Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „The Sword and the Arm of the Lord (Sect)“

Abstract The story of the thunder god whose human helper makes foolish mistakes is typical of the Maya area, though it is told as far north as the Distrito Federal of Mexico (where the thunder spirits are “rain dwarfs” and their home is called Tlalocan). Here, in a variant from the Mam of Guatemala, the scene is set in the sky, the thunder spirit is “the lord of the clouds,” and his helpers are “angels.” They say it happened long ago, they say a man was carried off by the lord of the clouds, who took him away to his home in the sky, and when the man looked around, he saw angels. They were just setting out with their capes, just beginning to run, starting to thunder, and they made a cracking sound. In their hands they carried a reflecting sword that flashes when rain falls, and makes lightning. The noise of their capes is the storm, and when they run, rain falls on the earth.

The aim of the thesis is to analyse how the szlachta is perceived in Polish literary and folk narratives. The research was based on excerpts from the first two parts of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s The Trilogy (Ogniem i mieczem (“With Fire and Sword”), Potop (“The Deluge”) related to nobility (500 quotes) and transcribed dialectal texts: narratives of the Polishspeaking nobles themselves, their descendants, or ordinary inhabitants of Kaunas region (about 300 pages of transcripts, 73 quotations for analysis). The research is carried out using the method of anthropological-cultural linguistics in the cognitive approach. The methodology of textual (linguistic) picture of the world and oral history is applied in the thesis. After analysing the research material, the most characteristic features of szlachta were singled out and divided into subcategories – facets. The set of facets, depending on what the narratives focus on, allows distinguishing the main profiles of the researched concept, which reveal the principles of its conceptualization in texts created by different subjects (authors). In the literary narrative, the profiles of the nobleman as warrior-patriot, the proud nobleman, the nobleman-traitor and the noisy, feasting nobleman became the most prominent, while in the folk narrative the profiles of the rich lord, the good lord, the nobleman-Pole, and the nobleman, wronged by fate.