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ELEMENTS.
her person is to be seen, not even the face. 1 Escorted by other
maidens, dodola passes from house to house, before each house
they form a ring, she standing in the middle and dancing alone.
The goodwife comes out and empties a bucket of water over the
girl, who keeps dancing and whirling all the while; her com
panions sing songs, repeating after every line the burden oy
dodo, oy dodo le \* The second of these rain-hymns (piesme
dodolske) in Vuk s Coll. nos. 86-88 (184-8 of ed. 2) runs
thus :
To God doth our doda call, oy dodo oy dodo le !
That dewy rain may fall, oy dodo oy dodo le !
And drench the diggers all, oy dodo oy
dodo le !
The workers great and small, oy dodo oy dodo le !
Even those in house and stall, oy dodo oy dodo le !
And they are sure that rain will come at once. In Greece, when
it has not rained for a fortnight or three weeks, the inhabitants
of villages and small towns do as follows. The children choose
one of themselves who is from eight to ten years old, usually a
poor orphan, whom they strip naked and deck from head to foot
with field herbs and flowers : this child is called TrvpTrrjpovva. The
others lead her round the village, singing a hymn, and every
housewife has to throw a pailful of water over the pyrperuna s
head, and hand the children a para (J of a farthing). The Mod.
Greek hymn is in Theod. Kind s TpaywSia TT)? veas .EAA-aSo?,
Leipz. 1833, p. 13. Passow, nos. 311-3, p. 627. Neither Greek
nor Slavic will explain why the rain-girl should be called dodola
(caressingly doda) and TrvpTrrjpovva- 2 Burchard very likely could
have given us a German designation equally inscrutable. But the
meaning of the performance
bucket on the dodola, so is rain out of heaven to stream down on
the earth ;
is clear : as the water from the
it is the mystic and genuinely symbolic association of
means with end. Just so the rebound off the millwheel was to
send evil flying, and the lustration in the stream to wash away all
1 Is this covering merely to protect the maiden s modesty, or has it some
further reason ? We shall see that personations of spring and summer were in like
manner enveloped in foliage.
2 Kind, pp. 86-7, gives some variant forms, but all the explanations appear to
me farfetched. Both the Greek and the Servian names have the reduplication so
characteristic of folk-words. [Slav, dozhd is rain, and zhd represents either gd or
dd ; if this be the root, dodo-la may be a dimin.]