Milk-White Horses in the Epics of Taiga Hunters, Fishermen and Gatherers

Abstract

One of the most interesting of the numerous riddles that Siberian native cultures present for researchers is according to the author, the way in which Taiga hunters, fisherman and wild plant gatherers created their magnificent epics, describing warriors of the steppe, who lived in golden palaces and owned great numbers of people and countless herds of sheep and cattle. On the basis of field data and analysis of dozens of epic narratives of the Taiga Shor people, the author describes the types of horses, coats and their lay classifications. He finds that the Shor language provides as many terms for horse coat color designation as the Teleuts of Bachat and other descendants of the steppe nomadic cattle herders might give. Pondering upon the considerable contradictions between the epic and ethnographic worldviews, the author highlights the importance of the Shor horse breeding and cattle raising terminology research, underscoring a thousand year gap between the epic reality and the ethnographic period when these epic narratives were put down in writing. Keywords: Epic, hero, colors of horses, Turk, Shor, Teleut, Siberia, Altay.