Nairi Zarian - Davit of Sassoun: Armenian Folk Epic

Dickran Kouymjian

Scholars of epic literature have emphasized from the beginning of comparative studies devoted to them that the dynamic improvisation and poetic evolution of this, the most developed of oral literary forms, stops when the story or saga recited or sung by the bard or minstrel is written down. Surely this was a major factor in sealing the development of what is now called Davit of Sassoun and regarded today as the Armenian national epic. The publication of the first transcribed variant of Sasna tsrer (literally the crooked or bent ones of Sassoun, that is different than straight or normal, thus iconoclasts, non-conformists, independent beings), as the various versions of the saga were called when Fr. Garegin Srvandztiants recorded what he heard from an illiterate reciter in 1873 and published the first ever version of it in Constantinople the following year. The epic continued to be recited decades after in the countryside of Western Armenia around Sassoun and Moush, about fifty kilometers southwest of Van, and neighboring areas, as we know by the collection of other, often very different, versions in the following decades. The ultimate end of the living oral tradition was provoked by the Armenian Genocide committed by successive Turkish governments, which removed through murder and exile the entire native population of Western Armenia. Only those who had learned to recite one or another of the various versions and who survived the physical destruction of the Armenians were able to repeat the epic, in part or in whole, years later when aggressive campaigns in the Armenian Republic were initiated to uncover and transcribe verbatim all versions still remembered among western Armenians who had taken refuge in the new homeland.

The oral epic recited by the ashough or bard was not just a great feat of memory, but one of creative inspiration with the usually illiterate, often itinerant, poet adding details or modifying story lines as the situation called for or his memory skills required. It was during the first phase of this post-Genocide fieldwork of preserving the variants among those who still remembered them, that members of the corresponding branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Armenian decided to edit a digestible and coherent epic out the greatly divergent versions already published or recorded; it was necessary to synthesize the 65 known variants into a single and singular work. In 1938 a team of philologists was assigned to this task Manouk Abeghyan, Gevorg Abov, and Aram Ghanalanyan all of whom had first hand experience transcribing variants among peasant-class, mostly illiterate storytellers; the overall editor was Academician Hovsep Orbeli. They had a deadline to finish this work of synthesis by September 1939, which the Soviet Armenian authorities decided to celebrate, somewhat arbitrarily, as the thousandth anniversary of the creation of the epic of Sassoun. In the process of accomplishing this task, the once regional story of the heroes of the Sassoun-Taron-Moush region was transformed into a national one and given the title Davit of Sassoun, The Armenian Folk Epic.

Davit of Sassoun is caught between the fate of epic poems that have stopped evolving because they are no longer recited by bards from memory, that is the oral tradition gave way to a written or literary epic, and the most unusual phenomenon that the raw material, now some 130 variants of the Sasna tsrer reflecting nuances and interpretations only partially incorporated into the official text are most published in their original dialectical form. Among the many striking features of the Sassoun epic compared to the great poems of this genrethe Homeric epics, the Scandanavian Sagas, Shahnameh, the Georgian epic, Niebelungen Lied, Song of Roland, Song of Prince Igortwo are quite remarkable. Within the very rich Armenian literary tradition spanning nearly 1500 years from the creation of the alphabet until the Davit variants were collected and published, a tradition very rich in historical and poetic writing, not once is the epic of Sassoun or any of its protagonists mentioned. Its various cycles were passed down orally for at least a millennium by illiterate bards; they were ignored or simply unknown to the educated class of clergymen and notables. Because of this total historical silence, when the first variants were gathered and published some thought the work was a creation of the recent pre-modern period. However, research has revealed its clear mention by a twelfth-century Arab writer as well as two sixteenth-century sources, the Kurdish epic the Sharaf Nameh and a Portuguese travel account. Its second unusual feature is the simultaneous creation and publication of the commissioned synthetic version and the scores of diverse variants used to create it. Homers consolidation of the numerous narratives at his disposal to compose the Iliad and the Odyssey is similar to what the troika of scholars did in 1939, but in the Greek poets case, we have none of the variants he worked with only a few fragmentary lines from earlier stories.