Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Milli Folklor, cilt.2025, sa.145, ss.157-168, 2025 (AHCI, Scopus, TRDizin)
The Soviet scientist and folklorist Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp devoted almost his entire scientific career to the study of fairy tales. Although the widely known work Morphology of the Folktale was translated into many languages, the book The Historical Roots of Fairy Tales did not become popular due to the political situation in USSR. This book has not been translated widely into foreign languages, including Turkish. The aim of this article is to introduce Propp’s book, in which the historical roots of fairy tales were examined. The book takes an important place in the world folklore. This article is aimed at analysing the motifs of initiation rites within the framework of Propp’s theory. Considering fairy tales as products derived from myth, Propp at the same time observed that fairy tales came from an initiation rite. Initiation is a rite of passage into adulthood. Before the rite, an initiate was taught the necessary knowledge and skills, after which he had to pass a kind of exam. Those who passed the rite received a higher social status. Young men became full members of society. Thus, fairy tales usually begin with the fact that a child leaves his home, and end with the fact that he, having passed all adventures, returns home a married or rich man. Before the initiation rite, children were taken to the forest, where they were trained and received all the necessary knowledge to become full-fledged members of the society where they lived. During the rite, the death of initiates and their resurrection were staged. Boys were supposed to die and then be resurrected as grown-up men. This is so-called form of “temporary death”. This meant that the boy was symbolically burned, boiled, or chopped into pieces. The phases of the initiation rite appear as different motifs in fairy tales. Since the initiation rite was also seen as a journey to the after world, the motif of the afterlife is the second important element of any fairy tale. In his research Propp showed that the magical world where a fairy tale hero goes is the underworld; the forest in fairy tales is the border between the two worlds; Baba Yaga is a guardian of the other world. In Russian folklore, Baba Yaga plays an important role in the journey to the other world, in Turkish fairy tales, her role plays Dew Mother. Based on this theory, we tried to show that the two fairy tale characters, although belonging to different cultures, have common mythological roots. We don’t claim that Baba Yaga and Dew Mother are the same character, but they have similar functions. Thus, we aim to analyse such motives as leaving home, passing difficult exams, cutting body into pieces, journey to the other world, which reflect the traces of initiation rites, through the mentioned above Russian and Turkish fairy tale character. In this article, we tried to use Propp’s theory to analyze the role of the Russian fairy tale character Baba Yaga in fairy tales. In order to better understand the characteristics of this character, as well as to find a reflection of the motifs associated with initiation rites, we compared Baba Yaga with the character of Turkish folk tale, Dew Mother.