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This presentation focuses on an aspect of old pan-European belief that reaches back, ultimately, to a hunter-gather mentality, namely, the belief that humans descended from bears. It is a belief that the Basque people kept alive into the 1980s, but which has deep roots in other parts of Europe, including Slavic-speaking areas. As is well-recognized, the image of the bear is very prominent in Slavic mythology, folk belief and fairy-tale discourse where mystical even supernatural powers have been regularly attributed to this animal. The belief in ursine ancestors shows up in many forms and disguises, one of which is a set of folktales known in English as the "Bear's Son Tale." After spending several decades comparing the various European versions of these tales, I was able to extract the “master narrative”, given that some versions were much more archaic in terms of their plot than others. In short, it's been an exercise in "diachronic cultural linguistics" in which translation, understood broadly, played a major role. Acting as sites of collective memory, a vast amount of information that can be gleaned from the study of these tales and related European performance art. The cosmovision in question has left a deep imprint in many of the languages of Europe, culturally entrenched in places one might not suspect. It is quite remarkable how such a belief system has been passed down orally from one generation to the next for so many thousands of years, keeping in mind the belief along with the ursine cosmovision itself has its ultimate origins in a hunter-gatherer mentality. The intriguing part is how these stories ended up spread across Europe, a transmission process that took place took place primarily in orality and in which translation played a key role, for as each generation of storytellers transmitted the tale, the teller of the tale (often grandmothers and grandfathers) would keep many of the old elements, respecting in that sense their knowledge of the version they themselves had learned. But at the same time elements were modified to suit the changing norms of the time and an evolving worldview, changes responding in part to the fact that as time passed these ursine ancestors faded from view and ceased being part of the worldview of the tellers of the tale. As a result, viewed diachronically, some parts of the plot ended up suppressed or mixed up while other elements remained remarkably stable. In other words, translation, understood as a means of knowledge transfer between generations, has insured the status of the tales as important sites of collective memory.
The talk examines specific elements that were retained as well as those that were lost, offering the possible explanations for certain losses and retentions. For example, in the case of Slavic versions of the tale, it is quite remarkable that the "immortal' nature of the protagonist's opponent has survived whereas in versions found in other languages the “immortality” of the character is often absent. In this sense, the Basque and Slavic versions are similar: both sets of tales emphasize that the hero's opponent is immortal.
In reconstructing the “master narrative” the Slavic versions have been particularly helpful, alongside even more archaic Basque versions as well as Spanish and French versions often collected in zones where Basque was spoken earlier. At noted, in these more archaic versions, the true identity of the 'immortal enemy' (known in the Russian tales as the Коще́й Бессме́ртный) who engages in ritual battles with the hero is brought into view.
Another cause for the changes that can be detected in the tales seems to be the fact that, viewed in the longue durée, language change—replacement—was also taking place so that a bilingual generation of storytellers would develop who would keep a few elements in the original language which the speaker and bilingual audience still understood but the meaning of which the next generation of monolingual speakers would no longer comprehend. In short, this process of cross-generational transmission often required the teller to translate the tale from one language into another which also often involved (incomplete) knowledge transfer between generations.