Birtalan Ágnes: Kalmyk Folklore and Folk Culture in the Mid-19th Century: Philological Studies on the Basis of Gábor Bálint of Szentkatolna’s Kalmyk Texts.
FOLKLORE GENRES
5. comic tales, jokes 6. etiological tales. 53 9 The Kalmyk emic classification, according to which Bálint specified his collection is: axr túl' "short tale" and ut tül' "long tale". 54 0 On the basis of Basangova (Bordzanova)'s arrangement: uaxr tül' (bytovaja, satiriöeskaja i skaza o Éivotnyh); ut tül' skazka dlinnaja, bol'Saja po ob'jomu povestvovaija" 54 1 Bálint classified all his tales as ut tül', but according to Basangova's (Bordzanova) categorization the animal tales (such as the cumulative tale about the sparrow) belong to the short tales. However, the others are appropriately designated as Long tales according to their solemn content and structure. THE TALES (BÁLINT UTU TÜLI) IN BÁLINT'S MANUSCRIPT 54 2 The tales constitute more than the half of the manuscript and offer a very rich source of material concerning 19 l h century Kalmyk vernacular language and to a lesser extent formal language. 5 4' Bálint also refers to a personal collection of folklore texts in Kazan which included tales, but as it was explicated in the Introduction its fate is unknown. "After living two and a half months in Kazan I mastered the spoken Kalmyk tongue so that I speak and write in it. After listening I collected words, folk tales, folk songs, riddles, materials representing the purest folk tongue for a little Chrestomathy." 54 4 On The recording of tales in Astrakhan Bálint commented as follows: "After the folk songs followed the recording of tales with more difficult [syntactic] structure. These [tales] were written down in Kalmyk script by young Kalmyks from various tribes, some of them visited the secondary school, some the surgical school, and others the elementary school and were considered to be good story-tellers. These tales written down in Kalmyk script were told sentence by sentence for me by my instructor according to the people's pronunciation. This way we prepared the transcription that I read out to him and corrected [the parts] in the case if I heard improperly. The grammatical analysis and the interpretation of the tales followed thereafter. My tale collection prepared this way contains fifteen shorter and longer folk tales written down with Kalmyk letters and in an abbreviated Hungarian "'This subgroup is rather a kind of myth, i. e. etiological myth (Mong. domay, Khal domog, Kalm., Oir. domg and should be comprehended rather as the basic genre of Mongolian mythology. Certainly, because no such written mythological tradition existed among those peoples who had a longer tradition of using script, the mythological sujets are sporadically scattered throughout the various genres. However, the various domogs providing the origin-explaining sujets compose a loose system of mythology that belongs to the common heritage of the Inner Asian nomads and the aboriginal Siberian hunters (these two legacies are combined in the pre-Buddhist Mongolian tradition). In detail cf. Birtalan: Die Mythologie. According to my suggestion for the classification of the etiological tales, stories should not be listed in the genre classification of tales. 1 propose to treat the domogs as an independent genre group: the "myth" (definitely, these narratives can not be comprehended as myth in the classical Greco-Latin sense). 541 1 This genre distinction is similar to that of the Mongolian folk songs (cf. Chapter Songs). 54 1 Basangova: Sandalovyj larec. p. 3. 54 2 Motives and formulae typical for the Kalmyk tales will be discussed in the notes attached to particular tales, however, a comprehensive analysis of this aspect requires a separate study. 54 1 Manuscript pp. 36-139. 54 4 "1 harmadfél hónapi Kazánba lételem alatt magamévá tettem a kalmik népnyelvet annyira, hogy rajta beszélek és irok; gyűjtöttem egy kis Chrestomathiára való anyagot, mely áll tulajdon hallomásom után följegyzett szók. népmesék, népdalok és talányokból, a lehető tiszta népnyelven." Jelentés az akadémiához, pp 244-245 (cf. Kara: Bálint Gábor keleti levelei ). 85
