large silver fingers,
Like ten grey weasels,
Pressed head to head,
His skin began to tear,
And his light clean blood
Sprinkled with convulsing trickles,
Like thin strands,
Of the horse with soft mane and tail,
His temple skin shrivelled,
Like bent bearskin bedding;
Lights of blue flame rose
Hissing from his temples;
Like a raked-up fire;
A flame large as a pot
Was dancing on top of the fire;
His eyes were scintillating with sparks,
Like sparks of a flint-stone;
When blood on his back
Boiled and roiled,
Approached his throat,
He spat and hawked
Splashes of scarlet blood.
This description is conditional (of course, Olonkho-tellers understand that such things are impossible). Its purpose is to extol the outstanding, fantastic, unique hero. The hero’s rising anger is depicted through changes to his appearance.
Similes make a deep impression although they are not impressive but simple: a trap, a weasel, strands of a horse’s mane, a bearskin bedding, fire, a pot, etc., i.e. those things that form part of the past life of the Yakuts (these similar similes create a parallelism of the whole phrase). Impression is deepened because all these simple things are compared with the fantastic events that happen to the hero in a tense moment. Such an effect is created by a contrast of scenes and the joining of ordinary and extraordinary things.
The same effect is created by epithets that describe a man’s condition and characterize objects offered for comparison. Let us look at this example:
(He) Built a winter dwelling
Along the endless southern ocean shore
Of the overflowing
Kys-Baigal-Khatyn ocean,
That throws out monstrous fish
As large as a three-year-old horse,
It emerged at the edge of the earth
And the snowy, white sky,
Dangling and touching (the ocean),
Like edges of sharp scissors,
Sowing a deep sprinkle of snow,
With buttons from bright stars,
With a whip of formidable lightning,
Accompanied with lumbering thunder,
Over-salted by crimson clouds,
Looking like spread wings and tail
Of the endless sky white crane
With a coloured beak,
And rings around the eyes.
It is the description of a winter dwelling constructed. Nevertheless, such a specific description is a basis for the whole picture creation: the space and the fantastic ocean that borders the sky and throws out monstrous fish.
An epic warrior flying on his horse
The thought that the seashore, where the winter road is built, borders the sky undoubtedly resulted from an observation of the horizon. This image serves to show the significant hyperbolic size of the ocean. In doing this, the authors not only show that the ocean borders the sky, but also give a description of the sky through the description of its ‘elements’. This approach is connected with the Olonkho tradition and the entire Yakut traditional song art: all the objects mentioned in traditional songs that play a significant role in the plot’s development are more or less intimately described; but in this case it is not only tradition that plays a role. The fact is that the first human on earth built the winter house; it was built in a wonderful land, the centre of the earth, created for a happy life, and thoroughly praised in the introduction of Olonkho. Thus, ‘the description’ of the sky connects the home and the land where the house is built with the entire universe; and it is a part of praising the land and the human who is predetermined by the gods to live on this land. The text starts with an epithet of a white crane, which is a part of the simile group together with the word ‘cloud’. It is an accepted tradition to portray an image of a white crane flying high up in the sky; it is the Yakut people’s most favourite bird, used in Yakut traditional songs as well as in Olonkho in order to characterize the broad sky. A large number of songs are dedicated to the white crane, described as follows:
The white crane of the endless sky
With a painted bill,
With rings around its eyes –
are the loci communes.
In the first example (the wrath of the mighty hero) everything was based on a chain of similes, but in this example a chain of epithets plays the main constructive role, characterizing separate ‘elements’ of the sky: clouds, snow, lightning, thunder and stars. Such a descriptive structure, taking the form of an enumeration and leading to parallel constructions with complex expressive means, is one of the main stylistic peculiarities of Olonkho.
In the example given, we have shown a typical tendency of Olonkho and of the entire folklore of the Yakut song tradition wherein the narrator gives a description of nature by describing an object (a home in this case) which does not refer to nature itself.
There are a great number of repetitions in Olonkho. Epithets are most frequently repeated with the names of the heroes, heroines, mighty Aiyy and Abaahy, as well as with the names of countries, worlds and the nicknames of the mighty heroes’ horses. They can be complex and contain an entire description. The epithets characterizing the mighty heroes’ horses are especially rich and complex, and also quite grotesque. This is due to the fact that the description of the mighty horse is an element of the hero’s description; thus, the more handsome and mighty the horse, the stronger and more majestic the mighty hero, its owner. A constant enumeration of epithets characterizing the horse every time the narrator mentions the hero’s name is a traditional feature of Olonkho.
There may be any number of pieces setting out the entire epic that are more than ten thousand verses long. These large repetitive fragments of text often contain the key parts of the epic: stories about various important events, about the story of the heroes’ rivalry, about the heroes’ origins. For this reason, such repetitions most often appear in the different characters’ long monologues, in which they express
