In the folklore of the peoples of Northern Eurasia, two stories occupy an important place. First, a trickster plot, describes the struggle for survival of a small, mobile creature with a large, old and unwieldy ogre (giant). Another describes the exploits of the hero, the late son of a childless couple. These two plots are presented in the form of a heroic epic and trickster cycles. The latter in Northern Eurasia was identified and studied in detail only for Chukotka and Kamchatka (the Raven Cycle), to an incomparably lesser extent it was studied in Ob Ugrians, Samoyeds, Kets and Tungus-speaking peoples of the Urals, Siberia and the Far East. The heroic epic was studied in detail in Buryats, Yakuts, Dolgans and Turkic-speaking peoples of Altai, and very few in Kets, Ob Ugrians, Samoyeds and Tungus-speaking peoples. In the texts of North Eurasia, it is very difficult to identify a clear sight of the trickster and heroes. The person of the ogre, one of the hypostases of “the world evil”, being the third corner of this triangle, in fact complements this pair, giving meaning to the acts of heroes and tricksters. Semantics of connections of these images has not been analyzed before. The heroic epic and tricksterism in Eastern and Western Eurasia have many similarities that are not accidental. The paper reveals the similarities and differences between the images of the trickster and the hero, as well as their role inversions, due to the borrowing (overflowing) of some characteristic features. Migration of the population to the Urals, Siberia and the Far East from Western Eurasia during the last Holocene was accompanied not only by the transfer of the achievements of material culture, but also by the transfer of myths and symbols, which are not always recognizable, as they went through many stages of transformation and symbiosis. The analysis of plots and images in the “triangle” trickster – hero-ogre reveals the features of their symbiosis, due to the inversion, as well as their role in the calendar myth.

The main purpose of the academic analysis of the Kyrgyz epic Gulgaaky is to clarify its ontological, axiological, socio-ethnic and ethical-aesthetic value from the point of view of the tragedy of love as a symbol calling for the rapprochement of the militant peoples – the Kyrgyz and Kalmyks.

The relevance of the topic lies in the fact that to this day the epic Gulgaaky remains one of the unexplored works of the Kyrgyz people, despite its great artistic-aesthetic, social, philosophical and epic-symbolic wealth. It (wealth) actualizes the catharsis of love, the source of which is the tragic story of personal relations between the Kyrgyz hero Gulzhigit and the Kalmyk ruler Gulgaaky. From our point of view, this work has a great expressive and emotional advantage even over the Kyrgyz epic Manas, when it comes to the amazing lyricism of the language, the subtle transfer of deep feelings, the romanticism of the inner world of the main characters, the presence of a variety of artistic means and techniques.

In the process of the academic analysis, hermeneutic, logical and analytical methods of research were used, allowing to reveal the essence of the main idea of the epic associated with its socio-philosophical, artistic, spiritual and empirical specificity.

Our research led to the following results. In the philosophical context, the fundamental unity of the living and the inanimate world in the epic is the nature with which man is fused (the nomadic cult of Tenir), and obeys the will of fatum (dependence on it), whose soul after death continues to live in the imaginary world. Therefore, the ontological basis of the epic is connected with the identity of the laws of nature and human morality, for evil receives its punishment. The axiology of the epic is based on the theme of love and death of the heroes, which determines its tragedy and is carried out according to the scheme: acquaintance-rapprochement-fusion-self-sacrifice-transformation. Hence, the category of the tragic becomes a martyr (physical suffering of the characters), suicidal (suicide of the heroine) and fatal (fate scenario) phenomenon. In the social context, the novelty of the epic is that love acts as a factor in the fusion of physical and spiritual (between the main characters) without performing ritual (religious) rites. In our opinion, one of the reasons for this approach is the original understanding of reality, which allows through a symbol of love that knows no boundaries, to make an attempt to bring together two warring people – the Kyrgyz and Kalmyks.

The subject of the article is a geographical name Uryankhai, the former name of the province where Tuvans live now, the historical ethnonym uraangkhai, and folklore name of the Sakha people uraangkhai-sakhalar. For many years, the meaning and linguistic identity of the naming Uraangkhai have been discussed in the literature; the spatial distribution and ethnicity of those referred to as uraangkhai or similar names have never had an unambiguous interpretation. At the same time, the certainty of the geographical territory named Uryankhai within its boundaries, the linguistic affiliation of the toponymical ethnonym uraangkhai and its probable etymology are extremely important for learning the historical geography of southern Siberia, for studying the ethnic composition of its territory and its linguistic landscape in the historical perspective. Giving an overview of the most important literature on the issue and relying on similarly sounding names, the author relates the toponym Uryankhai with the place name Urengoi, associated with the area of distribution of Samoyedic languages in the Ob River basin, shows that such a name has the status of a geographic appellative, and not a specific name of a geographic object, and explains it from the Nenets language as varyo-ng-hoi ‘the mountain with thawed patches’. It is clear that the object with the same name defies individual identification, but it is understandable as the name of a geographical province, whose territory is inhabited by Tuvans, who were called uryangkhai for a long time. In the light of the established origin of the toponym Uryankhai, the folk naming Uraangkhai-Sakha, on the one hand, historically connects Sakha (Yakut) people with the more southern territories, in particular, with the territory East Tuva; on the other hand, the name Uraangkhai-Sakha fits in the model of naming territorial groups of Sakha people according to the characteristics of the area where they live. In the Yakut Olonkho, naming uraangkhai always correlates with the people bearing the standard traditional Turkic culture. Mentioning of uraangkhai in the Evenki epic texts reflect, without a doubt, the influence of the Yakut folklore, hence, the identification of uraangkhai with the Evenki, as suggested by some researchers, is unconvincing.

Acknowledgments: The study was prepared within the framework of the RFFR, project No. 18-412-140013 p_a “The Epic Heritage of the Arctic (Northern) Yakuts in the Context of Ethnic History (the Problem of Interaction and Mutual Influence)”.

The article is devoted to one of the basic categories, along with the category of space, the category of time, as reflected in the texts of the Khakass heroic tales of Altyn Aryg, recorded by S. P. Kadyshev (1885-1977), a popular folk singer of the Khakassia Republic; Аy Khuuchin and Aydolay, recorded after the narrator P. V. Kurbishekov (1910-1966); Khara Khuskhun, recorded after the narrator P. V. Todanov; and texts of the Tuvan heroic tale Khaiyndyryngmai Bagai-ool (Bold, Daring, from haiyndyrar ‘to act, to do’), combining the features of an epic and fairy-tale narratives. In addition, Tuvan material was also taken from the article by M. V. Ondar, which is devoted to the analysis of standard phrases reflecting the time in the texts of Tuvan heroic tales. The relevance of the research is connected with the growing interest in the place and role of temporal ideas in the form of the ethnic linguistic culture. It is known that space and time as the fundamental properties of being determine the specifics of the mentality of an ethnic group, determine the uniqueness of time and spatial plans of life. Each language has its own means of expression and its own system of means of expression (temporal) representations.

The purpose of this article was to identify and describe repetitive standard phrases that reflect the time in the texts of heroic tales of the Khakass and Tuvan people. The study was conducted within the anthropocentric paradigm of knowledge, the natural starting point of which is the idea of man and language in man. As a result of the research, temporary representatives of folklore texts of the Khakass and Tuvan languages in comparative terms were identified and analyzed; the composition of temporal vocabulary in the heroic epics of the Khakass and Tuvan languages was determined; both traditional temporal and nominators relevant to the language of the heroic epic were defined.

The results of the study can be used in lecture courses in the Khakass and Tuvan languages at philological faculties of universities, in the preparation of teaching aids, dictionaries, as well as in comparative typological studies.

The concept of lembi (or lempi in North Karelian) and the related myth-based set of rituals is a phenomenon specific to the Karelian traditional culture. Over the past century, lembi has most often been associated exclusively with love magic and maiden audiences. The study of folklore-ethnographic sources and Karelian epic songs based on which E. Lönnrot wrote The Kalevala epic has shown, however, that originally the functional, gender and age framework of this concept used to be much broader. Lembi is not only a sexual attraction, first and foremost, of young people, not only a special magical power, an ability to charm numerous members of the opposite sex. This is both the external and internal beauty of a person, a synthesis of moral and physical qualities, that is, what creates a positive image. This is a very capacious concept, which includes honor, and charm, and the ability to farm, and hard work, and happiness, and good fame, and good luck, what is nowadays meant by the words and “charisma” and “sex appeal”. The purpose of pre-wedding love rituals was to raise lembi to an unattainable height for others, and after the wedding, too high lembi was considered a disease and the cause of adultery.

The article relies on archival materials, as well as records the author was taking during folklore-ethnographic expeditions to Karelians in the last decades of the 20^th century and first decades of the 21^stcentury. Traditional methods of folklore studies were employed: typological, descriptive, comparative-historical, and structural-typological.

The aim was to provide an extended definition of the lembi concept and, proceeding from the vocabulary, to define the functional, age and gender scope of use of this term, including its use in The Kalevala. One of the tasks was to identify the transformation pathways of the lembi concept.

The article has been necessitated by the lack of knowledge on the subject and the growing interest in folk culture, including ritualization and the mythological dimension of love magic, not only among specialists but also among wider audiences.

Acknowledgements: the study was financed from the federal budget through allocations to state order to KarRC RAS (project № АААА-А18-118030190094-6).

This article is the first to review the history of collecting and studying the storytelling tradition of Verkhoyansk from the times of the famous folklorist I. A. Khudyakov to the present.

The relevance of the study lies in the importance of the preservation, popularization and distribution of the epic traditions of the peoples of the Russian Federation in preserving the diversity of cultures of the peoples inhabiting our country for future generations.

Objective: to summarize and analyze the results of painstaking collecting work from I. A. Khudyakov to the present day, both individual folklorists and folklore expeditions to the Verkhoyansky District, Sakha Republic (Yakutia). In the process of research to achieve the goal, the task of identifying the contribution of folklorists, who studied the oral folk art of the region, to the study of the local epic tradition was solved.

The materials collected by folklorists from the 19th century to the present, including the authors of the article, and deposited in the archives of the Institute of Humanitarian Research and Problems of Indigenous Peoples of the North, SB RAS and the National Archive of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), in the personal archives of the authors recorded from informants – residents of the Verkhoyansk ulus, as well as the published texts of Olonkho by Verkhoyansk narrators. The study used both theoretical methods (the study of archival materials, scientific literature), methods of comparison and generalization, and methods of field research.

As a result of the study, it was established that while I. A. Khudyakov collected and studied Verkhoyansk folklore in stationary conditions, subsequent folklorists of the Soviet period – A. A. Savvin, V. V. Illarionov, P. N. Dmitriev, S. D. Mukhopleva – collected the richest folklore material in the field. The article emphasizes the role of collectors-enthusiasts: T. T. Danilov, who recorded M. N. Gorokhov’s olonkho “Kyydaannaakh Kyys Bogatyr”, E. I. Burtseva, who recorded the olonkho with technical tools, I. I. Struchkova, M. A Struchkova, the materials of which are used in the study of the storytelling tradition of the Verkhoyansk Olonkho-narrators. The results of the analysis and academic generalization undertaken in this article will help to further academic research on the local epic tradition of Olonkho-narrators.

This article discusses cuisine in Guinea-Conakry and its representation in the literary tradition of Sunjata. Many key events involving women in the epic of Sunjata center on their role as cooks and cuisine provides female protagonists with the resources they use to demonstrate their heroic abilities and competence. Heroic status in the epic requires both magical abilities and social recognition through elegiac praise sung by griots. This article shows how the relationship between heroes and heroines reveals the deeper Mande value of gender complementarity in society. Heroines do not fight on the open plains or track game in the bush, but rather the kitchen becomes their battlefield and they often play key roles in matters of national significance through their culinary activities.

 Not only does cuisine take on heroic proportions in this Mande literary tradition, but it also continues to play an important social function in modern Guinea. Through the activity of cuisine, Mande diaspora women in Conakry demonstrate artistic ability that is both acknowledged and respected by men. Building on the idea of complementarity, Nelson considers the importance of cuisine as an element of feminine identity in modern-day Guinea. Adapted from Nelson’s 2018 master’s thesis at Dallas International University, this article explores the activity of cuisine both through library research involving comparisons of a variety of published versions of Sunjata, and through fieldwork in Guinea-Conakry where Nelson focused on values and perspectives regarding cuisine. During her fieldwork, Nelson studied cuisine and she analyzes it here using the “seven lens” approach to highlight its artistic elements and cultural significance.

This article discusses the works by P. A. Oyunsky, the great poet, revolutionary, founder of the Soviet literature of the Sakha, dedicated to the wonderful world of the Olonkho epic and the legend of the famous founder Uluu Kudangsa, which reveal the deep philosophical and religious meaning of life, developed by the ancestors of Sakha in the ancient times. The poet rightly believed that in the Sakha archaic epic, light female shamans and their goddess Aiyhyt make the archaic layer of the Aiyy creators cult. Under the influence of the ancient cults of Heaven and Earth, zoomorphic guardian spirits and female shaman “mothers of beasts” moved to the Upper World, joining later men patrons of the military democracy era. The former goddesses of the Universe, represented in the form of the cosmic moose, deer, bears, acquired anthropomorphic features and turned into spouses of higher deities. This process resulted in a mirror-reflection of social relations on earth that took place from the period of the late Neolith and Paleo Metal until the early Iron Age. That is why the Pantheon of deities lived in large families and abided by the rules of the tribal relations. All this was typical of the social societies standing on pre-state stage of development. The Olonkho epic, which goes back to the Turkic tradition of singing oleng, preserved ancient totemic features that disappeared in other Turkic epics. Thus, the analysis of Olonkho texts and ritual hymns of algys blessings can trace the evolution of early forms of religion and the formation of the Pantheon of deities of the Upper World, where there was a strict hierarchy of sacred power. The novelty of the research lies in the accuracy of reproduction of Sakha traditions, rituals and myths. As a result, the author reveals the organic unity of light shamanism with the cult of ancestors. The works of the great poet P. A. Oyunsky arouse keen interest of researchers in the Humanities. The reconstruction of early cults reveals the continuity of totem cults and their influence on the sacred power of fire priestesses, blacksmiths, shamans, warriors, and leaders.

In the context of the challenges of modern science towards the search for fundamental invariants of the general scientific picture of the world, the synthesis of natural science constructions and ancient thinking, enshrined in the Olonkho heritage, seems promising. In this perspective, when studying the traditional culture in general, the reconstruction of the harmonious structure of the Yakut pantheon of deities, the generally accepted classification of their names and loci, today is almost kept to a minimum. It should also be pointed out that in Yakut folklore studies, the moment of myth creation itself remains outside the field of research. We must not lose sight of the fact that over many historical epochs, the traditional mythological fabric transmitted from generation to generation has been multiplied and processed by the creative activities of narrators. The latter, in its primary basis, formed the sum of anthropological and psychophysiological constants, real-historical and folk-mythological narratives, the objective and subjective experience of the narrator, and finally, the features of external factors at the time of execution. In the interest of increasing the objectivity of the research, an interdisciplinary systems approach is proposed, where the starting point is the use of the Gumilev deduction method – a peculiar bird's-eye view. This method is necessary for a more adequate resolution of the problem of the separation of sources available to science. The aim of the study is to identify the prerequisites (reasons) for the statement of multivariate interpretations of the names and loci of the celestials pantheon of the ancestors. The methods of review, analysis, synthesis, comparison, widely used in folklore, are used, and the methods of synergetics, extrapolation, and hermeneutics are also used. According to the author, variability in its root comes from the nature of human co-creator, and an interdisciplinary synthesis at the junction of a number of disciplines is necessary to obtain an objective picture of the classification of the names and loci of the ancestral pantheon deities. This work is a logical continuation of the previous articles of the author “Model of the Sakha World: semantics from the perspective of form geometry (based on the Yakut epic)”; “To the question of the structural interpretation of the locus of the heads of the Yakut pantheon from the perspective of the geometry of forms”. Further research in this direction is planned.

Acknowledgments: The study was carried out as part of the research project of the NEFU “Heroic epics of the Turkic-Mongolian peoples of Eurasia: problems and prospects for comparative study”.

The article attempts to analyze the history of the study of the heroic epic Olonkho of the northern Yakuts and the epic traditions of the Dolgans, Evens and Evenkis for the period from the XIX century to the beginning of the XXI century and systematize the achievements of several generations of epic specialists who took part in understanding the mutual influence of the Yakut olonkho with the epic tradition of the abovementioned Siberian peoples of Russia from the point of view of modern science. It is assumed that the olonkho of the northern Yakuts and the epics of small peoples of the North of Yakutia as a result of cultural interaction could not but undergo a significant interaction. The epic heritage of the northern Yakuts, as well as the epic of the northern peoples, arose and developed in a particular socio-historical, common, cultural context, ideologically, worldview, artistically corresponding to the mentality of the ethnic groups inhabiting the Arctic zone of Yakutia, significantly different in the manner of performance, composition of characters, subject structure, language. The purpose of the article is to analyze the sources and works that to some extent dealt with the problems of interaction and interinfluence of the northern Olonkho and the folklore of the Evenkis and Evens. The fundamental theoretical and methodological principle of the research is the identification and analysis of sources and works, suggesting a consistent and systematic study of a set of problems related to issues of the regional olonkho tradition, interaction and mutual influence of the northern olonkho and Evenkis and Evens folklore. At present, the study of the northern Olonkho and the epic tradition of the small peoples of the North (Evenkis and Evens) does not stand still – it has reached a certain stage of development, separate questions have been developed concerning typology, performing arts, textology, studying of plots, the language of the epic, etc. At the same time, it should be stated that there is no overall picture of the formation and development of the northern Olonkho, as well as its features in the process of interaction and interinfluence with the epic culture of the peoples of the Arctic. Researchers who repeatedly referred to the epic of the northern Yakuts and the folklore of the Evenkis and Evens, each separately, undoubtedly made their invaluable contribution, but the results of their research are highly specialized, determined by the scientific interests of these researchers, and today there is a lack of an interdisciplinary approach to the scientific research.

Acknowledgments: The study was prepared within the framework of the RFFR, project No. 18-412-140013 p_a “The Epic Heritage of the Arctic (Northern) Yakuts in the Context of Ethnic History (the Problem of Interaction and Mutual Influence)”.