The problem of the historical dating of folklore material

This article analyzes the approaches of various folklore research schools: supporters of the so-called "specific historicism", followers of the migratory, mythological, comparative-typological theories, as well as of the new direction - areal folklore study developed by Yu.E. Berezkin. In particular, the author of the article considered the experience of folklore dating by historians (ethnologists) working with the folklore material of Siberian aboriginal ethnic groups: the Evenks, the Altaians, the Nganasans, etc. The researchers concluded that, as a rule, the folklore material of a substantial part of historical legends (namely, this genre of folklore is the most convenient for the correlation of folklore events with real historical facts) characterizes the past era which is not far from the modern reality (from 1-2 to 3-4 centuries). It was revealed that for dating based on the analysis of the specific historical content of the folklore texts, an important point is the search for dating markers, while mythological and migratory approaches for dating folklore works are based on the comparison of texts with each other: if one knows the time of the dating of the plot, conclusions about the other plots are based on the before/after principle. A comparative-typological approach denies a linear relationship of the plots and suggests that the plot, written in the twentieth century, can be more ancient from the historical-typological view point than the plot which is known from the earlier, for example, ancient times. The areal study of folklore suggests that folklore motives may contain information about the very distant past of the humankind. This information is not contained in the content of the motives, but in the "configuration of areas", within which the observed motives are recorded. The comparison of the areas of the distribution of the motives put on the geographical map with the areas of the distribution of the languages (language families) and archaeological cultures allows to correlate them with migration routes of various groups of the population. However, the question of the reliability of the dating of the "waves" of the spread of folklore (folklore motives), as well as the periods of the formation of various folklore areas, is directly related to the reliability of the dating features in the archaeological material. As a result, in the course of the conducted research the author revealed that, despite various efforts, the question of exact dating of the folklore data remains unresolved, and the connection of folklore to historical chronology is rather hypothetical.

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