e-infrastructure Roadmap for Open Science in Agriculture

Although the new comparative mythology/philology has not taken a great deal from the documents of Slavic tradition, those documents would appear to offer possibilities hitherto not fully appreciated. Although the preserved remnants of Slavic mythology appear to be very scanty, especially compared with the mythological lore of the Celtic or Germanic peoples, not to mention the Greeks, Romans or Indo-Iranians, the author has reconstructed some elements of the Slavic tradition by adopting an inverted research approach. Thus, the so-called "agrarian myth of the Slavs", initiated at the end of eighteenth century by Johann Gottfried Herder and developed particularly in Polish literary culture and historiography of the first decades of nineteenth century, can be derived from the mediaeval cognitive pattern attested indirectly by the (pseudo-) ethnonym Veneti/ Venedi, which in turn appears to be rooted in the mythological concept of a "third-functional" community, in Dumezilian terms. The semantic shift of the Indo-European g(u)hen- in Common Slavic towards agricultural terminology (examined in the article in more detail) seems to confirm the attempted reconstruction and justifies the hypothesis concerning the Slavic modality of the dragon-slaying myth. So an extreme persistence of verbal formulas - a phenomenon underlined by Calvert Watkins, among others - finds a complement in an unexpected persistence of narrative patterns, provided that they prove useful as a device for defining - or inventing - an ethnocultural identity.