Arthur Hatto’s The World of the Khanty Epic Hero-Princes draws on a corpus of some eighteen Khanty oral epics in order to trace the texts’ collective depictions of everything from the cosmos and its spirits to the metaphorical resonances of the material arts of sewing and of boat building. The Khanty reside on the Ob River in east Siberia, and historically relied upon a mixture of fishing, hunting, and reindeer herding. As Hatto explains early in his book, although the Khanty were absorbed into the Russian state in the late sixteenth century, the epics themselves look back to a past in which Khanty princes ruled fortified towns built on the headlands of the Ob, and where Russians figured not as administrators but as adversaries and possible allies.
The Khanty heroic epics that Hatto analyzes were collected by a series of Hungarian and Russian scholars from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century, and they present multiple interpretive challenges. Twelve of them were transcribed by Antal Reguly during a field visit from 1844 to 1845, but Reguly did not include translations or other annotations; when József Pápay, the next major Hungarian scholar of Khanty epic, visited from 1898 to 1899, he worked with Khanty bards to record additional epic texts and also sought their help in making sense of Reguly’s transcriptions. But the dialect in which Reguly’s texts were recited had disappeared, and the informants with whom Pápay worked struggled with Reguly’s texts. As Hatto remarks, “Pápay had found good interpreters, but what could they do with archaisms in a dialect that had died out before their time?” (24). Despite all of this, a series of scholars eventually crafted both more formal transcriptions as well as translations into Hungarian, which in turn form the major basis of Hatto’s own study.
In reviewing the work of the Hungarian academics who studied the Khanty epics, Hatto remarks that their effort “evokes an image of a team of heroic runners taking up the torch as their predecessors were struck down” (24), and this image is in turn no mean description of the composition and editing of Hatto’s own book. Hatto (1910–2010) began as a specialist in medieval German literature with a deep interest in the comparative analysis of the broader genre of epic. In his retirement, Hatto became an expert in the oral epic of Central Asia; his translations of sections of the Kyrgyz epic Manas are beautifully written, academically rigorous, and, alas, still one among only a handful of English language translations of the enormous corpus of Central Asian Turkic oral epic. [1] Still later, Hatto turned to the study of the Khanty epic, remarking in this book that it sometimes seemed as though “none of the better-known oral traditions of Heroic epic comes nearer to the putative lost oral stage of Ionian epic than does the Khanty” (32). Unfortunately, Hatto’s failing health kept him from completing the study before his death; his daughter, Jane Lutman, took up the work of finishing the manuscript, and explains in the preface that she was helped in this task by Professor Marianne Bakró-Nagy, a specialist in Khanty language who had already worked closely with Hatto on the text, and by Drs. Daniel Prior and John Smith. Prior, a specialist in Kyrgyz oral epic, helped with the editing of the volume and also contributed an invaluable afterword in which he explains the place of this book within Hatto’s broader vision of the comparative study of epic.
What, then, is the fruit of all this labour? The book consists of thirteen chapters, beginning with background on the Khanty and the manuscript history of the epics, but rapidly shifting to chapters that are focused on the content of the epics themselves. The plots of the various epics most often follow a pattern in which the father of “Ego”—the texts are typically sung in the first person—has died, and the town in which Ego lives has fallen into misfortune: fish are few, the woods empty of game, fertility conspicuous in its absence. In order to restore the town’s fortunes, Ego and his brothers must travel to a distant town and win a bride—a “Tressy Princess”—for Ego, with the successful marriage guaranteeing the future prosperity and fertility of the larger community. Hatto’s first chapters on these epics review the conceptualization of the cosmos and of time, season, and geography. This section includes fascinating details on how the Ob-Irtysh river system forms a kind of chronotope (though Hatto does not use this term) within the Khanty epic, with Hatto tracing the movements of various characters up and down the river’s tributaries, even as he cautions that the geography within the epic is not always strictly factual.
These sections are succeeded by chapters on the texts’ characters, including both humans and magical spirits. Chapter 9, the longest and most detailed within the book, is on the human personae of the epics, including Ego, his relationships with foster parents and with brothers older and younger, the bride and her character, and finally with the narratives’ antagonists. These are sometimes Rus’ (the term Hatto prefers to Russian in this context) and sometimes Samoyed, though Hatto notes that warfare with the Rus’ may also be used as a stratagem through which Ego pursues rivalries against his own brothers. The book concludes with a series of almost ethnographic chapters in which Hatto reviews the texts’ depictions of Khanty material culture, including not only armour and weapons but also boats and ironwork. Hatto repeatedly draws on his comparative knowledge of epic to contextualize details of the Khanty texts—a particularly fine example of this is the comparison of the motif in the Khanty texts of the “Tressy Princess” and her skill at sewing with the weaving of Penelope in the Odyssey and of Brünhild in the Nibelungenlied. The Khanty texts contrast “sewing-that-holds” with the negative “sewing which unravels,” the former standing for the community’s endurance (146-151).
It is to be regretted that Hatto’s excursion into Khanty epic did not extend, as it did for Kyrgyz epic, to the full translation and annotation of any of the epic texts he reviews. In the absence of such translations, The World of the Khanty Epic Hero-Princes is in many ways a fantastically detailed primer to a world as yet invisible to those who cannot read Khanty, Hungarian, or German (and Hatto has little positive to say of the existing German translations). In the meantime, his book can be profitably read alongside Tomsk Pedagogical University’s continuing series of annotated and translated folk texts from the Ob-Yenisseic languages, which contains multiple examples of Khanty narratives. Though these are prose narratives, their depictions of Khanty material culture and of narrative personae both human and magical would lend themselves to comparisons with the nineteenth-century Khanty texts.
Works Cited
[1] Arthur T. Hatto, ed. & trans. The Manas of Wilhelm Radloff. Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990.
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[Review length: 1148 words • Review posted on December 12, 2018]