Tellers from across the North Caucasus present stories about the Narts, a mythic tribe of nomadic warriors. The stories “occur…among Chechens and Ingush, among Ossetians, among Circassians and their kin, and even among the Kartvelian-speaking Svans and Georgian highlanders of northernmost Georgia.” That list comes from page xiii of the preface to John Colarusso’s Nart Sagas: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Circassians and Abkhazians, published by Princeton in 2002 and reissued in paperback in 2016, and the companion to the book under review here, Tales of the Narts: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Ossetians. Elsewhere in the preface to Nart Sagas, Colarusso tells us who translated what in the volume (or who helped him translate what) and where one might track down the original language texts. This admirable degree of transparency bolsters the reader’s faith in that project. Additionally, in Nart Sagas, Colarusso aids the reader by appending footnotes to the individual texts and in many cases a brief thematic analysis, ranging from one sentence to several paragraphs. Tales of the Narts does not always fare well in comparison.
Tales of the Narts turns to Ossetian tellers. It includes eighty-nine tales, each given a name and assigned to one of eight sections. In his preface, Colarusso does well to refer to these texts as tales, avoiding the word “epic.” Elsewhere in the volume mention is made of “the Ossetian epic” (Salbiev, xv; Abaev, xxix), and scholarship speaks frequently of “the Nart epic” (e.g., A. Alieva, “Caucasian Epics: Textualist Principles in Publishing,” Oral Tradition 11 [1996]: 154–62). One might charitably speak of a cyclic epic tradition here, as Vasily Ivanovich Abaev does in the volume’s introduction (xxix–xxx), a species of epic formatting found the world over (cf. M. S. Jensen, Writing Homer: A Study Based on Results of Modern Fieldwork [Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2011], 101-4). But the term and its concomitant debates distract us: the Ossetian stories do not have to constitute or be part of an epic in order to be worthy of our attention.
These tales distinguish themselves from the Nart material found elsewhere: “they are elaborate but a bit less archaic than those of the neighboring Circassians…They are quite lacking in Mazdaic features…and offer the only glimpse of some of the traditions of the Iranian-speaking steppe nomads of classical antiquity, such as the Scythians, Sarmatians, and Alans” (Colarusso, Nart Sagas, xiv). Colarusso’s preface to this volume finds the value of these tales in their providing a window into the past of these Steppe Iranians (xii–xiii), and in the volume’s introduction Vasily Ivanovich Abaev stresses these connections as well. This book concerns itself neither with the performers of these tales nor with the work these tales did for their performers and audiences. Abaev lauds “the poetic genius of the folk who long ago composed and created” the tales (lxiv). This, despite the fact that the dust jacket promises “a wide selection of fascinating tales preserved as a living tradition among the peoples of Ossetia in southern Russia.” The book’s occlusion of the tradents who actually enabled its production mirrors its failure to address adequately the number of filters through which the texts presented in this volume have passed.
Prompted by Tamirlan Salbiev’s quick review, after Colarusso’s preface, of this volume’s origins, one traces the following trajectory. First, Soviet-era collectors compiled the Ossetian texts. Second, “a summary text of the Nart tales was first published in the Ossetian language in 1946” (xvi). The “summary texts” provide the “basis” for this edition (xvii). Salbiev does not tell us who made these summary texts, and one wonders what a summary text is in the first place. The phrase recalls Albert Lord’s “synopses” of tales in volume 1 of Serbocroatian Heroic Songs (Cambridge: The Harvard University Press; Belgrade: The Serbian Academy of Sciences, 1954), and at times some of the Nart tales exhibit the same rapid presentation of events that one finds in Lord’s synopses. Conversely, the summary text includes the direct speech of characters, whereas Lord’s synopsis does not. Perhaps the summary text is a composite text that blends different performances of the same tale by different performers. Third, Walter May is labeled “the translator” of this volume’s texts (xix), and presumably he translated the summary texts into English. According to Nienke van der Heide, Walter May mastered neither Russian nor Kyrgyz (Spirited Performance: The Manas Epic and Society in Kyrgyzstan [Bremen: EHV Academicpress, 2015], 89; cf. K. Reichl, “Oral Epics into the Twenty-First Century: The Case of the Kyrgyz Epic Manas,” Journal of American Folklore 129 [2016]: 327¬-44, at 341n10). One wonders how good his Ossetian was. Walter May passed away in 2002. This book was published 2016. Perhaps in their capacity as editors of the volume, Colarusso and Salbiev checked and silently reworked May’s translations in the intervening years. Fourth, for this book, “the text has been slightly modernized and given a more artistically developed content, with variations and modifications in detail” (xvii). The passive voice obscures the agents of these alterations, themselves unspecified.
The reader encounters here, then, illustrative specimens of the typical career of a text as various parties handle and transform it in its movement from oral presentation to printed artifact. This book does not represent a careful attempt to render the words of actual oral performances. Typical too is the occlusion in the final product of those parties’ contributions to the final product.
Unlike Nart Sagas, this book does not append analyses to discrete texts, and it includes only a smattering of footnotes, the authorship of which is unclear. Note 5 on page 48 reads as follows:
“These words of the Narts to a certain extent reflect the feudal trading in slaves that existed in those far-off times in the Northern Caucasus. [Prisoners of war were also frequently used for this purpose, especially young ones.--WM]”
Walter May contributed the portion in brackets. Who wrote the first sentence? More important questions arise about the texts themselves. What is the significance of the sequence in which the texts are presented? The tales are organized by protagonist: part 3, for instance, comprises those about Shoshlan. Salbiev reports, “There have also been some changes in the position of various tales, placing them in their corresponding series” (xvii). One wants to know how the tellers positioned these tales in relation to one another. And how do the tellers identify these tales? Do they use the titles assigned to them in this volume?
If the tales in this volume receive inadequate contextualization, the same cannot be said of the volume’s introductory essay by the eminent Ossetian linguist Vasily Ivanovich Abaev (1900–2001). True, we are not told where this essay first appeared--Colarusso says it “is retained in this edition” (x)--but with a couple of incisive footnotes, Colarusso shows the piece to be a revealing instance of Soviet-era scholarship: “Abaev’s career and the welfare of the Ossetian and other Caucasians depended on the sort of Marxist apology he has written here” (lxvii, note 24).
To be sure, we owe a debt of gratitude to Colarusso and Salbiev for giving us a glimpse of a tradition of storytelling with which most of us will have been unfamiliar. The translations read seamlessly. The folklore collected by Russian and/or Soviet-era scholars has for too long remained unavailable to researchers working in Western languages. One thinks especially of the volumes of nineteenth-century Russian byliny (oral epic) that sit unstudied by Westerners. Students of folklore and mythology will enjoy juxtaposing these Ossetian tales and their motifs with those from other corpora. Abaev notes several points of contact, such as Urizhmag’s escape from the cave of the one-eyed giant, a tale type that appears in Homer’s Odyssey (xxxv); the account of the creation of beer, a subject broached in Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (xxxv); and Shoshlan’s trip to the land of the dead, an adventure a number of heroes undertake (Gilgamesh, Cúchulainn) (xxxviii). For additional guidance in tracking parallels, one can consult H. W. Bailey’s “Ossetic (Nartä)” in Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry I (A. T. Hatto, ed. [London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1980]): he notes, for instance, Shoshlan’s birth from a stone (257)--which we find in tale 19 (73) (cf. T544.1 “Birth from rock”)--and a bird’s turn as a messenger (265)--which we find in tale 37 (187, 189) (cf. B291.1 “Bird as messenger”). I was struck by the final tale in the collection wherein the Narts, given the choice of eternal life or eternal glory, opt for the latter (423). Their choice resonates with the Trojan ally Sarpedon’s declaration in book 12 of Homer’s Iliad: only mortals have the opportunity to stake their lives in battle and therefore to gain glory. Mere immortality has its drawbacks.
Still, readers of JFRR are likely to find the book only sort of useful. We get at least an approximation of what an Ossetian teller performed at some point in time. It would be hard, however, to justify basing, say, a rigorous comparative analysis on these texts. The book rather is intended for lay readers, or for academics operating as lay readers. The excurses into, for instance, the etymology of the names of various Narts (lxv, note 6) serve primarily to make such readers feel as if they are part of the academic conversation.
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[Review length: 1548 words • Review posted on June 21, 2018]