Epic
Алпамыс
Not translated into English
Anonymous · 1500
Synopsis
Alpamys and his betrothed are engaged from childhood, but a quarrel leads the girl's father to take his clan to the land of the Kalmyks. There, many heroes covet her; Alpamys sets out to find her and defeats all his rivals in the trials imposed on the suitors. Later, having returned to the Kalmyks to help his father-in-law, he falls into the khan's hands and remains a captive for seven years at the bottom of a dungeon. Meanwhile, his half-brother, the son of a slave woman, seizes the tribe, tyrannises it and claims he will marry his wife.
Context
An epic shared by several Turkic peoples, called Alpomish by the Uzbeks and Alpamys by the Kazakhs and the Karakalpaks alike, it exists, according to Viktor Zhirmunsky, in four versions, among them that of the Kongrat, common to the Uzbeks, the Kazakhs and the Karakalpaks, which sets Turkic nomads against the Kalmyks; an Oghuz branch survives in two sixteenth-century manuscripts. Scholars trace the tale back to the Turkic khaganate of the sixth to eighth centuries, and place its finished form between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century. The first transcriptions date from the last quarter of the nineteenth century; a Kazakh variant of more than four thousand lines was written down in the 1940s. Under Soviet rule, the epic was put on trial in the 1950s, according to the historian Hasan Paksoy.
Who it is for
A heroic epic in verse, sung by storytellers, whose versions differ from one people to another.
Prizes and reception
Printed at least fifty-five times between 1899 and 1984; the Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan published an edition in 1961.