Space in the Epic Folklore of Oghuz Turks Revisited: Real and Mythological Geographies of The Book of Dede Korkut

Abstract

Geography is an important element to monuments of epic nomadic folklore of the Oghuz Turks. The Book of Dede Qorqut (Kitab-i Dedem Korkut), a Turkic medieval written epic, is undoubtedly a most important early medieval source on social and cultural life of the Oghuz Turkic tribes. The epic generally rests on the border between oral and literary traditions — and between folk narratives and historical writings. The emergence of the twelve stories to have constituted The Book of Dede Korkut is customarily dated back to the 11th century but those were written down far later, approximately in the 15th century. The twelve songs-legends narrate about exploits of Oghuz heroes. The main plot scheme central to the stories is that of struggle between the Oghuz tribes and infidels, non-Muslims (kafir) in the lands of Asia Minor, as well as constant internecine strife among the Oghuzes themselves. The geography in the The Book of Dede Korkut combines two main stratums, namely: real geographical place names and toponyms mentioned in the epic, and the so-called ‘mythological’ geography and spatial orientation. The epical enemies of the Oghuzes in The Book of Dede Korkut are connected with some specific geographical realities — mainly in the South Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia — by some toponyms mentioned in the tales (a bulk of the latter being names of fortresses). An external enemy for the Oghuzes in The Book of Dede Korkut has specific (‘Tagavor of Trebizond’, ‘evil infidels of the Evnük’, etc.) and, at the same time, mythological features, thereby marking the boundary between the nomadic and neighboring sedentary worlds. Still, the second stratum of the geography in The Book of Dede Korkut has been less investigated. Those are traditional — for Turkic (and, in a less degree, Islamic) mythology — geographical images that exist along with the real ones and are embedded into the system of the existing geographical names (e. g., Mount Qaf). Along with a system of the Turkic archaic traditional spatial orientation (undoubtedly preserved by the Kitab-i Dedem Korkut to a certain extend), it reflects the nomadic worldview connected with Turkic mythology and some Islamic impact. Although the geography of The Book of Dede Korkut is a topic of separate research study, in this case, a clear localization of the epic characters illustrates the fact that a quite a number of the tales took their form and cyclization in the respective territories already.