The Battle of the Epic Hero with Death The Problem of the Relationship between Medieval Turkic and Byzantine Folklore

Absztrakt

The fifth tale of the Turkic Book of Dede Korkut about Deli Domrul has a strong connection with the Greek legends and Byzantine songs about Digenis Akritis. In terms of its plot, this story stands apart from the rest of the tales of the Book of Dede Korkut and, at first glance, from the tradition of the Turkic epic in general. It combines two motifs that were distributed primarily in ancient and modern Greek folklore: the struggle of the hero with death and the wife who gives her life as a ransom for her husband’s death. But at the same time, there is a similar motif in the Bashkir folklore in the oral epic Ural-Batyr as well as in a legend (known to us from a later literary study from the 19th century) about the hero, who, boasting to his friends, tries to deceive and kill Death, but God punishes him for that.