Нартский эпос и кавказское языкознание - The Nart Epic and Caucasology

23-25 November 1992, Maykop, Republic of Adygeya

Proceedings of the VI International Maykop Colloquium of the European Society of Caucasian Studies

Maykop, 1994, pp. 345–349.
Published by the Government of the Republic of Adygea.

Summary

In “Horse Consecration: Ossetic Funeral Rites,” Fridrik Thordarson examines an ancient Ossetic funerary custom known as Bǣkh fǣldisyn, literally “horse consecration.” The rite involved dedicating a horse to the deceased to accompany them on their journey to the afterlife. Drawing on linguistic evidence, oral traditions, and comparative mythology, Thordarson explores the ritual’s Indo-Iranian roots, its moral and eschatological symbolism, and its possible connections to broader Caucasian and Scythian funerary practices.

The article discusses the sermons recited during such ceremonies, which offered the deceased moral guidance for crossing into the next world, including encounters with figures like Aminon and Barastyr, the lord of the underworld. Thordarson also notes parallels with shamanistic traditions and mythic narratives such as Soslan’s descent to the underworld in the Nart epic cycle.

In closing, the author situates the Ossetic tradition within a wider Eurasian context, comparing it to Zoroastrian, Christian, and Islamic conceptions of the afterlife. The accompanying bibliography provides key sources for further study of Ossetic religion, language, and folklore.

Fridrik Thordarson (1928 – 2 October 2005) was an Icelandic linguist. Thordarson was born in Iceland, and studied Classical philology in Oslo. In 1963 he took exams with Latin as his major and Greek and Indian philology as his minors. From 1965 onwards he taught classical philology as a lecturer. He became professor in 1994. Thordarson worked for most of his life in Norway.

Apart from Classical languages, he became an expert in Caucasian languages such as Georgian and Ossetic. He also published a grammar of Ossetic. Thordarson was a regular contributor and a consulting editor to Encyclopaedia Iranica.

“Horse Consecration”: Ossetic Funeral Rites

“Horse Consecration” is my English translation of the Ossetic term Bäkh fäldisyn, which in the old traditional society was used of a certain kind of funeral rites.

Bäkh is the common Ossetic word for „horse“, obviously a loanword, to all appearances from a Nakh (Ingush-Chechen) dialect. It occurs (written Bah) in one of the mediaeval Alanic documents, the so-called “Yassic list of words”, as the equivalent of Latin equus and is thus an old word in the language, at least adopted earlier than the 13th century. (S. Abaev, IES, vol 1, p. 255 ff.; Németh 1959.) This, of course, does not prove the antiquity of the rites, but it does not contradict it either.

Fäldisyn (Dig. fǣldesun) is a verbal noun (infinitive), used in the sense „to consecrate, to dedicate“, especially to the realm of the dead. It is derived from the Indo-Iranian root *dis’- (Indo-European *dik’, deik’) „to point out, show“ plus the ancient preverb *pari-, cf. Sanskrit paridiśāti „to announce, make known“ (a corresponding verb is not attested in Old Iranian). Derivatives of this root are quite common in Ossetic (ǣvdisyn „to make known“ etc.).

The bäkh fäldisyn rites were practised until fairly recent times at the funerals of chieftains or “big men“. I do not know for certain when they fell out of use, and would be grateful for any information on that matter.

Horse Consecration: It means that at the funerals a horse was consecrated or dedicated to the dead as his means of conveyance on his journey to the otherworld. The horse was carefully chosen; not any horse would do. It was not killed, not sacrificed, but after the funeral it was the object of some taboos that seem to have varied from place to place, e.g., it was not supposed to be used as a work horse any more.

At the funeral a speech or sermon was delivered, which contained a detailed description of the journey to the otherworld, and where the dead got instructions for his conduct on his way. The sermon was recited by a relative of the dead, a man of some standing, though not necessarily wealthy, the bǣkh fǣldisaq. The recorded texts are of considerable length; one of the texts published in Iron ādǣmy sǣfǣldisæg (vol. II) covers about 8 pages. The same words, the same phraseology and the same motives recur, with some variations, from text to text. The language is somewhat archaic. It is obvious that we have to do with oral traditions, no doubt of some, or even high, antiquity. We must conclude from this that the bǣkh fǣldisaq had to learn the sermons from a forerunner, a teacher of oral lore or traditions, he had, so to say, gone to school. Some of the words which occur in the texts are not found elsewhere in the modern language, and were evidently not, or only imperfectly, understood by the recorder and his informant; so e.g. nagh, used of the material of which the saddle blanket was made.

In the sermon the dead gets detailed instructions for his journey to, and his conduct in, the otherworld. Common to all the texts that I have examined is a bridge which connects the two worlds. The bridge is narrow, and the passage is dangerous. In some of the texts the dead man’s soul meets Aminon, a kind of judge, or rather a guard, who asks a formal question about the behaviour of the dead while he was still alive: „Was your conduct good or bad?“ The dead is supposed to answer: „I was neither good nor bad, but I tried to be just“, i.e., he must be modest. What happens to the soul if it does not satisfy Aminon, or if it does not succeed in passing the bridge, we are not told. The dead is supposed to have been a good man. But as the difficulties in passing the bridge are stressed, the possibility of an unsuccessful passage evidently exists.

Across the bridge the dead meets various visions, examples of rewards and punishments for good or bad behaviour in the world of the living. Not unexpectedly the punishments have a more prominent place than the rewards among these moral paradeigmata. There is neither Heaven nor Hell, rewards and punishments take place promiscuously in the same world. The visions are quite elementary, representing obedience to or break of ordinary social duties. I find no traces of initiates, people initiated into some kind of mysteries which entitled them to rewards in the realm of the dead.

Having passed these visions — they may be quite numerous the dead arrives in the Paradise, the realm of Barastyr, the lord of the otherworld. In some texts the soul meets Jesus Christ, and at least in one he meets Soslan the central hero of the Nart epic cycle. This variant is not quite clear to me. Does it mean that Soslan, in some traditions, became the lord of the otherworld after his tragic death? In his earthly life he was married to Bedukha, who, in the story of Soslan’s katabasis, his visit in the otherworld, is a person of some standing in the realm of Barastyr. It is tempting to ask if she originally was the queen of Hades?

After the funeral various games took place; among these horse races played a prominent part. In the Caucasus, like in ancient Greece, horse races were confined to funerals. The importance of the horse races is borne out by their name, dugh, Dig. dogh. This is almost certainly a loan-word from some ancient — now extinct — Turkic language spoken in the Ponto-Caspian area, where we may assume the existence of a word *dogh (*dhogh, with a spirant *d-), corresponding to Old Turkic jogh „dirge, funeral ceremony“ (cf. Abaev, IĒS, vol. I, p. 373 ff.).

Funeral rites which closely resemble those of the Ossetic bäkh fäldisyn are found among other peoples of the North Caucasus and among the Georgian-speaking highlanders of the Central Caucasus, who in cultural matters are closely related to the Ossetes (s. in particular Charachidze 1968). But I have not so far come across anything similar to the sermons recited at the Ossetic Horse Dedication rites. At least, no such text seems to have been published.

And now I come to the main object of this paper.

It has for some time been my plan, if my social duties and the brevity of life permit it, to publish an English translation of the bäkh fäldisyn texts that have been available to me. In the bibliography, printed at the end of this paper, a list of 7 texts will be found. I would be very grateful for any information, about texts, published or not published, which are not recorded in this list.

Herodotus, in his famous description of the Scythian funeral rites (book IV, ch. 73), tells us that after the funeral of a chieftain the Scythians „clean“ themselves by taking a sweat bath produced by, or at least connected with, hemp smoking (in details the text is not quite clear). This narrative the Swiss ethnographer K. Meuli has explained as an imperfect description of some shamanistic usage: The dead is accompanied to the otherworld by his kinsmen; these bring themselves into an ecstasy by smoking hemp (Meuli: Scythica, 1). In the light of this I find it natural to explain the original rôle of the bǣkh fǣldisaq as that of a kinsman conducting the dead to the otherworld; he is to take care that he really gets there (an important point in shamanistic usages and conceptions of the otherworld). However, I must admit that I find nothing which indicates that the Ossetic bǣkh fǣldisaq was intoxicated at the funeral or used any means to produce an ecstatic state of mind. But, of course, exuberant drinking bouts used to accompany the traditional funerals of the Ossetes as well as the other peoples of the North Caucasus.

+ Characteristics of the ‘Shepherd’ Image in the Abkhaz Nart Sagas, by Vladislav Ardzinba

+ Abkhazian Cult of Thunder and Lightning and its North Caucasian Parallels, by Viacheslav Chirikba

+ The Adyghe (Circassian) Nart Epic: The People’s Age-Old Memory, by Asker Khadagatl

I am also tempted to see traces of ancient shamanistic practices in the Nart story of Soslan’s journey (or katabasis) to the land of the dead. This journey he undertakes in order to meet his dead wife, Bedukha, not to bring her back to the upper world, as Orpheus his wife Eurydiké in the romantic version of the Greek myth; on the opposite, he needs her help so that he can marry again. This he gets, but on the way back he breaks certain taboos, whereby he discloses to Syrdon, his archenemy, the only vulnerable spot on his body; and this proves fatal.

The journey of the dead to the otherworld and the katabasis of a living hero are, of course, two fundamentally different motives. Nevertheless, there are certain similarities between the bäkh fäldisyn itinerary and the visions met by Soslan in the otherworld. In both groups of texts we meet the same paradeigmata, examples of punishment and reward, expressed in much the same phraseology. In the bäkh fäldisyn texts as well as in the narrative of Soslan’s katabasis we also find prophecies about the future of the world, some of them surprisingly optimistic (justice and equality will rule in the end). In the katabasis texts Bedukha has the exegetic rôle to explain to Soslan his visions and their moral sense.

In the katabasis texts we meet Aminon as a door-keeper in the otherworld, but there is no bridge.

Soslan’s journey to the land of the dead is an event that has taken place only once. It is natural to see in Soslan the mythological proto-shaman (he is no doubt an ancient god), the mythological forerunner of the human shaman. So far as I can see, there are no traces of intoxication in the narrative of Soslan’s katabasis. But to the best of my knowledge Orpheus, with whom Soslan has some, probably only typological, similarities, did not need intoxicating means for hir journey to Hades; — and the shamanistic affinities of Orpheus seem to be beyond doubt.

Numerous questions have neither been raised nor answered in this short report. What are the contributions of Zoroastrianism (it is, however, extremely unlikely that the Zoroastrian faith ever spread to the Saka tribes), Christianity and Islam to the eschatological ideas expressed in the sermons of the Horse Consecration rites, and what is genuine Scytho-Sarmatian (non-Zoroastrian) paganism? Is the bridge which separates the worlds of the living and the dead a borrowing, through the popular religions of Georgia and Armenia, of the Chinvat-peretu of the Zoroastrians of Persia (or the al-Sirat of the Moslems), as Dumézil seems to mean (s. nr. 10 in the bibliography), or an inherited part of the ancient Iranian (or Indo-Iranian) eschatology, and thus ultimately related to, but not a derivative of, the Zoroastrian Chinvat-peretu, as I am more inclined to believe.

University of Oslo,
Norway.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1) A. Schiefner in Bulletin de l’Académie impériale des sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg,
t. 5/1863, col. 449; t. 6/1863, col. 453 ff.
2) В. Ф. Миллер in Осетинские этюды, I, Moscow, 1881, pp. 108 ff. (s. also pp. 132 ff.)
3) Ирон адæмы сæфældыстад, II, Vladikavkaz, 1961, pp. 396 ff.

Soslan’s katabasis:

4) Нарты кæдджытæ, Vladikavkaz, 1946, pp. 115 ff.
Variants in:
5) G. Dumézil: Légendes sur les Nartes, Paris 1930, pp. 103 ff.
Translation in:
6) G. Dumézil: Le livre des héros, Paris 1965, pp. 116 ff.

Other References

7) В. И. Абаев: IES — Историко-этимологический словарь осетинского языка, т. 1–4, Moscow, 1958–89.
8) R. Bleichsteiner: Rossweihe und Pferderennen im Totenkult der kaukasischen Völker.
In Wiener Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik, Jg. IV, Salzburg-Wien 1936, pp. 413 ff.
9) G. Charachidze: Le systeme religieux de la Géorgie paienne, Paris 1968, pp. 303 ff.
10) G. Dumézil: Romans de Scythie et d’alentour, Paris, 1978, pp. 249 ff.
11) Б. Гатиев: Суеверия и предрассудки у осетин, in: Сборник сведений о кавказских горцах, вып. 9, 3, Tbilisi, 1876.
12) M. Kovalevsky: Coutume contemporaine et loi ancienne. Droit coutumier ossétien,
Paris, 1893, pp. 50 ff.
13) A. X. Магометов: Культура и быт осетинского народа, Vladikavkaz 1968, pp. 375 ff.
14) Маяк, вып. 7, Moscow, 1843, pp. 35 f.
15) В. Ф. Миллер: Осетинские этюды, 2, Moscow, 1882, pp. 294 ff.; cf. also pp. 245 ff., 287 ff.
16) K. Meuli: Scythica. In: Hermes 10/1935. Rejmpr.: Gesammelte Schriften, II, Basel-Stuttgart 1975, pp. 817 ff.
17) J. Németh: Eine Wörterliste der Jassen, der ungarländischen Alanen.
In: Abhandlungen der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Klasse für Sprachen, Literatur und Kunst. Jg. 1958: 4. Berlin 1959.
18) F. Thordarson: Bǣx fǣldisyn. In: Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. III, London-New York 1989, pp. 876–77.
19) Idem: The Scythian Funeral rites. In: A Green Leaf. Papers in Honour of Professor Jes P. Asmussen, Lejden 1998, pp. 539–47.
20) G. Widengren: Die Religionen des Iran, Stuttgart 1965, pp. 165 ff.
21) Herodotus, book IV, ch. 71 ff.