instructions, they simply cannot but be, another thing is that we no longer understand them …
