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Представления о пространстве в эпическом фольклоре тюрков-огузов: реальная и мифологическая география «Книги моего деда Коркута»
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 socalled
‘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.