Manuk Abeghyan on the Female Authors of Hayrens

Abstract

Prominent scholar Manuk Abeghyan, when examining the wide range of hayrens, in his work referred to the female authors who created hayrens and came to a reasonable conclusion that hayrens were our old Gusan-folk songs, the creators and performers of which were also women. This is considered to be Abeghyan’s scientific novelty, which some researchers, due to their ignorance, attribute this discovery to the author of these lines. We’d like to mention that the theory suggested by M. Abeghyan has been substantiated with new texts and manuscript facts in our studies on hayrens. M. Abeghyan did not consider the issue under consideration separately, but in different parts of the study “Divan of Nahapet Kuchak” he examined the problems associated with female authors of the hayrens. Thus, in the subchapter “Variants of hayrens” M. Abeghyan mentions three airens and writes: “In the first of these songs, the singer (because it is a woman’s song) tells how her lover wanted to leave at dawn - and she tried to stop him, but to no avail " And finally, as indisputable proof of the existence of singers, one should refer to manuscript No. 9599 from the Yerevan Matenadaran named after Mashtots, in which two illustrations have been preserved, confirming the fact of the existence of female authors of the hayrens.