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Mythology & the Nart Sagas

The heroic epic of the Caucasus and the deep mythic world behind it — gods and giants, rain rituals and earth mothers, read across five essential works.

WorksFive Texts
TraditionOral Epic
FormatFull Text · PDF

At the heart of the Circassian imagination stand the Nart sagas — a vast body of oral tales recounting the deeds of the Narts, a race of heroes and demigods, presided over by the wise matriarch Setenaya. Among the most archaic living epics of Eurasia, they preserve echoes of Prometheus, of the Amazons, and of an ancient earth-mother faith older than any written record. The works gathered here move from John Colarusso's celebrated translations to a Victorian folklorist's notes, a surviving rain ritual, and a modern scholarly reading of the myths' symbolic life.

I

John Colarusso · Princeton University Press

Nart Sagas from the CaucasusMyths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs

The landmark English translation of the Caucasian heroic epic — a corpus of tales peopled by the Narts, the iron-willed Setenaya, the fire-bringer Pataraz, and a pantheon of giants and demigods. Colarusso's introduction sets the sagas against the Black Sea shore where, in 1780, Circassia and Abkhazia still met the sea, and traces their startling kinship with the myths of Ancient Greece. An essential gateway to the living mythology of the Northwest Caucasus.

Read Full Text (PDF) 7 pp.
II

John Colarusso · The World & I, 1989

Myths from the Forests of CircassiaPrometheus among the Circassians

Colarusso reads a modern oral tale from a little-known people of the Caucasus and finds in it striking parallels with the myths of Ancient Greece, Ancient India, and the pagan Germanic world. A vivid argument that the Nart sagas are not mere folklore but survivals from a far older Indo-European and Caucasian mythic substratum — with the chaining of Prometheus echoed in the mountains above the Black Sea.

Read Full Text (PDF) 10 pp.
III

A CircassianWorld Project

Hantse GuasheХьэнцэ гуащэ · A Rain Ritual of the Circassians

A surviving rite for invoking rain, known to the Abkhazians as Dzivara — the "Puppet Princess," a relic of the matriarchal age of Circassian prehistory. Rooted in the veneration of the earth mother as the source of fertility and abundance, the ceremony carried the goddess, clothed in human form, from house to house through the village. A rare window onto the pre-Islamic, pre-Christian faith beneath the Nart world.

Read Full Text (PDF) 4 pp.
IV

John Abercromby · Folklore, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1891

An Amazonian Custom in the Caucasus

A Victorian folklorist's essay, first published in Folklore in 1891, tracing a Caucasian custom back to the ancient legends of the Amazons — the warrior women the Greeks placed on these very shores. Abercromby, archaeologist and President of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, gathers the ethnographic threads that connect Circassian tradition to one of antiquity's most enduring myths.

Read Full Text (PDF) 11 pp.
V

A. V. Gucheva et al. · European Proceedings of Social & Behavioural Sciences, 2019

The Role of Mythologization & Personificationof the Image and Its Symbolic Nature

A modern scholarly study from the Kabardino-Balkarian Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, examining how mythological images are formed, personified, and invested with symbolic meaning in the Circassian tradition. It situates the Nart figures within wider theories of myth, showing how the epic's heroes continue to function as living symbols of a national imagination.

Read Full Text (PDF) 8 pp.

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