MYTHOLOGICAL EXPOSITIONS OF EPIC LEGENDS OF THE EVENKI AND EVENS AND ITS ROLE FOR STUDYING THE TUNGUS COSMOGONIC MYTHOLOGY AND FOR THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ETHNIC AND LOCAL TRADITIONS

Abstract

The subject of article is made by mythology elements, first of all cosmogonic mythology in epic legends of the Evenki people in their relations to the general representations about mythology of the Evenki and in connection with the problem of sources of the Tungus people mythology, where cosmogonic myths as a folklore form are actually absent. The author reveals and analyzes the Evenki epic legends as, where the description of the world or process of its appearance serves as a beginning.

The structural analysis of the text elements shows that only three texts include all elements of the model of the world without an exception, namely – three spheres of the world including the Middle world, as well as components of the geographical code (names of the landscape elements), phytonimic code (names of trees and grass), and zoonimic code (names of animals). The feature of these texts is the absence of characteristics of the sky which in different variants is present in other texts.

Other texts – and they make the obvious majority – show us the world model of an incomplete kind where there are only its separate elements. It is the Earth, the Middle World, the Sky (the sky-umbilical cord, the sky in size about the squirrel eye, the sky with a threefold rainbow, the sky with six rainbows, the sky covered box made from birch bark, the sky similar to a rainbow, the sky similar to an overturned kettle); ears of elk, a carpet, a skin from a head of a deer, mountain, rivers, the sea, trees, grass, animals.

The author does a conclusion that mythological expositions in Evenki epic texts are rather late, as well as at the Mongolian peoples, according to available researches, and marks the potential of comparative researches of the Evenki epic legends with the Yakut epic texts Olonkho in aspect of the Tungus epos genesis.

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