Authors
Abstract
Fairy tales are stories in which metaphysical, paranormal and mysterious events take place and there is no exact time and place; everything is spiritual. The Lorestanian story of “Daughter of Daal” is a tale of the “mythical birth” of a girl from an egg and her being raised by Daal (phoenix) in the cave of a Caucasus-like mountain. Daughter of Daal is snared by a hireling hellcat’s deceit, but is finally reborn from inside a calamus by the help of a prince and marries him. In this article, with a mythological approach and by use of library and documental method, stories with similar theme are collected, and the rules governing these kinds of stories, with the objective of explaining common global mythological theme, have been studied. Through analyzing the content, based upon mythological and cryptic elements, and by the help of comparative mythology as well as analyzing mythological and epic narratives of Iran and other nations and ethnos, the writers are to prove that Daughter of Daal is a fairy and a symbol of vegetative god, and finally answer this fundamental question that of Daughter of Daal and other characters of the story, each symbolizes who, and what the theme is trying to convey. Implied answer to these questions and hypotheses is that Daughter of Daal is a goddess-mother who is freed from land of daemons to return lushness to dead nature. The hellcat symbolizes settlers of the dark land who do not want to fertilize the earth. The story of Daughter of Daal displays the theme of the contrast between vegetative/aquatic life and drought/death.
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