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Columbia, MO: Center for Studies in Oral Tradition. Oral Tradition 11/1 (1996): 85 - 98.
The first urgent research task is therefore to establish intensive cooperation in creating a Motif catalogue of the Mongolian epic. The first step towards this goal is to encourage monographic studies of single motifs. The second task, closely related to the catalogue, is to collect and record those epics still extant in Mongolia and in the Inner Mongolian districts of China. Although many of them are no longer transmitted by professional singers, but only remembered by a younger generation and repeated according to hearsay, the epics must not be allowed to fade out unrecorded. To secure this oral and semiliterary material for coming generations as well as to enable scholars to work on an international basis, the third task must be the creation of an archive of epic oral tradition under the guidance of an international body.
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Oral Tradition 11/1 (1996): 85-98 The Present State of the Mongolian Epic and Some Topics for Future Research Walther Heissig In the March 1993 issue of the bulletin Folklore Fellows Network Lauri Honko raised the question: “What is an epic?” As a small contribution of my own I shall confine myself here to the question of what we know about the recent state of the Mongolian epic (Bawden 1980). Had it not been for the intensive and praiseworthy collection of the first Mongolian epic by Russian and Finnish scholars during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the present century, we might not have reached the present stage in this branch of literary research. Through their recording projects, these scholars demonstrated the existence and dominance of the Mongolian epic.1 Considering that practically all Mongolian literary productions believed to belong to the category of epic have been transmitted orally, the number of epics recorded in writing or on tape is rather large. All the texts have been preserved in writing either by researchers or, as is very often the case, by Mongol scribes. The classical case here is Burdukova and his scribe (1966). This method implied a certain “dictation” by the singer himself in which the text lost some of the spontaneity of its immediate presentation. A. B. Lord and Milman Parry have already made some reservations about these shortcomings. The use by Mongol scholars of a hurriedly written “shorthand Mongol” served the preservation of the spontaneous diction of the singer far better; this is evident in the notes made by, for instance, P. Horloo of the ula aldar qan or by . Rin indor i, of which I will give some samples. The use of recording machines has 1 Nekljudov 1984; Vladimircov 1923; Poppe 1955; Ramstedt 1973. 86 WALTHER HEISSIG substantially affected the qualities of the preserved texts; certainly all experienced fieldworkers agree with this premise. Yet every performance of the same epic by the same singer has to be regarded as a new creation, because no singer will ever repeat his epic verbatim. Have we therefore the right to consider a mixture of the most beautiful and best-worded passages by various singers as the real epic (Heissig 1991b)? The initial collection of Mongolian epics in the first part of the twentieth century was devoted to the West Mongolian epic of the Altai region, to the Khalkha territory and to the Calmuck versions of Janggar. Since the middle of this century not only the Khalkha-Mongols but the Mongols of Inner Mongolia and Sinkiang have likewise been very active, yielding a greater number of recorded epics. The officially sponsored actions in China to collect all possible versions of the Geser cycle and the Janggar deserve special mention for their achievements in obtaining many orally transmitted versions of these epics (Bormanshinov 1981; Heissig 1