S e l k u p M y t h o l o g y ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF URALIC MYTHOLOGIES 4 Editors-in-Chief Anna-Leena Siikala (Helsinki) Vladimir Napolskikh (Izhevsk) Mihály Hoppál (Budapest) Editorial board Veikko Anttonen Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer Kirill V. Chistov Pekka Hakamies Nikolaĭ D. Konakov Vyacheslav M. Kulemzin Mare Kõiva Nikolaĭ F. Mokshin Håkan Rydving Aleksandr I. Teryukov Nataliya Tuchkova Academy of Finland Helsinki University Department of Folklore Studies Russian Academy of Sciences Hungarian Academy of Sciences Ethnographical Institute S e l k u p M y t h o l o g y AUTHORS NATALYA A. TUCHKOVA ARIADNA I. KUZNETSOVA, OLGA A. KAZAKEVICH, ALEKSANDRA A. KIM-MALONI, SERGEI V. GLUSHKOV, ALEKSANDRA V. BAĬDAK EDITORS VLADIMIR NAPOLSKIKH ANNA-LEENA SIIKALA MIHÁLY HOPPÁL AKADÉMIAI KIADÓ BUDAPEST FINNISH LITERATURE SOCIETY HELSINKI This edition is based on the Russian original Anna-Leena Siikala, Vladimir Napolskikh, Mihály Hoppál (red.): Ėntsiklopediya ural’skik mifologiĭ. Tom IV. Mifologiya Sel’kupov.Rukovoditel’ avtorskogo kollektiva N. A. Tuchkova. Avtorskiĭ kollektiv: A. I. Kuznetsova, O. A. Kazakevich, N. A. Tuchkova, A. A. Kim-Maloni, S. B. Glushkov, A. V. Baĭdak. Nauchnyĭ redaktor V. V. Napol’skikh. Tomsk: Tomskiĭ gosudarstvenniĭ pedagogicheskiĭ universitet, Tomskiĭ oblastnoĭ kraevedcheskiĭ muzeĭ, Moskocskiĭ gosudarstvenniĭ universitet, Institut yazykoznaniya RAN. Edited by Vladimir Napolskikh, Anna-Leen Siikala and Mihály Hoppál Translated by Sergei Glushkov Translation revised by Clive Tolley ISBN ISSN © Authors, 2007 © Editors, 2007 © Translation, 2007 Publishesd by Akadémiai Kiadó in collaboration with Finnish Literature Society P.O. Box 245, H-1519 Budapest, Hungary www.akkrt.hu All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means or transmitted or translated into machine language without the written permission of the publisher and the authors. Printed in Hungary MAP BLANK/MAP C O N T E N T S PREFACE XX INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR XX BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA XX THE SELKUP PEOPLE XX Dialects of the Selkup Language XX The Southern (Narym) Selkups XX The Northern (Taz–Turukhan) Selkups XX THE LITERATURE AND THE SOURCES OF SELKUP MYTHOLOGY AND FOLKLORE XX The History of Collection and Research XX The History of the Study of Southern Selkup Folklore XX The History of the Collection of Norhern Selkup Folklore and Mythology XX The Foreign Publication of Selkup Folklore Material XX The genre classification of Selkup texts XX THE TRADITIONAL WORLD-VIEW AND RELIGIOUS AND MYTHOLOGICAL NOTIONS XX The Southern Selkups XX Cosmogonic Myths XX Myths about the Creation of the World XX Anthropogonic and Ethnogonic Myths XX The Structure of the Universe XX Notions of the Soul XX Shamanism XX The Northern Selkups XX Myths about the Origin of the World XX Anthropogonic Myths XX Ethnogonic Myths XX Mythological Notions about Animals XX Myths about the Origin of Vegetation and Geographical Objects XX The Modern Attitude of the Selkups to the Traditional Beliefs XX ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF SELKUP MYTHOLOGY A–Z XX APPENDIX 1 Southern Selkup Texts XX Northern Selkup Texts XX APPENDIX 2 The archive of L. A. Varkovitskaya XX ABBREVIATIONS XX REFERENCES XX INDEX XX Selkup–English Glossary and Index XX English–Selkup Glossary and Index XX Siberian Dialect and Other Russian Terms XX 8 PREFACE The present volume is a continuation of the series Encyclopaedia of the Uralic Mythologies, prepared and published by a group of researchers working in different scientific centres in Russia, Finland and Hungary. The project is supported by the Finnish Academy of Science, and involves publication (in Russian and in English) of separate volumes devoted to the description of the religion and mythological traditions of the Uralic peoples. Started in 1999 with Komi Mythology (in Russian), the series now comprises four volumes in Russian: Komi (1999), Khanty (2000), Mansi (2001) and Selkup (2004), three of them having been also published in English: Komi (2003), Khanty (2006) and Mansi (2008); further volumes are under preparation. The present volume introduces readers to the mythic narratives, beliefs and religious traditions of the Selkups, an indigenous group speaking a Samoyed language. The tiny Selkup population consisting of less than 4000 persons lives in a vast area in the west of Siberia; their nearest linguistic relatives are other Samoyed- speaking peoples, the Nenets, Enets and Nganasans, and the Ob’-Ugrians (Khanty and Mansi). The Southern and Northern Selkups differ both in their dialects and their customs, and lack a common literary language. The Selkups were one of the classical targets of ethnographic studies in Siberia by the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to important Russian ethnographers such as E. D. Prokof’eva and G. N. Prokof’ev, the Finnish researchers M. A. Castrén and Kai Donner made the Selkup language and culture known in Western countries. However, though there are classical descriptions of Selkup shamanism published by the above researchers, their mythic narratives and folklore has been a closed field for Western researchers. This book opens up the world-view and beliefs of the Selkups and thus presents the means to interpret their rituals and religious practices. Selkup Mythology is the fourth volume of The Encyclopaedia of Uralic Mythologies, edited by Anna-Leena Siikala, Vladimir Napolskikh and Mihály Hoppál, which offers a basis for the study of the roots and present nature of Finno-Ugric and Samoyed religions. The volumes present information on the history, social organisations and livelihoods of the peoples in question, describe the central parts of their religions and world- views and give a reference list of the most important studies and archives on their culture and folklore. Each volume involves a large dictionary of mythological terms for the tradition concerned. Mythology is understood in a broad sense, including not only myths proper and mythic narratives but also the beliefs and practices involved. The reader of Selkup Mythology will benefit from reading Khanty Mythology and Mansi Mythology, the second and third volumes of The Encyclopaedia of the Uralic Mythologies. They deal with beliefs and ideas related to Selkup mythic thinking. Prof. Vladimir Napolskikh, who edited the Russian version published in 2004 in Tomsk, has had the main editorial responsibility in publishing Selkup Mythology. He has worked with Dr Natalya A. Tuchkova from Tomsk, who has headed the group of authors. The scientific interests of Natalya A. Tuchkova lie in the ethnographic studies of Siberian peoples, the mythology of the Uralic and the Turkic peoples, the Selkup language, the history of Siberia, museology and the classification of ethnographic museum collections. During the 1990s she carried out active field work among various local groups of the Southern Selkups. In 1999, under the supervision of Prof. Dr V. M. Kulemzin, she defended her doctoral thesis “The Dwelling and the Settlements of the Southern Selkups as the Components of Inhabited Space”. Since 2003 she has worked as Assistant Professor of the Department of Archaeology and Ethnology at Tomsk State Pedagogical University. Internationally well known, Prof. Dr Ariadna I. Kuznetsova, Professor of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics in Moscow, has investigated the mythology of Northern Selkups. She has arranged and taken part in more than twenty linguistic expeditions, mainly to the Samoyed and the Finno-Ugric peoples. The core of her scientific work is the Selkup language, the vocabulary and in part the grammar of which were described in Ocherki po sel’kupskomu yazyku, tazovskiǐ dialect (The Study of the Selkup Language, the Taz Dialect) I–III, 1993, edited by her, and in many papers addressing problems of ethnic and sociolinguistic research. Her more than 140 articles, published in Russia, Hungary, Germany, Finland and Estonia, reflect a wide spectrum of scientific interests. Prof. A. I. Kuznetsova is an Honorary Professor of Moscow State University, and an Honorary Member of the Finno-Ugric Society (Finland, 1991). Dr Olga A. Kazakevich from Moscow is, like Dr Kuznetsova, a specialist in the Northern Selkups. In 1989 she defended her doctoral thesis “The Computer Corpus of the Selkup Language: Its Creation and Application in Specific Linguistic Research”. Dr Kazakevich is the author of more than 140 publications on Samoyed studies, phonosemantics, ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, methods of language teaching, including five monographs, and co-author of a textbook on the Selkup language. At present she works as a senior researcher at the Laboratory of Automatic Lexicographic Systems of the Scientific Computational Centre of Moscow State University. She is a member of the Expert Council on National Schools of the Ministry of Education of Russia. In 1997 she worked as the expert on the problems of minorities in Russia in the working group of the Commission on Human Rights of the United Nations. She works as a teacher at the Institute of Linguistics of 10 the Russian State Humanitarian University, where, among other things, she runs the course on disappearing languages of the world. In addition to Natalya A. Tuchkova, Prof. Dr Aleksandra A. Kim-Maloni from Anchorage, USA, took part in the writing of the Southern Selkup chapters of this book. The scope of her scientific interests covers various aspects of ethnolinguistics – the Samoyed and the Germanic languages, reconstruction of the world-view on the basis of the cult