re-establish his position in the changed situation. Sometimes he is conveyed
home with extraordinary swiftness by a supernatural agency. He overcomes
his rivals by a feat of valour and wins his wife back.
This story pattern, most familiar as the basis of the Odyssey, is widely
attested in Europe and elsewhere, and well known to folklorists as the
Husband’s Return.^86 It appears in various medieval Germanic tales, in
Serbo-Croat oral epic, and in at least one Russian bylina from the Kiev cycle.^87
However, there is no compelling case for claiming it as Indo-European. It
is a prime example of the wandering folk-tale, diffused without regard to
linguistic boundaries. The influence of the Odyssey is probable in at
least some of the medieval versions. And the Odyssey story, like several
of Odysseus’ subsidiary adventures in that epic, is very likely not a piece of
ancestral Greek tradition but a relatively recent import from abroad, perhaps
picked up by Milesian explorers in the Black Sea region. It shows remarkable
similarities to a story widely current in the epic poetry and popular narrative
of the Turkic peoples of central Asia, the tale of Alpamysh.^88 The subject
matter of the Alpamysh story can be traced back for many hundreds of years.
There is no likelihood that it somehow derives from the Odyssey. So far as we
can tell, it is indigenous to the Eurasian steppes. At the period relevant to the
genesis of the Odyssey this region would have been occupied by Iranian
peoples; the Turkic hordes came much later. But that does not mean that the
story was of Indo-European antiquity or origin.
When Alpamysh returns home after escaping from seven years’ captivity,
preparations are afoot for his wife to marry his wicked half-brother. He goes
to the wedding feast disguised as a beggar. There is an archery contest, in
which the first challenge is to draw Alpamysh’s old bow. Only he is able to do
it. We noted earlier that this motif appears both in the Odyssey and in the
two Indian epics in the context of a contest for a bride. But if in the Odyssey
it is an integral part of a narrative deriving from the steppes and having no
particular claim to be Indo-European heritage, the Indian epic may have it
(^86) Cf. Kaspar Schnorf, Der mythische Hintergrund im Gudrunlied und in der Odyssee (Diss.
Zurich 1879); Willi Splettstösser, Der heimkehrende Gatte und sein Weib in der Weltliteratur
(Berlin 1899); Ludwig Radermacher, Die Erzählungen der Odyssee (Vienna 1915), 47–58;
J. Tolstoi, Philologus 89 (1934), 261–74; O. Holzapfel in Kurt Ranke et al. (edd.), Enzyklopädie des
Märchens, vi (Berlin 1990), 702–7; William Hansen, Ariadne’s Thread (Ithaca–London 2002),
201–11 with further bibliography.
(^87) A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass. 1960), 121, 242–59; Chadwick (1932),
81–90, ‘The Return of Dobryna’.
(^88) On this cf. V. Zhirmunsky, PBA 52 (1966), 267–86; H. B. Paksoy, Alpamysh. Central Asian
Identity under Russian Rule (Hartford, Conn. 1989), 119–57; Karl Reichl, Turkic Oral Epic Poetry:
Traditions, Forms, Poetic Structure (New York–London 1992); id., Das usbekische Heldenepos
Alpomish (Wiesbaden 2001).
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