Asker Gadagatl’s Seven-Volume “Nartkher” – An Authentic Monument of Circassian Culture

The most complete archive of the Nart epic is the seven-volume academic collection “Narts. Circassian Epic” in the Circassian language (published in Maykop in 1968–1971). Collected and systematized by Doctor of Philology Asker Gadagatl, this work is not simply a folklore collection, but a monumental landmark of spiritual culture that restored the true historical subjectivity of the Circassian people in science. By gathering this colossal material over twenty years (from 1946 to 1966), the researcher accomplished a true scientific feat, capturing the living breath of oral tradition in an era when it could have been irretrievably lost.

The word “archive” is precisely the most fitting here. The collection includes 705 authentic texts and 40 musical notations of ancient melodies, exactly as they were recorded during the collectors’ expeditions. It is the first academic publication where the materials were not subjected to artificial stylistic editing or modernization. They were published in the original — in the living language of the djeguako singers, shaped as ancient songs (ored), epic poems (pshinalye), and prose legends (khishe), preserving the austere, serene, and majestic aesthetic of antiquity.

At the same time, the books present multiple variants of the same plot, and multivariance is the first and most crucial sign of the continuous and long-standing existence of an epic in the popular environment.

The main value of this work lies in its decolonial academic breakthrough. Prior to the publication of this seven-volume set, imperial and Soviet science was long dominated by the concept of an “Alanian” (non-Caucasian) origin of the epic, which claimed that the ancestors of the Circassians and other Caucasian peoples allegedly merely borrowed foreign plots. Gadagatl’s fundamental work, relying on strict folkloric, linguistic, and ethnographic data, irrefutably proved the autochthonous, Caucasian origin of the Nartiada.