The Epic of Janyl

The Epic of Janyl (Iradi: Janyl Baatyr, "Janyl the Valiant") is an Iradi oral heroic epic about Janyl, the warrior woman venerated by the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church as St. Janyl, Mother of Irad. Bards (ırchy) sing it to the komuz. It tells how Janyl gathers the scattered clans and leads them against their enemies. Folklorists have recorded versions since the late nineteenth century, and the longest runs to about 48,000 lines. Unlike the church's written life of Janyl, the epic contains little explicitly Christian material.^[1][2]

Content

The versions share a core of episodes:

• Janyl's birth to a chieftain and her childhood among her father's herds, where she learns to ride and shoot;
• the gathering of the clans, as she rides from camp to camp to unite clans scattered by raiders;
• battles and ambushes in the mountain passes, with Janyl shooting from the saddle;
• negotiations over pastures with foreign governors, which she wins by wit as well as force;
• in some versions, a closing episode in which the clans swear an oath to her at a mountain spring.

Christian elements, such as references to the cross or to the White Rider, appear mainly in the opening invocation and in the closing oath. Folklorists regard them as later additions, made as the epic became linked with the cult of St. Janyl.^[1]

Recording and publication

Russian and Tatar ethnographers wrote down fragments in the 1880s and 1890s. Soviet collectors gathered fuller versions in the 1930s–1950s. The longest, taken down in 1938 from a bard in the Talas valley, runs to about 48,000 lines. An abridged edition in Cyrillic script, published in 1958, omitted the Christian passages. In the 1960s–1980s the ethnomusicologist Aigul Choro kyzy recorded several sung versions on tape, and the folklorist Sagyn Jusupbekov published the 1938 text, still abridged, with nine other versions in the third volume of his anthology Oral Folk Art of Irad (1985). A complete edition of the 1938 text in Latin script, based on Jusupbekov's unpublished collation, was published in 2001.^[1][3]

Performance

Bards perform the epic over several evenings at weddings, memorial feasts and gatherings during the Feast of St. Janyl. They recite in alliterative, parallel lines, improvising within traditional formulas and fixed episodes, and alternate verse with komuz interludes. Performances were rare in the Soviet period and revived after 1992. Extracts of the epic are now taught in schools in the Irad Special Economic Zone.^[1]

Relationship to other traditions

Folklorists note close parallels with Janyl Myrza, a Kyrgyz epic about a warrior maiden, and with other Turkic heroine epics. Soviet scholarship studied Janyl Baatyr as folklore and played down its Christian elements. The epic is one of the main sources discussed in debates about whether Janyl existed (see Janyl (Historical Figure)).^[2]

See also

• Ak-Kula (Legendary Horse)

References

1. ^ Central Asian Folklore Society (2021). Epic Cycles and Horseback Chants of the Northern Valleys. Talas State University Press, Talas, pp. 135–158.
2. ^ Talas State University Press (2017). Saint, Heroine, Myth: The Historiography of Janyl, pp. 1–88.
3. ^ Talas State University Press (2001). Janyl Baatyr: The Complete Text of 1938. Talas.