Medieval

Oral Literature

Edited by
Karl Reichl

De Gruyter
 Contents
List of Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XV
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XVII
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIX
Note on Transliteration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XXI

I
1 Plotting the Map of Medieval Oral Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
K R

P I: C  A

2 Oral Theory and Medieval Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
J M F  P R

3 The Written Word in Context: The Early Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

M R

4 Orality and Literacy: The Case of Anglo-Saxon England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

K O’B O’K

5 Performance and Performers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

J H  K R

6 Oral Poetics: The Linguistics and Stylistics of Orality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

T A. DB

7 Oral Literature, Ritual, and the Dialectics of Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

P R

P II: T  G

8 Older Germanic Poetry, with a Note on the Icelandic Sagas . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
J H

9 Oral Tradition and Performance in Medieval Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

J F N
VI Contents

10 Medieval German Literature: Literacy, Orality and Semi-Orality . . . . . . . . . 295

J-D M

11 Middle English Romances and the Oral Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

A P

12 The Chanson de geste and Orality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353

D B

13 The Italian Cantari between Orality and Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

R M

14 Court Poetry, Village Verse: Romanian Oral Epic in the Medieval World . . . . 387
M H. B

15 Hispanic Epic and Ballad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411

R W

16 The Late-Medieval Ballad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429

T P

17 Medieval Greek Epic Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459

E J

18 The Song of Igor and its Medieval Context in Russian Oral Poetry . . . . . . . . 485
S. N. A

19 Oral Traditions in a Literate Society:

The Hebrew Literature of the Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 499
E Y

20 Woman’s Song in Medieval Western Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521

A L. K

21 Popular Song and the Middle English Lyric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 555

K B-L

22 The Pastourelle as a Popular Genre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581

L S

23 Andalusī-Arabic Strophic Poetry as an Example of Literary Hybridization:

Ibn Quzmān’s ‘Zajal 147’ (The Poet’s Reluctant Repentance) . . . . . . . . . . . 601
J T. M
 Contents VII

24 Orality and the Tradition of Arabic Epic Storytelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629

T H

25 Orality in Medieval Persian Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 653

J R

26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 681

K R

27 Dramatic Pastime, Custom and Entertainment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 701

T P

Notes on the Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 725

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 729
 26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative

Karl Reichl

In his Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340 – 1400) introduces as the first narra-
tor a knight who is joining the group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury straight
from one of the many military expeditions in which he has taken part. He has been
active in Eastern Europe, in Spain and in the Middle East, generally on the side of the
Christians, but occasionally also in the service of non-Christians:
This ilke worthy knyght hadde been also
Somtyme with the lord of Palatye
Again another hethen in Turkye […]¹
This same worthy night had also been/ at some time with the lord of Palatye/ (in his war)
against another heathen in Turkey […]

Palatye is modern Balat (ancient Miletus) on the Aegean coast of Turkey. In the four-
teenth century, the ‘lord of Palatye’ was a Turkish emir who had kept his independence
from the rising Ottoman empire and was involved in numerous feuds with the neigh-
bouring emirates ( Jones 1980: 86–88). Two hundred years earlier the Turkish Seljuks
made their first inroads into Asia Minor; under their sultan Alp Arslan they took Cae-
sarea (modern Kayseri in central Anatolia) in 1067. In 1071 they defeated a Byzantine
army in Manzikert (Manāzgird) north of Lake Van, a victory that marked the beginning
of the Turkish conquest of Anatolia, to be completed by the fall of Constantinople in
1453.
When the Seljuks invaded Anatolia in the eleventh century they had already estab-
lished their rule in Iran. The Seljuks belong to the large family of Turkic-speaking peo-
ples, which today stretches from the Yakuts of north-eastern Siberia to the Turks of Tur-
key. More specifically, they belong to the Oghuz tribal group, which, by the tenth cen-
tury, was found in the area of the lower Jaxartes (Syr Darya), in the vicinity of the Aral
Sea. From there they moved further west, into Iran and into Asia Minor. At the end of
the eleventh century, the Great Seljuk Empire was at its zenith, reaching from the Oxus
to the Persian Gulf in the south and the Aegean in the west. The reign of the Seljuks of
Asia Minor, the Rum Seljuks, lasted until the beginning of the fourteenth century; in
1299 Osman I, leader of a Turkish warrior group in the service of the Rum Seljuks,
declared himself sultan and founded the Ottoman dynasty. By the end of the fifteenth

¹ Fragment A, ll. 64–66. Quoted from Benson 1987: 24. –Unless indicated otherwise, all translations
of quotations from primary and secondary sources are mine.
682 Karl Reichl

century, the Ottomans had become the dominant Turkish power in Anatolia and had
established an empire which would rule over a large part of the Middle East and south-
eastern Europe until its final collapse after the end of World War I.²
From Central Asia the Turks brought their language, their way of life and their
culture, and hence also their poetry and music. At its roots their culture was that of a
nomadic tribal society, and their poetry that of an oral society. This nomadic culture
continued in some areas of Central Asia into the present age, and oral poetry has played
an important role in Turkey too, as will be discussed below. Towards the end of the
tenth century the Seljuks converted to Islam; both through their adoption of Islam and
their conquests of ancient civilizations such as that of Iran they came into contact with
writing and literacy. Niz.ām al-Mulk (1018–1092), the vizier of Alp Arslan, who had
defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert, and of his son and successor Malikshāh, was one
of the ablest statesmen of his time. He is the author of the Siyāsat-nāma, a book of
government and mirror for princes, which is one of the classics of medieval Islamic lit-
erature.³ Niz.ām al-Mulk wrote his ‘advice for rulers’ in Persian, the language of adminis-
tration and literature in the Sultanate of the Great Seljuks. Persian was also the language
of the greatest mystic poet of the Seljuk era in Asia Minor, Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī (1207–
1273), who spent the greater part of his life in Konya, where he founded the mystical
brotherhood of the ‘dancing dervishes’.⁴
While Persian and Arabic were the languages of government, law, theology, philo-
sophy, science, and literature, Turkish was also cultivated as a literary language in the pre-
Ottoman and medieval Ottoman period. In Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī’s poetry there is only the
occasional verse in Turkish, but at the end of the thirteenth/ beginning of the fourteenth
century another mystical poet of Anatolia, Yūnus Emre, composed his poems entirely in
Turkish. For his poetry Yūnus Emre used the Turkish syllabic metre, rather than the
quantitative metres of Arabic and Persian poetry. This is certainly one of the reasons
why his poems became popular and have retained their popularity until today.⁵ With
the ascendancy of the Ottoman Empire Turkish gained an ever increasing importance
in literature, although Arabic and Persian works retained their place in Ottoman culture
and were often the models and sources of Turkish imitations and translations.⁶
As in other medieval literatures, Turkish oral poetry from the Middle Ages is only
indirectly accessible. Although we know about the cultivation of oral poetry from con-
temporary descriptions and allusions, the works themselves are, of course, only preserved
if they were written down. There is, however, a difference from the medieval European
literary traditions in that medieval orality is still alive in Turkey, both in song and in epic
or romance. The oral epic traditions, it is true, are gradually becoming extinct, but can

² On the historical background, see Cahen 1968 (pre-Ottoman Turkey) and Inalcık 1973 (Otto-
mans, 1300–1600).
³ For an English translation, see Darke 1960.
⁴ For a perceptive introduction, see Schimmel 1993.
⁵ His biography as well as his dates of birth and death are uncertain; 1320 is generally thought to
have been the year of his death. For an introduction to his poetry and an English translation of
some of his poems, see Smith 1993.
⁶ For surveys of early Turkish (Seljukid and Ottoman) literature, see Bombaci 1968, esp. pp. 175–
199, 223–307; Björkman 1964a and 1964b.
 26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative 683

nevertheless still be studied. I will return to the modern descendants of medieval epic
and romance at the end of this chapter.

1 Popular ‘Romance’

‘Epic’ and ‘romance’ are two terms which cannot be sharply differentiated in the case of
Turkish oral literature. In this, the Turkish situation is similar to that found in medieval
European literature, where, as I have discussed above, the two genres overlap and inter-
sect. There is some consensus, however, in seeing epic as being primarily heroic in out-
look and romance as being focused on love adventures (see ch. 1, section 5.3). The dis-
tinction between epic and romance is riddled with additional problems in the case of
Turkish medieval oral or popular narrative poetry.⁷ The first problem concerns form.
While there are narrative poems in Turkish, i. e. narratives in verse, the predominant
form of popular narrative is the mixture of verse and prose, a genre also known under
the medieval Latin term prosimetrum.⁸ ‘Narrative poetry’ in most cases means prose nar-
ratives with verse insertions. In some cases the narratives are entirely in prose, occasion-
ally with passages in rhymed prose (saj‘). Another problem concerns narrative structure.
All narratives can be loosely characterized as ‘tales of adventure’, in which heroic deeds
are in the foreground. In many narratives these adventures are linked to build a larger
narrative or narrative cycle; their structure is additive, and the succession of adventures
resembles the ever-continuing quests and aventures of the medieval Arthurian knight,
even if the objects of the quests are quite different. Love stories form a minority, and
they are not focused on the ideals of courtly love as formulated in the roman courtois –
which is not to say that ideals as well as idealized love are absent from popular Turkish
narratives. The closest analogues in occidental medieval literature are the late medieval
Spanish libros de caballería, the chivalresque romances satirized in Cervantes’ Don Qui-
xote.
There are nevertheless generic differences between the various types of medieval
Turkish ‘epics and romances’. In her edition of one of these narratives, Irène Mélikoff
draws a basic distinction between ‘the epic that was created spontaneously on the ances-
tral soil in pre-Islamic times and the epic that developed among the Islamized Turks,
transplanted into foreign countries’ (1960b: I, 41). The former is represented in an epic
cycle commonly entitled ‘The Book of Dede Korkut’ (see below). The latter comprises a
number of different subtypes. Here a symbiosis of foreign models and native creative
spirit has taken place: ‘From their new home [the Turks] have the epic elements and
the plots with which they have amalgamated their own; they have adapted them to their
tastes and their mentality and, by transforming the foreign elements in this way, they
have created a new Turkish epic literature’ (1960b: I, 41–42). Two areas of foreign influ-

⁷ Similar problems are encountered in Arabic and Persian oral literature; see ch. 24 by T. Herzog on
Arabic and ch. 25 by J. Rubanovich on Persian in this volume; for a discussion of some of the tales
of the Arabian Nights under the generic term ‘romance’, see Heath 1987–88.
⁸ For a survey of narratives in a mixture of verse and prose in world literature, see Harris and Reichl
1997.
684 Karl Reichl

ence can be distinguished, the Iranian and the Arabian. The Persian epic tradition,
centred on Firdausī’s Shah-nāma and its popularization, has led to the composition of
imitations and continuations in Turkish which, according to Mélikoff, are characterized
by their ‘extrême naïveté’ (1960b: I, 42). From the Persians the genre of the historical
romance was also borrowed and adapted, such as the romance of Abū Muslim, a histor-
ical figure from the first half of the eighth century. He fought against the Umayyads to
help install the ‘Abbāsids, but was treacherously killed by the second ‘Abbāsid Caliph, al-
Mans.ūr, in 755.⁹
From a Persian source is also derived the Turkish romance of H . amza, the H. amza-
nāme.¹⁰ H . amza b.‘Abd al-Mut t
.. alib was the Prophet’s paternal uncle, who has become the
hero of a popular romance, of which versions are found not only in Persian and Turkish,
but also in Arabic, Urdu and other languages, generally differing significantly from one
another.¹¹ The earliest Ottoman version extant was composed around 1400 by H . amzevī,
a lengthy narrative, which in Alessio Bombaci’s words, has become proverbially synon-
ymous with a fabulous tale.¹² The H . amza-nāme was extremely popular in the Ottoman
Empire, well beyond the Middle Ages. Evliya Çelebi (Chelebi), the seventeenth-century
traveller, gives in his Seyahat-nāme (Book of Travels) a vivid description of Erzurum,
then (in 1645) an ‘international’ town with Persian, Indian and Chinese merchants and
a Turkish, Armenian and Georgian population. He found the Muslim women enchant-
ing, was impressed by the longevity of the men and is full of praise for their oratorical
skills:
[…] the Musselmán women wear pointed caps of gold and silver stuff, velvet trowsers [sic]
and yellow boots: they are extremely pretty, their teeth as well arranged as their words; with
their beautiful hair, dragging a thousand lovers after them as slaves. The men are long-lived, in
society may be found many men past seventy years of age, with full use of all their faculties.
They generally speak a peculiar dialect, but their divines and poets speak with great eloquence,
and their storytellers delight intelligent people by their tales of Hamza, and by Chinese
shades. (Hammer[-Purgstall] 1834: II, 114)

Evliya Çelebi does not elaborate on the art of the storytellers. As far as we have texts of
the H. amza-nāme, the bearers of tradition are named in an introductory phrase which
has become formulaic and is found in this type of popular narrative as far afield as
Uzbekistan. In a manuscript from 1200 / 1785/86 the 69th part of the romance
begins with the phrase:

⁹ See Moscati 1960 and the study by Irène Mélikoff 1962.

¹⁰ In Turkish the titles of these popular romances are generally compounds with Persian nāma ‘book’
as second element. In modern Turkish orthography the spelling of this word is nâme (or just name);
the emphatic sounds in Arabic names and loan-words (symbolized by a dot under the letter in Latin
transliteration) are simply spelled as h, t, s etc. in Modern Turkish.
¹¹ See Meredith-Owens 1986; Hanaway and Pritchett 2003; for the Arabic Sīrat H . amza see the para-
phrase and analysis in Lyons 1995: II, 223–38; III, 534–85. See also ch. 24 by T. Herzog in this
volume.
¹² ‘Vers 1400, H . amzevī, frère de Aþmedī, dédiait à l’histoire de H.amza, oncle du Prophète, tombé
dans la bataille de Uh.ud, un prolixe H. amza-nāme, devenu proverbialement synonyme de récit fabu-
leux.’ Bombaci 1968: 260.
 26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative 685

Râviyân-ı ahbâr u nâkilân-ı âsâr ve muhaddisân-ı rûzi-gâr revîler öyle rivâyet iderler ki […]¹³
The narrators of stories and the transmitters of traditions and the storytellers of the world,
the narrators tell a story thus […]

An Uzbek version of Abū Muslim has a similar opening phrase:

Ammo roviyoni axbor va noqiloni osoru muhaddisoni shiriniguftor andog’ rivoyat qilibdur-
larki […]¹⁴
Now, the narrators of stories and the transmitters of traditions and the sweet-spoken story-
tellers tell a story thus […]

All the words for ‘narrator’ in this formula are Arabic: Turkish râvi and Uzbek roviy
come from Arabic rāwin ‘narrator, storyteller, transmitter’; from the same Arabic root
rivayat/rivoyat ‘narrative’ is also formed; T. nâkil/ Uzb. noqil come from Ar. nāqil
‘bearer, transmitter’ (as well as naqqāl used in Persian), and T./Uzb. muhaddis comes
from Ar. muh.addith ‘speaker, storyteller, transmitter of tradition’, related to h.adīth ‘talk,
story, tradition’ and, of course, h.adith, the words and deeds of the Prophet according to
Islamic tradition. A similar formula is found in the Arabic popular epic narratives, the
siyar, whose narrators are generally called rāwī.¹⁵
There is indeed a close connection between the Arabic popular sīra, maghāzī and
futuh. narratives and the Turkish popular romances.¹⁶ One of the most popular Turkish
romances, the Bat..tāl-nāme, is inspired by Arabic models. It is an epic narrative on Seyyid
Bat.t.āl, a ghāzī or warrior for the faith of Islam, active in the wars of the Umayyads and
early ‘Abbāsids against the Byzantines in the eighth century.¹⁷ The Turkish popular
romance probably goes back to the beginning of the thirteenth century (Mélikoff
1960b: I, 47). In the Bat..tāl-nāme, Seyyid Bat.t.āl, the ‘battle-hero’,¹⁸ fights as general of
the pashalik of Malatia against the Byzantines, of course victoriously, and in the course
of his extraordinary military campaigns crosses the Seven Seas and reaches, not unlike
Alexander, distant and fabulous lands. H. L. Fleischer has aptly characterized the hero:
Conforming to the ideals of his people, Bat.t.āl is the union and model of all chivalrous virtues
and clerical perfections; he is the flower of aventure – Achilles, Ulysses, Roland, Abellino, all
in one person. On his expeditions to most parts of the world, in various disguises, often for a
long time unrecognized even by his friends, he overcomes the most dangerous adventures
with the help of his singular audacity, presence of mind, cunning and craftiness and performs

¹³ Sezen 1991: 91. The form revîler is somewhat unusual; compare the formula in the ‘Tale of Gül and
Ali Şir’ (Gül ile Ali Şir Hikâyesi) edited by Boratav (1946: 230): Râviyan-ı ahbâr, nakılân-ı asâr,
muhaddisân-ı ruzigâr şöyle rivayet ederler ki […]
¹⁴ This is the beginning of the second part; the beginning of the first is somewhat more involved.
Sarimsoqov 1992–93: II, 3. Uzbek is here written in present-day orthography.
¹⁵ See Jacobi 1995; Ott 2003: 42.
¹⁶ The topic of the sīra (pl. siyar) is the lives and heroic deeds of legendary or historical persons, of the
maghāzī the wars of the warriors for Islam and of the futuh. the Muslim conquests; see further
ch. 24 by T. Herzog in this volume.
¹⁷ See Mélikoff 1960a; for a detailed discussion, see Fleischer 1888; for a German translation, Ethé
1871; for an analysis, in particular of the tale’s characters and motifs, see Köksal 1984.
¹⁸ Arabic seyyid ‘lord’ denotes also a descendant of the Prophet; Ar. bat..tāl means ‘brave man, hero’.
686 Karl Reichl

unheard-of deeds of prowess so that his appearance alone, even the mere sound of his name
puts great numbers to flight.¹⁹

The Bat..tāl-nāme is in prose; a verse version dates from the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury.²⁰ The prose is simple; ‘there are no traces of Ottoman literary prose with its endless
chains of complex sentences, of Arabic and Persian rhetoric, of parallelism in the structur-
ing of speech and of inserted proverbs and verses’ (Fleischer 1888: 239). Its relationship to
the Arabic siyar is more one of style and spirit than of textual dependence. Irène Mélikoff
makes this point in her discussion of the epic genre in Turkish literature:
On a supposé l’existence d’une geste arabe dont le Bat.t.ālnāme serait la traduction. A l’époque
où la littérature populaire turque était surtout orale, on ne peut guère parler de traduction.
[…] Le Roman de Seyyid Bat.t.āl a eu pour point de départ des récits épiques arabes racontés
dans des milieux de Ġāzis; mais, transformés par l’adjonction d’éléments turcs et de motifs
iraniens turquisés, ces récits ont donné naissance à une épopée anatolienne à partir de laquelle
s’est formée une littérature épique ayant pour sujet la conquête de l’Anatolie.²¹

One of the works of this newly created ‘Turkish epic literature’ is the Dānişmend-nāme
edited by Mélikoff. The Dānishmendids were ghāzis of Turkmen origin, who rose to
power in eastern Anatolia at the end of the eleventh century. For their military cam-
paigns against the Byzantines they were awarded the title malik, ‘king’. Their kingdom
ended when their territories came under Seljukid dominion in c. 1180.²² As Mélikoff has
shown, the oral legends about the founder of the Dānishmendids were first put down in
writing in the first half of the thirteenth century; in the middle of the fourteenth cen-
tury a second version was composed by a chronicler by the name of ‘Ālī ‘Ārif. His ver-
sion is in prose with intercalated verse passages; the earliest manuscript of this version
dates to the sixteenth century.²³ The romance as it is transmitted in manuscript form has
clearly had a written textual history. The variations in the manuscripts, to judge from the
examples given, show a certain latitude in phrasing, but, considering that the extracts are
in prose, the different manuscript texts resemble one another sufficiently to suggest a
basically written transmission (Mélikoff 1960b; I, 175–76). Scribes of popular works felt
free to change, add or omit, in the West as much as in the East. When Ethé compared
the manuscripts of the Bat..tāl-nāme, he noticed that ‘in almost no single place do they
agree with one another – as is not surprising in popular romances of this kind – and
manifold insertions, here and there, make it very difficult to find the correct reading of
what was probably the original text.’²⁴
¹⁹ Fleischer 1888: 236. – Abellino was the Venetian bandit hero of a novel and a drama by Heinrich
Zschokke (1771–1848), which was very popular in Fleischer’s time.
²⁰ For a survey of manuscripts and versions (including modern ones), see Köksal 1984: 17–23.
²¹ Mélikoff 1960b: I, 46–47.‘The existence of an Arabic romance of which the Bat..tālnāme is a trans-
lation has been postulated. At a time when Turkish popular literature was mainly oral one can
hardly speak of a translation. […] The romance of Seyyid Bat.t.āl had as its point of departure Arabic
epic narratives which were told in the circles of the ġāzis, but, transformed by the addition of
Turkish elements and Turkicized Iranian motifs, these narratives have brought about an Anatolian
epic which resulted in the creation of epic works about the conquest of Anatolia.’
²² For the historical background, see Cahen 1968: 91–106; Mélikoff 1960b: I, 71–101.
²³ See Mélikoff 1960b: I, 53–70 (composition) and 171–76 (manuscripts).
²⁴ Ethé 1871: I, vi. The German term for my translation ‘popular romances’ is Volksbücher. German
Volksbuch ‘popular book’ generally denotes printed popular novels and romances (chapbooks), a
 26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative 687

Not all variations are due to the activity of scribes, however. These works were gen-
erally recited and read aloud to an audience, and in the process of their performance
changes were introduced which reflect both the skill of the narrator and the taste of his
audience. Before turning to performance and the various types of Turkish ‘minstrels’ and
epic singers, I would like to discuss what Mélikoff called ‘the epic that was created spon-
taneously on the ancestral soil in pre-Islamic times’.

2 The Book of Dede Korkut

This work is extant in two manuscripts from the sixteenth century, one in the Vatican
Library, the other in the Saxonian State and University Library in Dresden.²⁵ In addition
to an introductory chapter, the Dresden MS contains twelve narratives, while the Vatican
MS contains only six of them. According to linguistic and historical criteria, the text in
its present form goes back to the fourteenth or fourteenth/fifteenth century. The com-
position of the narratives in their original form, however, is certainly earlier. Here opi-
nions differ, and not all tales in the Book of Dede Korkut need be of the same age. As the
narratives treat of the deeds of the Oghuz, it can be assumed that the oldest among them
go back to the period before some of the Oghuz tribes moved westward into Anatolia.
This is supported by additional evidence (see below).²⁶
The personage after whom this work is named is alternatively called ‘Dede Korkut’,
‘Korkut Ata’ (both ‘Grandfather Korkut’) and ‘Dedem Korkut’ (my Grandfather Kor-
kut). Dede and ata mean ‘grandfather’, but are also terms of respect, especially when
referring to saintly persons.²⁷ In the Dresden MS the text is preceded by the heading
Kitāb-i Dedem Qorqud ‘alā lisān-i .tāʾifa-i oghūzān, ‘The Book of my Grandfather Korkut
according to the language of the tribe of the Oghuz.’ Dede Korkut, however, is not the
main hero of the epic cycle but rather its ‘chronicler’. He makes his appearance in the
narratives as a wise counsellor of the Oghuz khan, but also as the person who composed
the tales of the adventures narrated. At the end of the first tale, for instance, we find in
the Vatican MS the words:

form (originally as lithographic editions) in which a number of these Turkish popular romances
have circulated.
²⁵ Vatican Library, MS Turco 102, and Dresden, Sächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, MS
Ea.86. Photographs of the Dresden MS are available at <http://digital.slub-dresden.de/sammlun
gen/werkansicht/280873166/0/>. See Illustration 26.
²⁶ The Book of Dede Korkut is considered to be a central text not only for the Turks of Turkey and
Azerbaijan, but also of Central Asia; there is consequently a huge literature on this work, of which
only a few important items can be referred to here. For English translations, see Sümer, Uysal, and
Walker 1972 and Lewis 1974; for a critical edition of both manuscripts, see Ergin 1958–63, and of
the Vatican MS (with an Italian translation) Rossi 1952. For studies of the Book of Dede Korkut see
Zhirmunsky 1974 and Korogly 1976; a useful comparative analysis of the motifs found in the tale-
cycle is given by Ruben 1944: 193–283. An encyclopaedic collection of texts and studies was pub-
lished in Kazakhstan in 1999 (Nysanbaev 1999, in Russian and Kazakh). For a short characteriza-
tion, see also Reichl 1992: 43–55.
²⁷ The transliteration Qorqut (on account of the velar character of the k-sounds) and Qorqud are also
found; Ergin’s critical text has k with a dot beneath to symbolize velarity. When quoting from the
original text, I will use q instead for velar k.
688 Karl Reichl

26 – Beginning of The Book of Dede Korkut in the Dresden MS

Dedem Qorqut boy boyladı, soy soyladı, bu Oğuz-nāmeyi söyledi.²⁸

My Grandfather Korkut composed a tale, made verses, told this Oghuz-nāme.

Dede Korkut narrates and composes poetry, he also plays the qopuz, a lute, and presum-
ably sings. At the end of the eleventh tale (only found in the Dresden MS) we read:

²⁸ Ergin 1958–63: I, 94; facsimile in Rossi 1952, fol. 19v.; see also his translation on p. 111 (‘Dede
Qorqut narrò il racconto, parlò in poesia e disse questo Oġuznāme’).
 26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative 689

Dedem Qorqut geldi, kopuz çaldı, ğāzi erenler başına ne geldügin söyledi. (Ergin 1958–63: I,
243)
My Grandfather Korkut came, played the qopuz and told what had happened to the brave
warriors for the faith (ghāzi).

In the preface to the cycle of narratives, Dede Korkut is introduced as a man from the
Bayat tribe who lived close to the time of the Prophet and was a ‘consummate sooth-
sayer’ (tamam biliçisi).²⁹ There follow a number of maxims and proverbial sayings,
among them:
Qolça qopuz götürüp ilden ile, bigden bige ozan gezer.
Er cömerdin, er nākesin ozan bilür.
İleyüñüzde çalup aydan ozan olsun.
Azup gelen qazayı Tañrı savsun, hanum hey. (Ergin 1958–63: I, 75)
The singer (ozan) goes with his qolça qopuz from land to land, from beg to beg.³⁰
The singer recognizes a generous man, a stingy man.
May the singer play and speak in your presence.
May God chase away ominous bad fortune, oh my khan.

Dede Korkut is such a singer (ozan); this is explicitly stated when it is said that ‘the ozan
speaks from the tongue of Dede Korkut’.³¹ He is a bard, but a bard of special importance
and capability. In the Pedigree of the Turkmens of Abū ’l-Ghāzī, khan of Khiva in the first
half of the seventeenth century, it is written about Dede Korkut: ‘Korkut Ata performed
many unusual deeds (karāmatlar). He lived to an age of 295 years and served as vizier
under three rulers.’³² Among these rulers Salur Kazan is mentioned; for him Dede Kor-
kut composed a praise-poem, which Abū ’l-Ghāzī inserts into his Pedigree.³³ Salur Kazan
appears also in the narratives of the Book of Dede Korkut.
Dede Korkut is not only a vizier or counsellor, possibly with some basis in history,
nor just a bard and oral chronicler. He is an exceptional figure. There are a great number
of legends about him in Central Asia, in particular in Kazakh oral tradition. In one of
them he sees someone digging a grave and when he asks for whom the grave is being
dug, he is told that it is for him. Dede Korkut tries to flee from death, but wherever he
rides on his camel, someone is digging his grave. In the end he realizes that there is no
escape and returns to the banks of the river Syr-Darya, where he dies and where his
mausoleum is found in the vicinity of Kazalinsk.³⁴ As early as 1852 Chokan Valikhanov,
the Kazakh scholar and ethnographer, pointed out that the flight from death as told in
this legend is a shamanistic trait, and he calls Korkut ‘the first shaman, who taught (the

²⁹ Lewis’ translation (1974: 190).

³⁰ The qolça qopuz is lit. an ‘arm qopuz’; Lewis translates ‘arm-long lute’ (1974: 192). A beg is a noble-
man.
³¹ Dede Qorqut dilinden ozan aydur. Ergin 1958–63: I, 76. On the ozan, see Köprülü 1966.
³² Kononov 1958: 57 (Russian translation), 42–43 (Arabic page numbers) (text); Ar. karāmāt means
‘miracles (performed by saints)’.
³³ Kononov 1958: 71–72 (Russian translation), 66–67 (Arabic page numbers) (text).
³⁴ See the texts in Nysanbaev 1999: 34–122 (where the Kazakh küy (melodies) on Dede Korkut are
also discussed). The Central Asian qobuz is not a plucked lute like the qopuz mentioned in the Book
of Dede Korkut, but a bowed viol-type instrument; it is the instrument that the Kazakh baqsï (sha-
man, faith-healer) and the Karakalpak jïrau (epic singer) use.
690 Karl Reichl

Kazakh shamans) to play the qobuz and to sing saryn (a type of melody)’ (Valikhanov
1985: 65). There can be no doubt that Dede Korkut is a complex figure – both shaman
and primeval bard – who harks back to the pre-Islamic world of the Central Asian
Turks.³⁵
In all twelve narratives in the Book of Dede Korkut war-like deeds are related. They
are legendary stories, but have, at least in part, some basis in history. The Oghuz are
already mentioned in the earliest writings in a Turkic language, in the runic inscriptions
in the Orkhon valley from the eighth century. They are also the subject of genealogical,
legendary and historical literature, such as the Pedigree of the Turkmens, mentioned
already, the Jami‘ at-tawārīkh (Universal History) of the Persian historian Rashīd ad-
Dīn (d. 1318) and a legendary history of Oghuz Khan (Oghuz Qaghan), the ancestor
of the tribe, which is preserved in a manuscript in Old Uighur script from the fifteenth
century, thought to be considerably older.³⁶ The various historical elements in the Book
of Dede Korkut have been the subject of scholarly debate; in the context of this chapter
there is no space for further pursuing this question.³⁷
Various groups can, however, be distinguished according to plot. In six of the tales a
rescue from captivity is narrated.³⁸ The beginning of ‘The Tale of the Pillage of Salur
Kazan’s House’ sets the scene for the ensuing adventures in epic grandeur:
Bir gün Ulaş oğlı,
tülü quşuñ yavrısı,
beze miskin umudı,
Amıt suyınuñ aslanı,
Qaraçuğuñ qaplanı,
qoñur atuñ iyesi,
Han Uruzuñ ağası,
Bayındır Hanuñ güyegüsi,
Qalın Oğuzuñ develti,
qalmış yigit arhası Salur Qazan yirinden turmuş–idi.
Toqsan başlu ban iverlin qara yirüñ üzerine dikdürmiş–idi.
Toqsan yirde ala qalı ipek döşemiş–idi.
Seksen yirde badyalar qurılmış–idi.
Altun ayaq surāhiler düzilmiş–idi.
Toquz qara gözlü,
hub yüzlü,

³⁵ See Basilov 1970: 40–54; see also Rossi 1952: 21–25.

³⁶ On the relevant parts of the Jamic at-tawārīkh, see Jahn 1969 and Shukyurova 1987; on the legend
of Oghuz Qaghan, see Bang and Rachmati 1932 and Shcherbak 1959: 13–110; see also the discus-
sion in Reichl 1992: 33–39.
³⁷ On the historical elements in the Book of Dede Korkut, see, among others, Zhirmunsky 1951 and
1962, as well as Zhirmunsky 1974; see also Rossi 1952: 31–35 and Boratav 1983. In appearance at
least, the most historically oriented of the tales is the last one, ‘The Tale of the Rebellion of the
Outer Oghuz against the Inner Oghuz and the Death of Beyrek’.
³⁸ (1) The Tale of Dirse Khan’s Son Buğaç Khan; (2) The Tale of the Pillage of Salur Kazan’s House;
(4) The Tale of How Kazan Bey’s Son Uruz Bey was Taken Prisoner; (7) The Tale of Kazılık Koca’s
Son Yigenek; (10) The Tale of Uşun Koca’s Son Segrek; (11) The Tale of How Salur Kazan was
Taken Prisoner and his Son Uruz Freed him. – Numbering according to the order of the tales in
the Dresden MS.
 26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative 691

saçı ardına örilü,

göksi qızıl dügmelü,
elleri bileginden qınalu,
parmaqları nigarlu,
mahbub kāfir qızları kalın Oğuz biglerine sağraq sürüp içerlerler-idi.³⁹
One day the son of Ulaş,
the young of the feathered bird,
the hope of the wretched and miserable,
the lion of the Amıt river,
the tiger of Karaçuk mountain,
the master of the chestnut horse,
the father of Khan Uruz,
the son-in-law of Bayındır Khan,
the good fortune of the numerous Oghuz,
the support of the young warriors left behind: Salur Kazan rose up from his place.
He had his ninety rich tents with golden tops put up on the black earth.
On ninety places he had spread multicoloured silk carpets.
On eighty places jars were placed.
Golden cups were lined up.
Nine black-eyed infidel girls, pretty-faced,
beautiful infidel girls,
their hair plaited behind,
their breast red-buttoned,
their hands from the wrist dyed with henna,
their fingers ornamented,
filled the cups of the begs of the numerous Oghuz and they drank.

Salur Kazan decides to go hunting, but leaves the encampment without sufficient pro-
tection. The infidels under the Georgian king Şökli attack the encampment and lead the
women into captivity. When they also want to take ten thousand sheep along with their
plunder, the shepherd Karaçuk opposes them together with his brothers. Meanwhile
Salur Kazan has been warned in a dream and returns with his warriors. He hears from
Karaçuk what had happened, but is at first unwilling to take him along on his expedi-
tion against King Şökli. Karaçuk, however, succeeds in persuading Salur Kazan by his
determination and loyalty. Salur Kazan and his companion arrive just at the moment
when King Şökli is about to have Salur Kazan’s wife and son killed. After a heroic battle,
the captives are freed and the infidels defeated. At the end we read that ‘My Grandfather
Korkut came, composed a tale, made verses, told this Oghuz-nāme.’⁴⁰ Before the tale
ends, Dede Korkut speaks a poem on the transience of human life and gives a blessing.
This tale is like the others composed in a mixture of prose and verse. There are
eighteen verse passages in Ergin’s edition, ranging from two lines to seventeen. They are
found in different situations and express different moods. One example will have to
suffice. When Salur Kazan at first refuses to take Karaçuk along, the brave shepherd
insists and demands to be apparelled for the campaign:

³⁹ Ergin 1958–63: I, 95. I have printed the text so that the parallelism of the prose comes out more
clearly. For syntactic reasons, mahbub kāfir qızları in the last line had to be moved further forward
in the translation.
⁴⁰ Dedem Qorqut gelüben boy boyladı, soy soyladı, bu Oğuz-nāmeyi düzdi qoşdı; Ergin 1958–63: I, 115.
692 Karl Reichl

Qoñur atuñ virgil maña

Altmış tutam gönderüñi virgil maña
Ap alaca qalqanuñı virgil maña
Qara polat öz qılıcuñ virgil maña
5 Sadağuñda seksen oquñ virgil maña
Ağ tozluça qatı yayuñ virgil maña
Kāfire men varayın
Yeñiden toğanın öldüreyin
Yiñüm-ile alnum qanın ben sileyin
10 Ölür-isem senüñ uğruña ben öleyim
Allah Ta‘āla qor-ise ivüñi ben qurtarayın (Ergin 1958–63: I, 104)
Give me your chestnut horse,
Give me your spear of sixty spans,
Give me your multicoloured shield,
Give me your sword of black steel,
5 Give me your quiver with eighty arrows,
Give me your strong bow with the white grip,
I will go to the infidel,
I will kill the newly born,
I will wipe the blood off my forehead with my sleeve,
10 If I die, I will die for your sake,
If God Almighty protects me, I will save your house (family).

The poetic form of this verse passage is typical of all verse portions in the epic cycle.
Lines rhyme in irregular groups (here ll. 1–6 and 7–11). Sometimes a rhyme pattern
might be interrupted by non-rhyming lines. Also, the rhyme might consist of a constant
rhyming word, as in lines 1 to 6 (where actually the two last words of the line rhyme).
The rhyming vowels are dependent on vowel harmony, which can result in slightly dif-
fering rhymes (öldüreyin, sileyin with front vowels vs. varayın, qurtarayın with back
vowels). Morphological variants can also rhyme (the first person singular optative form
öleyim rhymes with öldüreyin etc.). The metre is syllabic, but irregular. The verse lines in
this passage comprise between seven and sixteen syllables, with a predominance of twelve
syllables. In modern popular epic poetry verse passages in lines of 7/8 and 11/12 sylla-
bles are the rule.⁴¹
When comparing these verse lines with the prose passage given above, it can be seen
how a strongly patterned parallelistic prose can, as it were, merge into verse. In the
Turkic languages the verb comes at the end of the sentence; furthermore the structure
of Turkic morphology is agglutinative. This means that various grammatical categories
(tense, person, mood, number etc.) are expressed by distinct suffixes, ‘glued’ to the verb
stem. The form öldüreyin (I may/will kill) consists of the morphemes öl- (die), -dür-
(causative), -e- (optative) and –(y)in (1st person singular), lit. ‘may I cause to die’. From
this it follows that parallelistic lines will almost automatically have ‘grammatical rhyme’,
i. e. the same verbal suffixes at the end of a sentence or clause. This extends to other
sentence parts, as in the various nominal appositions in the introductory sentence of this

⁴¹ See Boratav 1964: 11–14. On the form of the Book of Dede Korkut, see also Rossi 1952: 87–91 and
Zhirmunsky 1974: 615–29.
 26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative 693

tale. Viktor Zhirmunsky (1985) has suggested that the verse of Turkic oral epic poetry
has its origin in parallelism, a suggestion which is supported by the style of both prose
and verse of the Book of Dede Korkut.
The tale in the Book that has aroused most scholarly interest outside Turcology is
the ‘Tale of How Basat killed Tepegöz’ (no. 8). In 1815 Heinrich Friedrich von Diez
published a study with the title Der neuentdeckte oghuzische Cyklop verglichen mit dem
Homerischen (The newly-discovered Oghuz Cyclops compared with the Homeric
[Cyclops]). Diez, who owned the Dresden MS, edited and translated the text of this
tale and discussed its relationship to the Cyclops of the Odyssey. ‘Tepegöz’ or ‘Depe
Göz’ is compounded of tepe/ depe ‘top, crown of the head’ and göz ‘eye’; this describes
Tepegöz, who, like Polyphemus, is an ogre with only one eye on his forehead. The
hero of this narrative is Basat, the son of Uruz Koca. Basat was brought up by a lion
and has traces of a ferocious animal in his character. Tepegöz, the Cyclops, is the son
of a shepherd and a peri (fairy). He harrasses the Oghuz with his forays and demands a
tribute of sixty-six men per day, a number that Dede Korkut manages to bring down
to two. When Basat’s help is sought and he hears that his brother had lost his life
through the ogre, he goes to fight the ogre. Tepegöz puts Basat, who is unable to
wound him with the arrows he shoots at him, into his boot. At night Basat frees
himself and blinds the ogre with a spit heated in the fire. Basat escapes from the ogre’s
den by a ruse similar to that employed by Odysseus (he kills a ram and leaves the ogre’s
cave in the ram’s skin) and in the end kills the giant. The Polyphemus motif is widely
diffused in folklore and also in folktales of the Turkic peoples. The similarity to the
Polyphemus story is striking, but the precise relationship of this folklore motif to the
Homeric epic remains unclear.⁴²
Folkloristic motifs are also found in other tales of the Book of Dede Korkut. One is
the central motif of the ‘Tale of Deli Dumrul’ (no. 5). It is motif D1855.2 in Stith
Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, ‘Death postponed if substitute can be found’.
In the Turkish narrative, Deli Dumrul, a dare-devil Oghuz hero and also something of a
simpleton (deli means both ‘crazy’ and ‘brave’) is one day a witness to how a man dies in
the flush of youth. In his naïveté Deli Dumrul asks how this can be and is told that
‘Azrāʾīl, the Angel of Death, has taken the young man. Deli Dumrul challenges ‘Azrāʾīl ,
but has to admit defeat in the end. He is given a reprieve if he can find someone to
sacrifice his or her life for him. Neither Deli Dumrul’s father nor his mother are willing
to give their life for their son. His wife, however, is ready to make the sacrifice, but Deli
Dumrul is not in agreement and would rather die with her. As a reward God grants Deli
Dumrul and his wife a long life, but carries off his parents. This motif is best known
from Greek myth: Admetus has to die but will be granted life if someone else dies for
him. His aged parents refuse, but his young wife Alcestis descends for him into Hades.
According to Euripides’ drama, Alcestis was, however, saved in the end and brought
back to earth by Heracles.⁴³ This motif with variations is also found in the Greek ballads

⁴² On the ‘Polyphemus motif ’ in Dede Korkut, see Grimm 1857; Ruben 1944: 244–53; Mundy 1956.
For this motif in folklore, see Hackman 1904; for Turkish folktales with this motif, see Eberhard
and Boratav 1953: 159–60 (Type 146).
⁴³ See Thompson 1955–58; Ruben 1944: 230–38
694 Karl Reichl

(tragoudia) about Digenis Akritis, the Byzantine border warrior against the Muslims; a
mutual influence is not unlikely.⁴⁴ Deli Dumrul, who is ready to wrestle with the Angel
of Death on account of an unknown youth, clearly embodies the heroic ideal of these
tales.
Two of the narratives are bridal quests, ‘The Tale of Kam Püre’s Son Bamsı Beyerek’
(no. 3) and ‘The Tale of Kañlı Koca’s son Kan Turalı’ (no. 6).‘The Tale of Bamsı Beyrek’
is perhaps the more interesting of the two, because elements of its plot show a close
resemblance to the return of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, but also because the tale in
the Book of Dede Korkut is the earliest version of a widely diffused heroic oral epic from
Central Asia, the epic of Alpamysh. The narrative opens with a common motif of Turk-
ish and Turkic epic and popular romance, the childlessness of a couple, which is reme-
died through divine intervention. Bay Büre Beg and Bay Bican Beg are at first childless,
and when they have children – Bay Büre a son and Bay Bican a daughter – they promise
to marry them to one another. After Bay Büre’s son Beyrek has shown his valour, he is
ceremonially named Bamsı Beyrek of the Grey Stallion by Dede Korkut. Bamsı Beyrek
sees Banu Çiçek, his betrothed, for the first time when he is out hunting. He falls in love
with her, but is challenged by her to a bow-shooting contest, a horse-race, and a wres-
tling match. Although Bamsı Beyrek wins these contests, marriage is delayed until Banu
Çiçek’s brother Deli Karçar is satisfied with the bride-price. Dede Korkut manages to
collect the demanded animals, including one thousand huge fleas, and gets Deli Karçar
to give his consent to the marriage. At the night of the wedding feast the infidels attack
the Oghuz and Bamsı Beyrek is led into captivity together with thirty-nine of his com-
panions. Sixteen years pass without news from Bamsı Beyrek, who is the ruler of Bay-
burt’s prisoner. Yartaçuk, who was once given a shirt by Beyrek, dips this in blood and
‘proves’ in this way that Beyrek has died. He asks for Banu Çiçek’s hand and is promised
to be married to her. When Beyrek hears of this, he breaks out of prison with the help of
the king of Bayburt’s daughter, who had fallen in love with him. On his return he
exchanges clothes with a minstrel (ozan) and meets first with his shepherds, who have
remained loyal to him, and then with his sisters, who lament their brother’s death. At
the wedding feast Beyrek is given his own bow and shoots an arrow through the mark,
the bridegroom’s ring. He addresses songs to the khan and his court and exchanges songs
with his wife, who, it becomes clear, had been tricked into marrying Yartaçuk, but who
has remained faithful to her husband. Beyrek finally reveals his identity and miraculously
heals his father’s blindness. In the end Beyrek’s companions are freed, Bayburt is
destroyed, Beyrek’s seven sisters are married to his companions, and the king of Bayburt’s
daughter becomes Beyrek’s second wife.
This is clearly also the plot of the epic of Alpamysh, an epic which is found in
Uzbek, Kazakh, Karakalpak and other Central Asian Turkic traditions; there are even
versions in non-Turkic languages.⁴⁵ All of these versions exhibit the same structure: the
combination of a bridal quest including suitor contests that consist of bow-shooting,
horse races, wrestling and others, and a return story, with the motifs of the disguise of

⁴⁴ See Deter-Grohmann 1968: 27; Politis 1909. On Digenis Akritis, see also ch. 17 by E. Jeffreys in this
volume.
⁴⁵ For a detailed study, see Zhirmunsky 1960; see also Reichl 1992: 160–70, 333–53, and 2000: 21–36.
 26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative 695

the returning husband, the testing of retainers, family and wife, and the recognition of
the hero through skills such as the ability to wield a mighty bow.⁴⁶ In some traditions the
legend of Alpamysh is preserved in the form of a folktale (Tatar), in others in the form of
the archaic heroic tale (Altaian). In Uzbek, Kazakh and Karakalpak the poetic form of
the legend of Alpamysh must be called heroic epic, even if in most of these traditions the
epic is in a mixture of verse and prose. It should be stressed, however, that in many of
these works it is not verse that is inserted into prose, but rather prose that connects the
sometimes very extensive verse passages.⁴⁷ Interestingly, the enemies in the Book of Dede
Korkut are the Christians and their king, while in the Central Asian epics the hero’s
adversaries are the Buddhist Kalmucks (both qualified as infidels). In both cases, adjust-
ments of the story to later historical circumstances have been made, to the wars of the
Seljuks and other Oghuz tribes with their Christian neighbours in the west, and in Cen-
tral Asia, to the bloody clashes between Turks and Oirats (Kalmucks) in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. These are later adaptations of a legend whose origin in all
probability antedates the move of the Seljuks south-west from Central Asia, from where
it must have been carried to Anatolia.⁴⁸
A final remark on this tale in the Book of Dede Korkut concerns the relationship of
the last part of the narrative to the homecoming of Odysseus. V. Zhirmunsky (1967) has
pointed out the striking similarities between Alpamysh and the Odyssey. How these simi-
larities can be explained, is an intriguing problem which has not been solved. For the
present discussion it is one further indication of the firm rooting of at least some of the
narrative material in Dede Korkut in a more ancient world of oral poetry, whether this
world reaches back to antiquity or not.

3 Epic Singers, Minstrels, Public Entertainers

In the Dresden MS the cycle of epic tales is entitled Kitāb-i Dedem Korkut, ‘the Book of
my Grandfather Korkut’. In the Vatican MS it has the title H . ikāyat-i Oghuz-nāma,
where both the Persian nāma, meaning ‘book’ like Arabic kitāb, and the Arabic word
h.ikāya ‘tale’ indicate the genre. The tales of the Oghuz are a book in the sense that they
have been written down, but it is uncontroversial that they were not composed as writ-
ten literature, as a ‘book’. The term h.ikāya (Modern Turkish hikâye) is used in Turkish
for the tales of the Turkish minstrel, the âşık. The word âşık (an Arabic loan-word)
means ‘lover’ and underlines the important role that love (divine and worldly) plays in
their poetry; it has been used for the Turkish minstrel since the fifteenth century. The
âşıks perform lyric poetry, both of their own composition and of poets like Yūnus Emre,
mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, and they traditionally also recited narratives,

⁴⁶ The names Bamsı and Alpamysh can be interpreted as being related if one derives Alpamysh from
Alp Bamysh/Mamysh (Hero Mamysh); Mamysh/Bamysh and Bamsı are most likely variants of the
same name. See Zhirmunsky 1960: 71.
⁴⁷ For a more detailed discussion of prosimetrum in Turkic oral epics, see Reichl 1997.
⁴⁸ The history of this legend/ epic is difficult to retrace; see the discussion in Zhirmunsky 1960: 145–
55. For a German translation of an Uzbek version of Alpamysh, see Reichl 2001.
696 Karl Reichl

both romances and epics. They accompany themselves on the saz, the Turkish long-
necked lute. The generic differentiation, as was said above, is difficult; many of these
tales are love-romances, but some, like the tales of the Köroğlu-cycle, are heroic tales,
close to the heroic epic. As with other traditional art forms, the reciter of hikâyes is fast
disappearing. One of the last Turkish traditional minstrels is Âşık Şeref Taşlıova (b.
1938), whose repertoire of hikâyes has recently been published.⁴⁹ In Central Asia, the
oral epics performed by the ‘singers of tales’ are generally called destan (or dāstān, a Per-
sian loan-word). This word is also used in Turkish as a genre term, where it can either
mean, as in the Central Asian Turkic languages, a traditional epic (with generic varia-
tions), or a type of traditional poem on a heroic or historical topic (Elçin 1967).
Book epics in Turkish are composed in rhymed couplets; on account of their metri-
cal form, they are designated by the Arabic term mathnawī (Modern Turkish mesnevi).⁵⁰
One of these is the tale of Varqa and Gülşāh, a love romance from the fourteenth cen-
tury, the first of its kind in Anatolian Turkish.⁵¹ The author of this work is called Yūsuf-
i Meddāh., Yūsuf the meddāh.. The meddāh. – an Arabic word meaning ‘panegyrist’ – is a
public storyteller and reader of popular narratives, similar to the storyteller of the Ara-
bian coffee-house.⁵² In Central Asia this type of entertainer is generally called qis..sa-
khvān, ‘reader of qis..sas (stories)’.⁵³ What is noteworthy is that this type of narrator and
popular entertainer clearly depends on written texts, but often uses these written texts
fairly loosely, to say the least. In other words, literacy and orality are intimately inter-
twined in the performance of a meddāh. or qis..sa-khvān, the predominance of one or the
other depending both on the skill of the entertainer and on his willingness to adapt to
the wishes and interests of his audience. In the quotation from Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahat-
nāme above, the word ‘storyteller’ translates meddāh.; at other places in his travel book,
Çelebi also uses the word qis..sa-khvān. Georg Jacob, in an early study of the Turkish
meddāh., characterizes this type of public entertainer as follows:
The meddāh.s, the professional narrators, are masters of oratory. They enact mostly comical
situations from the everyday life of the lower strata of society, which on the basis of astute
observation they copy and caricature. They represent these situations with humour and liveli-
ness, favouring the form of the dialogue and imitating various dialects and voices in it. They
emphasize their gestures through the use of a stick and a cloth.⁵⁴

These are the meddāh.s whom Jacob has studied and some of whose texts he has trans-
lated. Some were not only, or perhaps not even primarily, actors and mimes, but also

⁴⁹ On the Turkish hikâye as a genre, see Spies 1929; Boratav 1946; Eberhard 1955; Çobanoğlu 2000;
Başgöz 2008. On the Turkish aşık, see also Moyle 1990; on Âşık Şeref Taşlıova’s hikâyes, see Türk-
men, Taşlıova, and Tan 2008. For a general survey of Turkish and Turkic epic and hikâye, see Bor-
atav 1964.
⁵⁰ See Flemming 1990a. The Arabic term, derived from the root thanā ‘to fold’, refers to the metrical
form of these poems.
⁵¹ Modelled on a Persian source; for an introduction, edition and translation, see Smith 1976.
⁵² See ch. 24 by T. Herzog in this volume.
⁵³ On these and other terms for the ‘singer of tales’ in the Turkic languages, see Reichl 1992: 57–91. –
In Modern Turkish orthography, these terms are spelled meddah and kıssahan; -han is derived from
Persian khvāndan ‘to read’.
⁵⁴ Jacob 1904: 6. On the Turkish meddah, see also Nutku 1976; Boratav 1986.
 26 Medieval Turkish Epic and Popular Narrative 697

readers of popular romances, as too was the entertainer whom Evliya Çelebi saw and
heard in Erzurum. Here, too, the meddāh.’s performance is marked by a dramatic enliven-
ing of the narrative, a recital which, in the case of a gifted meddāh., uses the manuscript
or printed text as a prop rather than as a text to be followed faithfully word for word.
The meddāh. and qis..sa-khvān was also a familiar figure in Central Asia. H. Vámbéry
noted that in Bukhara in 1863 in front of the Divanbegi mosque (madrassa) there were
some trees ‘where the dervishes and meddah (narrators), employing strenuous mimics,
narrate in verse and prose the heroic deeds of warriors and prophets and are always
listened to by a curious audience’ (1865: 142). H. Zarif and V. Zhirmunsky, in their
study of Uzbek oral epic poetry, stress the importance of this type of narrator/entertain-
er for the meeting of orality and literacy, written and oral tradition:
In the towns and the villages around towns there were also professional readers (the so-called
qissa-xon), who read popular books aloud to an illiterate audience, performing in the bazaars
or, by invitation, in private homes. On these occasions an experienced reader could re-tell a
text from memory, with corresponding individual deviations. The folk singers (ashulachi) had
in their musical-poetic repertory works of Classical Uzbek poetry and music. Through these
routes the influence of written literature has long since penetrated into Uzbek oral epic poet-
ry. (1947: 28–29)

It is incontestable that works like the Book of Dede Korkut have their roots in oral poet-
ry, and it is equally incontestable that, with the âşık, the art of the oral poet has contin-
ued in Turkey into the present time. On the other hand, from an early period onward,
this oral art has been in close contact with literacy, both as a tool for putting orally
performed narratives into writing and as a form of literature, in the narrow sense of the
word, that has helped mould and shape oral poetry.⁵⁵ Narrators like the meddah. stand, as
it were, at the cross-roads of orality and literacy, reading, reciting, performing from
memory and even ‘composing in performance’, as the skill of the narrators allows or the
performance situation might demand. In the modern world an entirely new situation
has arisen, at first with the spread of oral poetry in the form of audiotapes and later in
the form of video-clips. YouTube offers performances by Turkish âşıks, and there are, of
course, film and television adaptations of the Dede Korkut narratives as well as of the
Bat..tal-nāme and popular epics like Köroğlu. This is a new orality, but in a fixed, re-play-
able form, and in this way not unlike the fixed written text. The transformations
entailed by these new media is a fascinating story, but well beyond the limits of this
chapter.

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