Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
- 2 Creativity and Tradition in the Fairy Tale
- 3 The Ultimate Fairy Tale: Oral Transmission in a Literate World
- 4 A Workshop of Editorial Practice: The Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmarchen
- 5 Old Tales for New: Finding the First Fairy Tales
- 6 Helpers and Adversaries in Fairy Tales
- 7 ‘Catch if you can’: The Cumulative Tale
- 8 Unknown Cinderella: The Contribution of Marian Roalfe Cox to the Study of Fairy Tale
- 9 Hans Christian Andersen's Use of Folktales
- 10 The Collecting and Study of Tales in Scandinavia
- 11 The Wonder Tale in Ireland
- 12 Welsh Folk Narrative and the Fairy Tale
- 13 The Ossetic Oral Narrative Tradition: Fairy Tales in the Context of Other Forms of Traditional Literature
- 14 Russian Fairy Tales and Their Collectors
- 15 Fairy-Tale Motifs from the Caucasus
- 16 The Fairy Tale in South Asia: The Same Only Different
- 17 Rewriting the Core: Transformations of the Fairy Tale in Contemporary Writing
- General Index
- Index of main tales and tale-types
13 - The Ossetic Oral Narrative Tradition: Fairy Tales in the Context of Other Forms of Traditional Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
- 2 Creativity and Tradition in the Fairy Tale
- 3 The Ultimate Fairy Tale: Oral Transmission in a Literate World
- 4 A Workshop of Editorial Practice: The Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmarchen
- 5 Old Tales for New: Finding the First Fairy Tales
- 6 Helpers and Adversaries in Fairy Tales
- 7 ‘Catch if you can’: The Cumulative Tale
- 8 Unknown Cinderella: The Contribution of Marian Roalfe Cox to the Study of Fairy Tale
- 9 Hans Christian Andersen's Use of Folktales
- 10 The Collecting and Study of Tales in Scandinavia
- 11 The Wonder Tale in Ireland
- 12 Welsh Folk Narrative and the Fairy Tale
- 13 The Ossetic Oral Narrative Tradition: Fairy Tales in the Context of Other Forms of Traditional Literature
- 14 Russian Fairy Tales and Their Collectors
- 15 Fairy-Tale Motifs from the Caucasus
- 16 The Fairy Tale in South Asia: The Same Only Different
- 17 Rewriting the Core: Transformations of the Fairy Tale in Contemporary Writing
- General Index
- Index of main tales and tale-types
Summary
… and Orcezmceg says to the people: ‘Shall I tell you an old tale or a new one?’ So they said to him, ‘We would indeed have listened to an old tale, but tell us a new one!’ (Gardantil 1927: 12)
Ossetia is a small land in the central north Caucasus, the inhabitants of which speak an Indo-European language, unlike their Caucasian neighbours, to whom they are only culturally related. The speakers of the two main dialects of northern Ossetic, Digoron and Iron, are divided from the speakers of the southern dialect by the Caucasus range itself. The written language developed only after the Russian conquest of the Caucasus and the first texts published in Ossetic appeared at the end of the eighteenth century. After brief experiments with both the Roman and the Georgian alphabet, Ossetic continues to be written in the Cyrillic script.
Ossetes are justly proud of their oral tradition and cultural heritage. Since the later part of the nineteenth century a fine written literature has developed in all the main areas of drama, prose and poetry, but it is the large corpus of orally transmitted traditional material which has given many Ossetic writers their inspiration. Kh. N. Ardasenov (1959: 51-3) stresses the importance of traditional prose and poetry, in all its variety, as a source of subject matter, rich language and form for Ossetic writers; written literature in Ossetia developed within the context of a still thriving oral tradition. In 1934 the Digoron poet Maliti compared himself to the legendary Nart musician, Atsæmæz: ‘I wish, Mama, I could become for you, like Atsæmæz, a wonderful fændyr-player … I would play wondrous songs’ (Maliti 1986: 50).
The fairy tale (Ossetic aryau) is well represented in Ossetic and an attempt was made to list and classify Ossetic animal and fairy tales, according to the system of Aarne and Andreev, in 1958 by A. Kh. Biazyrov. The tales classified as Volshebnye Skazki ‘wonder tales’, types 300-749, are subdivided into the familiar categories of Supernatural Enemies, Tasks, Helpers and Objects and there are good Ossetic examples of many very well-known tales, including ‘The Dragon Slayer’, ‘The Two Brothers’, ‘Rapunzel’, ‘Magic Flight’, ‘The Swan Maiden’, ‘The Princess in the Skin of a Frog’, ‘The Serpent Prince’, ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’, ‘Puss-in-Boots’, ‘The Golden Bird’ and many others.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Companion to the Fairy Tale , pp. 203 - 216Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2002