A Collection of Folklore along the Vasyugan River at the Beginning of the 20st Century

The Finnish researcher K.F Karjalainen spent four years (1898-1902) in the Khanty-speaking region of the River Ob and its tributaries. His work resulted in a rich collection of dictionary, grammatical and folklore material, most of which was published by Finnish and Hungarian researchers, after his death. The texts which Karjalainen transcribed in the Eastern Khanty region have so far remained manuscripts, and are now being prepared for publication. The author of the study presents Karjalainen's research conducted in the region of the Vasyugan River, and also describes the collections of texts from a folkloristical aspect. Karjalainen transcribed texts of the Eastern Khanty dialect in three places. Along the Tremyugan River, a territory belonging to the Surgut dialect, he wrote 67 pages of text. This includes three bear songs, a long heroic song, and the texts of vows, prayers and 25 riddles. In his whole legacy only the riddles are translated into Finnish. The rest of the texts are merely in Khanty with sporadically a few comments in Finnish or Russian on the margins. In Likrisovo, on the border of the Surgut and the Vakh dialect, Karjalainen transcribed five short bear songs. The Vasyugan collection is of the greatest volume, it is 89 pages long. It includes a long, 1017-line heroic tale, which tells the story of the battles of a man of divine origins, the son of Mother Earth and Father Sky. The purpose of battles in the Khanty heroic songs is usually obtaining a wife or some kind of vendetta. Heroic songs from Vasyugan have nothing to do with marriage; apart from Mother Earth no other women are mentioned. The protagonist comments several times that he does not know why he has been sent to battle, there is nothing to take revenge for. Characters in Khanty heroic songs are often helped by mythical animals, or they themselves turn into animals. In the tale from Vasyugan it is the horse of the protagonist who appears from the clouds every time he calls for it, and takes the hero wherever his father or mother has ordered. The transcribed texts also include a 379-line fly agaric song and a few individual songs. The fly agaric song serves as a teaching for young people preparing for marriage. The singer emphasises the importance of appropriate speech in order for the gods to provide good luck in hunting and fishing. If, however, inappropriate words have been uttered, lighting a candle in the church can make up for it. The individual songs are about love, and one aims to teach. It talks about how humans and bears live together in the forest, but both have to respect each other's territory. The texts are significant from both a linguistic and a folkloristic point of view. On the one hand, these are the oldest coherent texts recorded in the Vasyugan dialect of Khanty, on the other hand, they represent genres (heroic songs and fly agaric songs), which so far were little known in the Eastern Khanty region.

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