The Theme of the Calumniated Wife in Mongolian Popular Literature

Abstract

THE geographical remoteness of Mongolia is undoubtedly one of the reasons why the folk-literature of the Mongols has been collected and analysed rather less completely than that of many other peoples. Much of what has actually been collected has remained untranslated or lies hidden in the decent obscurity of rare Russian publications, while a further contributory cause has been the political dogmatism which in the course of the last thirty or more years has often opposed itself, within the Mongolian People's Republic, to the task of recording and publishing folkliterature, and has even been responsible for a policy of deliberate suppression of folk-singers and story-tellers and the destruction of old traditions. However, political necessities change, and since about 1956 there has been a notable revival of interest in traditional oral literature in Mongolia itself, while in the Chinese-controlled area of Inner Mongolia, a separate but adjacent political entity, collection and publication has gone on sporadically since the time of the victory of the communist regime. But here difficulties of communication have prevented foreigners from gaining access to and exploiting much of the material which is known to have been got together. Thus while a priori it might be expected that mairchen-motifs and themes which are common to numerous other peoples might be discovered in Mongolian folk-literature too, comparatively little translation and analysis has so far been done, so that, for example, the Mongolian versions of the tale of Rhampsinitus, the familiar story of the clever robber contained in the second book of Herodotus and one of the favourite themes of medieval literature and of story-telling are unknown to Prato's compendious study or to Penzer's discussion of the tale.' Some recently published