Lithuanian bridal songs

In 1910, Finnish folklorist Aukusti Robert Niemi documented a wedding in the Biržai region of Lithuania. The bride sat on a bread barrel with a pillow beneath her. Her mother combed her hair while the bride lamented and the other women sang about the loss of her wreath. The bride was crying, the women were singing, and her mother was preparing her for marriage. All three were part of the same ceremony.

Weddings are supposed to be a happy occasion, yet why is the bride in traditional Lithuanian wedding songs often lamenting? She mourns her mother, her childhood home, her maiden’s wreath, and the life she is leaving behind. Sometimes she fears what awaits her. Sometimes she already knows it won’t be great.

Traditional Lithuanian weddings were accompanied by songs for matchmaking, departure, welcoming the bride into her husband’s household and other occasions. Those performed in the bride’s family home were often sorrowful.

Amongst these songs were the bride’s laments, called verkavimai, from the word verkti, to weep. Girls learned the art of lamenting by listening to experienced women, and some received instruction from skilled lamenters before their weddings.

The songs and laments often carried similar themes and imagery.

A daughter raised for someone else

Močiute širdele

Here, the loss and sadness belong to both women. The daughter leaves the household in which she grew up, while the mother loses the daughter she raised. The repeated ne sau, “not for yourself,” expresses the uncomfortable reality of marriage in a society where a woman generally joined her husband’s household.

The maiden’s wreath

One of the first Lithuanian bridal songs I learned, studied by Liucija Citavičiūtė, is Aš atsisakiau savo močiutei, recorded in Lithuania Minor and published in the eighteenth century. Its bride addresses the wreath of rue that she will soon stop wearing:

Aš atsisakiau savo močiutei

Rue, rūta, was closely associated with unmarried girlhood. Its green wreath represented a status the bride was about to lose.

Later, the same song introduces another piece of clothing:

The contrast between vainikuota and nuometuota compresses an entire change of social identity into two words. The bride also addresses her hair, ribbons and jewellery as if they were living companions she will leave behind, reminding her of the person she used to be.

The fear of married life

In a bridal lament attributed to the nineteenth-century folklore tradition, the mother-in-law’s words are compared to stones.

The mother-in-law is a recurring figure in Lithuanian wedding poetry. The bride is leaving a familiar household, where she was a daughter, for another where she will be a daughter-in-law, expected to adapt to new responsibilities and authority.

In another song, the contrast between the two households becomes especially clear:

The song then contrasts this freedom with life in the husband’s household:

The bride has exchanged valelė, freedom, for vargelis, hardship, the wreath of rue for tears.

These are not isolated images. In Lithuanian wedding-song collections, the bride’s new life is repeatedly associated with vargelis, hardship, and nevalia, a state of constraint or lost freedom. Marriage can be imagined as a departure from the carefree world of girlhood into a place where the bride no longer determines her own fate.

Sometimes the warnings are even more direct. In Jau aušt aušružė, a wedding song from Lithuania Minor, the bride asks where her wreath has gone. Her mother has given it to the groom, who has thrown it into a flowing river. He then draws her attention to a trembling horse:

The bride replies by reminding him of what he promised before marriage:

These songs are not necessarily literal accounts of individual marriages. Some use exaggeration, satire or conventional poetic imagery. Yet they preserve recognizable anxieties about the bride’s future: hard work, loss of freedom, and the authority of a husband or mother-in-law.

The bride who wants to return

This one telling the story of a daughter married far from home might be my favorite. After a year or two, she longs to return to her family, but she cannot simply go back. Instead, she transforms herself into a cuckoo.

The following version of O aš viena dukrelė was printed in Mūsų Lietuva on 22 March 1952. The Lithuanian wording follows that printed version, with obvious typographical spacing corrected; spellings that appear unusual are retained.

O aš viena dukrelė

The transformation is more than an escape from an unhappy marriage. The daughter has crossed a boundary that cannot easily be crossed again. She can return to her childhood home, but not necessarily as the person who left it. Even her family may no longer recognize her at this point.

In Lithuanian folklore, the cuckoo is closely associated with lamentation, separation and longing. Its distinctive call can resemble repeated crying, and the cuckoo appears frequently in wedding songs, orphan songs and funeral laments.

The song was already in print in 1829, in Simonas Stanevičius’s Dainos Žemaičių. Folklorist Žemyna Trinkūnaitė has studied the motif in O aš viena dukrelė, a wedding-song type recorded in approximately 2,000 variants. She connects it with an international ballad tradition also found among Slavic peoples.

Not all versions tell the story in the same way. In some, the daughter actually becomes a cuckoo. In others, she wishes she had wings, imagines becoming a bird, or asks a bird to carry a message home. Some versions extend the story beyond the encounter with the brothers. The daughter is unable to return to human form and flies back into the forest, where she continues calling out her sorrows. This ending is described in Rimantas Sliužinskas’s study of Lithuanian and Polish folk songs.

A daughter who becomes a bird in Moravia

A closely related text appears in Leoš Janáček’s Moravian song setting Daleko provdaná, based on a Slovak wedding song from Poniky. Here too, a daughter married far from home imagines becoming a bird to visit her mother.

Daleko provdaná

The mother recognizes something familiar in the bird’s singing, but does not welcome it. She worries about her lilies, while the daughter tries to explain that she has come to complain about her unhappy marriage.

The resemblance goes beyond the transformation itself. Both songs bring a married daughter back to her childhood home in the form of a bird. Both place her in the family garden, and both make recognition and acceptance uncertain.

A related motif appears in Bulgarian ballads, too. Svetla Petkova describes the story of Grozdanka, married far from home, who turns into a bird to visit her family. Finally, a Bulgarian wedding song from Shishkovtsi (published in ИССФ 7, 1931, p. 310, no. 27–8) also explicitly calls upon the departing bride to weep:

Why did the bride have to cry?

The tears were not always spontaneous. In some Lithuanian communities, relatives and musicians deliberately performed sorrowful songs to make the bride weep. Ethnomusicologist Daiva Račiūnaitė-Vyčinienė records testimony that the bride was expected to cry even if she was delighted to be getting married.

The bride might lament when her wreath was placed on her head, when the groom arrived, during ritual toasts, before leaving for church, or after returning from the ceremony. Her crying was not confined to one farewell. It could accompany several stages of the wedding. The belief was explicit: „tikėta, kad per vestuves neverkusiai nuotakai reikėsią verkti visą gyvenimą“. It was believed that a bride who did not weep at her wedding would have to weep all her life.

The most immediate reason for this is separation. Marriage meant leaving one’s family, familiar surroundings and former social position. The lament gave this loss a recognized place in the celebration. There was also a ritual dimension. Wedding lamenting marked the bride’s passage from one social state to another.

And there is a social purpose. Ramunė Bleizgienė argues that compassion was something a bride was expected to demonstrate during her wedding. Lamenting could establish an emotional relationship not only with the family she was leaving, but also with the family she was joining. The bride needed to be accepted into a new household. Her sorrow could invite sympathy from people who would soon have authority over her.

So the bride’s tears were not necessarily evidence of personal unhappiness, nor were they merely theatrical. They could express genuine loss, fulfil a ritual expectation and appeal for compassion at the same time.

A celebration of loss

These songs do not mean that every Lithuanian bride was unhappy, or that traditional weddings were joyless affairs.

They do, however, preserve something that celebratory accounts of marriage often leave out: the perspective of the person who was expected to leave. Societal expectations placed on young women. A loss that cannot be recovered.

Sources

Mūsų Lietuva, 22 March 1952, p. 5. “O aš viena dukrelė.”

Rimantas Sliužinskas, Lietuvių ir lenkų liaudies dainų sąsajos, section 5.5.1.

Žemyna Trinkūnaitė, Marčios gegutės motyvo metamorfozės (2003).

Liucija Citavičiūtė, Vienos dainos istorija (2017).

Žibutė Lebednykaitė, Šūksnis ir nuorauda vestuvių raudų struktūroje (2001).

Daleko provdaná, Moravian song text.

Svetla Petkova, Crossing Genre Boundaries (2009).

Bulgarian wedding song from Shishkovtsi.

Jau aušt aušružė, Lithuania Minor.

Lietuvių liaudies vestuvinės dainos.

Lietuvių liaudies dainynas, vol. 22.

Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija, Lithuanian folk laments.

Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija, Wedding songs.

Daiva Račiūnaitė-Vyčinienė, Relics of Lithuanian Polymusic (2020).

Ramunė Bleizgienė, Gailestis: jausmo patyrimo fenomenologija (2024).

Jonas Balys, Ancient Wedding Customs (1960).

Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija, Nuotaka.