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Columbia, MO: Center for Studies in Oral Tradition. Oral Tradition, 12/2 (1997): 322 - 336.
Mongolian tuuli, or epic poetry, the most important genre in Mongolian literary history, is a vast tradition of orally composed works. Accompanied by musical instruments such as the tobshur and the choor, tuuli relates these nomadic peoples’ glorious past: their ideal heroes—the bravest hunters and herdsmen—and their ideal world—rich pastures, open steppes, decorated yurts and palaces, beautiful maidens, and swift horses. The heroes keep and guard these riches, perform deeds in defense of their holdings, and, more importantly, acquire new herds and new nomadic territories.
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Oral Tradition, 12/2 (1997): 322-336
Mongolian Oral Epic Poetry: An Overview Chao Gejin Background Mongolian tuuli, or epic poetry, the most important genre in Mongolian literary history, is a vast tradition of orally composed works. Accompanied by musical instruments such as the tobshur and the choor, tuuli relates these nomadic peoples’ glorious past: their ideal heroes—the bravest hunters and herdsmen—and their ideal world—rich pastures, open steppes, decorated yurts and palaces, beautiful maidens, and swift horses. The heroes keep and guard these riches, perform deeds in defense of their holdings, and, more importantly, acquire new herds and new nomadic territories. The scholarship on Mongolian epic can be traced back to the beginning of the nineteenth century.1 We have, for instance, some early German and Russian versions gathered from among the Volga Kalmyks. Around the beginning of this century, researchers such as G. Ramstedt, C. Zhamcarano, and B. Vladimirtsov reached many Mongolian regions and recorded a number of valuable epics (Niekeliuduofu 1991:1, 25). At that time scholars believed that there were three epic regions in the Mongolian world. As Vladimirtsov points out (1983-84:11): At the present time in the Mongolian world, as far as we know, there are three areas, three regions, where the heroic epic cycles live or still exist, where professional singers of tales are found, . . . distinguished one from the other by many individual features. The bearers of these three types and forms of the Mongolian epic are the following Mongolian tribes: the Buriats both of the Irkutsk gouvernement and the Trans-Baikal district, the Volga Kalmyks (Oirats), together with those who in the second half of the 18th century nomadized out of Russia and now live in Dzungaria and on the T’ien-Shan, and finally, the Oirats of North-West Mongolia, together with some Mongolized Turkic tribes. In each of these regions populated by one of these tribes, we find the heroic epic, organically mature, having its own 1
See further Bergmann 1804-05.
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definite history and being preserved or living at present in one or another characteristic form.
Vladimirtsov goes on to note that “there still exist areas, Mongolian tribes about which our information in this regard is quite insufficient, and we can say almost nothing as to the position of the heroic epic there” (11-12). Apparently little was known at that time about epic centers and the epic tradition in China, but scholarship on Mongolian epic poetry has developed considerably.2 The work of accumulating, publishing, and studying the epic tradition has been carried out for more than forty years, with a pause from the second half of the sixties through the seventies due to the Cultural Revolution. New discoveries have been reported in regions that were never before studied. In what follows, I would like first to describe the spread of Mongolian epic in China, and then discuss a few aspects of the Mongolian epic tradition that differ from other epic traditions. According to reliable statistics (see Bürinbeki and Boyanhesig 1988