The World of the Khanty Epic Hero-Princes: An Exploration of a Siberian Oral Tradition

In his final book, the late Arthur Hatto analyses the Khanty epic tradition in Siberia on the basis of eighteen texts of Khanty oral heroic epic poems recorded and edited by a succession of Hungarian and Russian scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book examines the world view of an indigenous culture as reconstructed from its own words, demonstrates a flexible outline for organising an analytical dossier of the genre of oral heroic epic poetry in a specific culture, and presents an abundance of new information to compare with better-known heroic epics. Consisting of main sections on The Cosmos, Time, The Seasons, Geography, Spirits, Personae, Warfare, Armour and Weapons, and Men's Handiwork, the book also includes a section of background information on the Khanty people. Marianne Bakr -Nagy contributes specialist knowledge of the Khanty language to the linguistic interpretation of the texts, and there is an afterword by Daniel Prior.

Author: Arthur Hatto
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 02/02/2017
Pages: 294
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9781107103214

About the Author
Hatto, Arthur: - Arthur Hatto, FBA (1910-2010) was a scholar of medieval German literature and, especially after his retirement from the University of London, where he served as Professor of German from 1953 to 1977, the comparative study of oral heroic epic poetry. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he had served as a Governor, and a Corresponding Member of the Finno-Ugrian Society. His other publications include translations from Middle High German poems for Penguin Classics: Tristan (1960), the Nibelungenlied (1965), and Parzival (1980); the edition and translation The Memorial Feast for Kökötöy-Khan (Kökötöydün Ası): A Kirghiz Epic Poem (1977); general editorship of Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry (1980-1989), the two-volume proceedings of the London Seminar on Epic, which Hatto chaired from 1964 to 1972; Essays on Medieval German and Other Poetry (1980); and The Mohave Heroic Epic of Inyo-Kutavêre (1999).