5. The Buryat Magic Fairy Tales

Text preparation and translation by E. V. Barannikova, S. S. Bardakhanova, V. Sh. Gungarov and others. Introductory article and commentaries by E. V. Barannikova and S. S. Bardakhanova.—Novosibirsk: Nauka. Siberian Publishing Firm, 1993.—341 pages.

The book contains 25 Buryat fairy tales. It includes popular fairy tales that are widely known in different regions where Buryat people live. For publication we chose specifically Buryat story lines, tales with close international analogs, and also texts representing oral poetry based on such ancient Indic or Mongol written works as “Panchatartra”, “The Magical Dead Man”, “A Sea of fables”, and others familiar to Buryats who knew Ancient Mongolian. The plot lines that came to Buryatia from these sources later acquired a particular local coloration.

These and many other phenomena representing the aesthetic, ethnographic, and historical character of the Buryats are reflected in the present volume.

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