About the motives of the hero’s birth in the Altai epic

In modern folklore studies, an urgent task is to study the interaction of ritual forms with epic motifs. An important type of ritual creativity is family-ritual folklore, which is also associated with the cult of the ancestor and other beliefs. In addition to ritual acts, the system of family and ritual folklore also has its own folklore genres that have magical functions for a person’s well-being from the moment of his birth to the creation of a family (songs, well-wishes, folk games, small genres - riddles, proverbs). The epic works reflect the ritual motifs associated with the birth of a child, his development, and the acquisition of a family.

This article examines the rituals associated with the birth of a child in Altaic traditional culture and the epic hero. The purpose and objective of the article is to clarify the motives of the birth3 of the hero in the Altai epic works, as they have not been fully studied.

The material for the article is research and textual publications on the subject of ritual folklore related to the birth of a child, as well as publications of epic works.

The research methods were descriptive, comparative, and comparative to clarify inter-genre relationships, their common and specific features.

The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that it5examines the ritual tradition of the birth of a child from the point of view of the3 presence or absence of motives for the birth of a hero and their specifics in epic works.

Results. The study of this problem has shown how important it is for a complete understanding of ritual folklore as part of folklore traditions, customs in the system of ideological institutions and aspects of the ethnic culture of the Altai people, including in epic works. It is in the rituals that archaic elements associated with the fate of man of the early epochs are preserved, which makes them interesting for researchers. In epic works, they are sometimes reflected by separate motives: the birth of a child, the naming of his name, or implied by the ritual context.

The completeness of the reflection of ritual actions in the epic depends on the plot situations and vicissitudes, therefore they are presented in detail or abbreviated. In the future, we plan to analyze not only Altaic epic texts, but also other related peoples, which will contribute to broader generalizations of our conclusions.

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