Considerations on Miorita - Colinda (The Ewe-Lamb Carols)

Abstract

Mioriţa, one of the greatest syntheses of Romanian culture, which deals with the major problems of mankind, and has great philosophical implications, is known in our ethno-musicology as a pastoral ballad and cannot be taken for “Mioriţa - colindă” (the ewe-lamb carol), because each of them has its own content and stylistic characteristics. The simple narrative structure of the poem has generated contradictory opinions due to the subsumed values and the complexity of its meanings, amplified by the existence of a large number of variants, with sensible differences of structure and substance between them.