Functional transformation in traditional oral narrative: An interdisciplinary study and personal interpretation of the codification of the Armenian epic 'David of Sassoun'.

摘要

Scholars believe the first Indo-Europeans arrived in Asia Minor by the second millennium B.C., but debate whether these were the Armenians, whose earliest presence in the area is thought to date from the first millennium B.C. Establishing themselves in the region of Lake Van, located in what was known, for centuries, as the Armenian Plateau---now referred to as Eastern Anatolia---and also settling the volcanic highlands, lava plateaux, river depressions and valleys of the Caucasus, including the lands of biblical Mount Ararat, Armenians preserved an independent Indo-European language. Like other peoples, they also adapted, for their communicative needs, a vocabulary taken from many cultures.;In 301 A.D., the Armenians became the first people to adopt Christianity as a national religion, a faith they have maintained for 1700 years. The popular Armenian epic, David of Sassoun, had its formative period between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, when Armenia's Christianity was well established. The traditional history recalls a mythology, but is deeply Christian. Narrators, under hostile circumstances, codified their beliefs and perpetuated them orally. After discovery of the epic in 1873, recorders transcribed variant versions using the phonetic Armenian alphabet. The first volume of collected variant texts was published in 1936. In 1939, the first publication of an "official" compilation celebrated the "One Thousand Year Anniversary" of the epic. The compilation has been translated into many languages, including English. Since then, other collections of variant texts have also appeared.;While scholarship on the Armenian epic has continued, to date, to all appearances it has not been examined with an interdisciplinary methodology. This approach facilitated the recovery, from phonetic variant texts, of oral texture. Armenia's traveling narrators communicated in a mix of dialects that sustained many twists of meaning. Personal interpretations led to a theory of functional transformation. This facilitated identification of a geo-historically relevant cultural symbology, a cosmology, and an epic structure in an effort to bring the Armenian epic into the mainstream of the field of comparative epic. The epic---its message foreshadowed in the many titles assigned to it and repeated in the narrative---systematically fosters psychological catharsis, perpetuation of the threatened religious belief, unity among the people, and the remembrance of history.;Functional transformation theory may have implications for the study of phonetically recorded traditional narratives of different cultures. This potential, requiring, in each case, cultural immersion, reaches beyond the scope of the present work, which analyzes variant text content, compares it to sound fragments, applies the data to a modern anthropological theory, determining Armenia's social structure, and surveys how the interpretive results may also serve a penetrating reception of Armenia's still mystifying Christian chronicles.