The Plot of Heroic Battle in Buryat Versions of Epic about Geser

Abstract

To establish the genesis and transformation of motives in different versions of the Buryat epic texts about Geser, for the first time in a comparative typological aspect, a plot about a heroic battle is analyzed. The similarities and differences in the motive fund of one plot in different local traditions are determined. From the perspective of the main goal of the study to identify the initial motive fund characteristic of the epic tradition of the Mongol peoples, it is relevant and significant to highlight the variation of motives in the local tradition. The static nature of the event series in the invariant of the motives of the fight and victory in the Ekhirit-Bulagat version shows the presence of one main variant of the motive for the fight with the enemy: the traditional fight. The use of variants of the motive of traditional types of wrestling and archery and new variants of the motive: battle and group battles, fighting with the “force of the point”, that is, with a dagger, a spear is revealed in the article. A comparative typological analysis of the motive fund in one plot in different versions establishes the preservation and transformation of the epic text, a feature of the regional variants of the national epic. The revealed discrepancies in the development of the plot about the heroic battle and the composition of the motivational fund show different stages in the addition of two versions of the heroic epic.