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Nart Sagas from the Caucasus. John Colarusso, ed. and trans. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002. 552 pp.
The volume at issue represents an impressive collection of myths and legends related to the tradition of "Narts" as it shows up in the folklore of Western Caucasia. "Narts" is the cover term for an ensemble of heroic figures who are said to have lived in one or more mythic settlements in (now mythic) prehistorical times. The Nart tradition is known throughout the Western and Northern Caucasus, both among autochthonous gentile groups (Circassian, Abkhaz, Abaza, Ubykh, Ingush, Chechen, in parts of Svan) and peoples who later immigrated into the region (e.g., Ossetian, Malqar). Basically, the book deals with a vast corpus of oral tradition, including both prose and poetic texts. Up to now, there has been no overall documentation of the Nart corpus available that would include the relevant sagas of all those ethnic groups mentioned above. This fact can on one hand be explained by the enormous size of the corpus. On the other hand, the Nart tradition is (in parts) embedded into the actual social habitus in Western Caucasia resulting in a constant process of accommodation and reformulation.
Colarusso's collection is a very careful selection of the Nart corpus still impressive in its size (92 sagas or saga fragments)....