I. YAKOVLEV CHUVASH STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY BULLETIN

epos, sea of fire, rock, raven, deer, obstacle, alien world, mythology of the northern peoples

There are such universal events and characters in folklore as the world tree, the mountain, the flood, Multi-headed Serpent, Cyclop, Dragon, etc. The origins of the images and heroes of the early mythological epic lead to them. The study relevance of the early stages of epos development lies not only in identifying typical motifs, but also in decoding and interpreting the subject world, the characters of the archaic period, which have now lost their significance. There are some moments in the richest arsenal of the Altai heroic epos  including the poisonous sea, the rock, the raven, the sacrifice to the raven, the deer’s eye. Similar motifs are found in the epos of the Tuvans and Derbets (tribes of Western Mongolia), as well as in the Yakutian tribe Olonkho. Based on the materials of modern traditional and cult practice, these archaic images are difficult to interpret. The study of these texts contributed to the idea that in order to decode those images we should search through the Slavic and Scandinavian mythology. The research showed that the poisonous sea and the raven scout images are similar in the mythology of the northern peoples and the Turks of the Sayano-Altai proves the existence of  Paleoasiatic mythological archetypes. It is obvious that in this way the most ancient archetypes, which made up the subject world of the Altai epos  mythological stage, eventually lost their semantic subtext. The study showed that the decoding of mythological subtext of Sayano-Altai Turks epos  texts may have practical use in terms of cultural contacts.

Ямаева Елизавета Еркиновна – доктор исторических наук, старший научный сотрудник отдела этнографии Научно-исследовательского института алтаистики им. С. С. Суразакова, г. Горно-Алтайск, Россия, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1771-0861, erkinov-nay@mail.ru