Historical and ethnographic aspects of the epic tales of the Vilyui ulus of Yakutia

It is believed that the Yakut heroic epic olonkho originated in ancient times, and according to the stage typology, researchers attribute it to the earliest types of the Turkic-Mongolian epic. Local traditions of olonkho are among the less developed topics. The study and collecting of the Vilyui region olonkho, covering a considerable territory, is substantially inferior to the central epic tradition of Yakutia due to its remoteness. The article deals with the features of storytelling in the Vilyui ulus of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), its role and place in the spiritual culture of the Sakha people, the mythological sources of epic creativity, the principles of narrative art, the basic spiritual and moral, personal priorities of the narrator’s status based on the results of folklore and ethnographic expedition conducted in 2017 and organized by the Olonkho Research Institute of the M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University. Value characteristics for the performance indicators, as well as the personal qualities of the Vilyui olonhosuts are given. As a result of the research, the author comes to the conclusion that, by all indications, the storytelling of the Vilyui ulus of Yakutia acquired its main features from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. These facts do not differ from the work of many researchers who found out that the epic tradition of the Vilyui and central uluses was formed only after the 18 century. The roots of the traditional Vilyui epic tradition are hidden in the shadow of centuries and are associated with the distant ancestors of the Turkic world time. For a long time of its historical path on a common Turkic basis, the Vilyui storytelling apparently interacted with elements of the culture of the Tungus-speaking tribes, and a “subsoil” layer of early borrowings of the central region storytelling is also revealed. Despite the fact that the members of the expedition received unique information about the storytelling practice of the olonkhosuts of the Vilyui ulus, the olonkho texts could not be recorded. Therefore, a detailed field study of the epic repertoire, preserved in the Vilyui ulus, could give a richer and more accurate picture of the epic heritage. In order to have all the information, it is necessary to do a very laborious job. Only then it will be possible to decide on the final conclusions and more accurately determine the role of the narrators’ speeches in the history of the Vilyui epic tradition. It should be noted that the storytelling in the Vilyui ulus was not collected systematically, and therefore a study on the Vilyui storytelling would be a great scientific and practical interest. The study of origin, the disclosure of the internal patterns of the evolution of the Vilyui storytelling tradition should contribute to solving various problems of the Yakut heroic epic olonkho.

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