Article

Name: Eschatological poetry of Altai: the main themes and motifs

Authors: N. R. Oynotkinova

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Study of folklore

Abstract: This paper analyses the main themes and motifs in Altaian texts about the end of the world. Altai material was compared with Christian sources, as well as with the results of the study of Russian eschatological stories since they have been already thoroughly investigated. For comparison, the motives from Mongolian texts are also given. The texts contain the ideas from Christianity, Buddhism and shamanism. Folklore and religious heritage of Altai are closely connected. Myths about the end of the world may have come to the Siberian Turks in the Middle Ages as an integral part of the early forms of Christianity, through Nestorianism and perhaps through Manichaeism, and in the 18th and 19th centuries through Orthodoxy. It is difficult to isolate the characteristics of Christian eschatological motives in the corpus because there are many religions, including Buddhism, which permeate the environment of ethnic ancestors of Altaians since the second half of the first millennium. Altaic eschatological narratives about the impending end of the world are built by a syllabic alliterative verse, which was characteristic of the ancient Turkic poetic system. Because of their poetic form, these works resemble Russian spiritual verses. The eschatological verses of the Altaians do not contain plots; their content is reduced to a certain number of themes and motives. Three topics were identified in the texts, coinciding with the themes of Russian eschatological stories: «Eschatological era», «The coming of the devil» and «Eschatological catastrophe». Eschatological texts with the theme «Waiting for the Messiah» appeared in a separate group, in the context of the national-religious movement, Burkhanism, in the early 20th century. A comparison of the themes and motifs of the Altaic eschatological verses with biblical sources, as well as with the eschatological texts of other peoples, Russians, Kalmyks and Mongols, showed the similarity of some of the motives. The zoomorphic images of iron animals and birds denoting modern transport are typical metaphors not only in the eschatology of Altaians and Russians but many other peoples who knew the ideas of world religions about the demise of the world.

Keywords: eschatology, altaian eschatological views, altaian myths, altaian christianization, end of the world

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