Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs (review)

The Nart stories are a cycle of heroic stories known among the peoples of the Caucasus, both the non-Indo-European-speaking peoples represented in this volume and the Ossetes, an Iranian-speaking people. Told in several genres of folk narrative (legends, folktales, and folk poetry), the stories narrate the origins and adventures of the Narts, the people of the Caucasian heroic age. Colarusso's collection is a welcome translation of these texts, especially because it is the first large-scale English translation of the stories. Although the translations of the stories will be of great service to scholars of heroic epic and comparative folk narrative, there are several important problems with the commentary and texts.

Much of the commentary is questionable as analysis and comparison. Colarusso proceeds from the assumption that the stories are "a treasure trove for the study of ancient mythology" that can be used to illuminate not only early Caucasian mythology, but also Indo-European mythology and folk belief (p. xiv). Colarusso suggests that "what is so exciting about the modern study of myth is the possibility of recovering lost belief systems even more ancient than those represented by the myths that lie before the reader's eyes" (p. xv). That he sees the stories in this backward-looking way is made plain, too, by other comments, such as, "These sagas are of interest not only in their own right as a testament to this lost world [i.e., the Caucasian heroic age] but also because they show striking parallels with the traditions of other ancient peoples who at one time were in contact with the North Caucasus" (p. 5). Colarusso also makes much of the "archaic language" of the stories, believing this is evidence of their great antiquity. The problem with his reasoning is that none of the stories was collected in early times—the stories that he translates are all from nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections. Colarusso, of course, is not the first to propose using modern texts in this way—and, in fact, modern texts can preserve ancient traditions—but they must also be accounted for as modern texts, and this aspect of the stories is almost completely lost in the book. As Colarusso himself points out (pp. 4–5), for example, these stories appear to have been important in preserving Caucasian culture in the face of Russian imperialism—that is to say, they clearly had a modern function for the people who told them, one more relevant for understanding their place in the cultures of the region than historical parallels that could not have been known to the tellers.

Colarusso's insistence on referring to the stories in this collection as "myths" or "sagas" is yet another problem. Most of the Nart stories are, in fact, heroic tales or legends and have similarities to many other ancient and modern heroic tales, folktales, and etiological legends from the regions bordering the Caucasus, as well as parallels to traditional stories from further afield. (It should be noted that Colarusso does not use tale types or motifs.) Colarusso constantly proposes parallels to ancient myths for these stories—implicitly arguing, I suspect, for the antiquity of the Caucasian stories. Although there are ancient parallels to the stories, he constantly misses the modern parallels. His approach thus raises doubts about the claims that he and others have made for the antiquity of the Caucasian heroic stories. Indeed, though Colarusso rejects this idea, it may be that much of what he sees as ancient is the recent influence of neighboring traditions on the stories rather than survival of truly ancient traditions.

Finally, Colarusso smoothes out texts by adding material in his translations or bridging passages not in the originals, and he even creates composite texts. His fourth saga, the story of Setenaya and Argwana, for instance, is one such composite...