The Oirat Epic Cycle Of Jangar

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Columbia, MO: Center for Studies in Oral Tradition. Oral Tradition, 16/2 (2001): 402 - 435.
Among the Kalmyk in Russia, 25 cantos of Jangar have been collected, with exactly the same number discovered and printed in the Mongolian Republic; about half of the latter 25 cantos are only provisionally identified as belonging to the Jangar cycle. The Oirat Mongols in the Xinjiang area of northwest China have maintained the Jangar singing tradition up to the present time. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Xinjiang Jangar Office combed the Mongol area to collect and record epic. According to the office’s reports, 106 jangarchi (singers) were recorded. As a major result, the twelve-volume publication entitled Jangar Material, with 124 cantos, was issued in successive installments. The author suggests classifying the various Jangar texts into five types: retold texts, dictated texts, manuscripts, transcriptions of audio recordings, and lithographed and modern printings.

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Oral Tradition, 16/2 (2001): 402-435 The Oirat Epic Cycle of Jangar Chao Gejin Introduction It is difficult or impossible to specify the exact moment of the emergence of Mongolian epic. As far as we know, no convincing clues have ever been found about epic singing in surviving documents composed by historians, missionaries, and travelers over the past few centuries. The Russian historian B. Vladimirtsov points out that a predisposition toward epic and perhaps even epic narrative patterns existed among the North Asian hunters and herdsmen in earlier eras and developed during Chinggis Khan’s time, which is also the period of the rise of Mongol nationality. Through the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, large epic songs, known as byliny, and epic cycles were created. Martial concerns, military achievements, and, most importantly, the steppe aristocratic class provided a supportive framework for the evolution of epic singing. One piece of evidence is The Secret History of the Mongols, which is filled with epic motifs and characteristics even though it is a history of Chinggis Khan and his “golden family.”1 The earliest printed epic text was The Beijing Geser Wooden Block, which appeared in 1716. As for the epic Author’s note: I am aware that international scholars use different methods to transcribe the Mongolian language. To avoid confusion over different dialects, I follow the written spelling. Thus I do not differentiate masculine from feminine, as some scholars have in the past. For instance, I spell hand as gar and yurt as ger. To take an example from the literary context, the phrase hüreng haljan hölög (a sorrel horse with a white spot on its forehead) alliterates perfectly and would not cause any confusion, whereas spelling the same phrase as küreng qaljan külüg would. Furthermore, in a very few cases, I follow the most common usage, spelling Jang_ar and Hong_or as Jangar and Hongor and tegri (heaven) as tenger. 1 See Vladimirtsov 1983-84:6-7. 1240 (Heissig 1964:28). The Secret History of the Mongols is dated to THE OIRAT EPIC CYCLE OF JANGAR 403 Jangar, scholars agree that the prominent Oirat2 epic cycle matured in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries,3 the period during which the Oirat peoples moved to the Tian Shan Mountains, took shape as the “Four Allies of Oirat” (Torgud, Dörbed, and other tribes), and eventually appeared on the banks of the Volga in 1630. We call Jangar an epic cycle because it is composed of many cantos with close mutual connections. The story as a whole concerns the khan Jangar and his twelve warriors’ heroic deeds: how they build up the khan’s palace, how they defeat threatening invaders, how they conquer others’ territories, and how they woo and marry beautiful maidens according to the dictates
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