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Breton Lanneg and Russian Ляда: Aspects of Liminality in Celtic and Slavic Folk Tales

In Modern Breton, the word lann, lanneg has two meanings – ‘the wasteland’ and ‘a sacred place’ (‘church’, ‘chapel’; ‘lieu consacre du village’, GBV). These meanings are present in other Celtic languages. The Old Church Slavonic cognate, *leda/ledъ/ledo has a meaning close to the Celtic one. Not only it is the wasteland, but the cognate lexemes both in Celtic and in Slavic derive from the IE stem *lendh- ‘wasteland’. This stem obtains a connotation of malicious sacred force. As far as the Russian language is concerned, the IE stem *lendh- finds its cognates in a dialectal Russian lexeme lyada (Russ. ляда). In Rolland’s Jozebik ha Merlin the wasteland is a liminal zone separating the human world (cultivated zone) and the Otherword. There is often a wood to the rear of the wasteland where the supernatural creatures live, the Otherworld, or the uncultivated land. In order to get access to the Otherworld and to get a permission to cross the boundary zone, the hero must first become a shepherd. The earlier Russian folklore, and, in particular, some contemporary ethnographic material from the twentieth century Northern Russia, provides some examples of magic rituals concerned with the initiation and other practices of the shepherds.