Travelling Characters in America and Eurasia

Abstract

Traditional narratives in which protagonists set off and meet on their way different strange and dangerous creatures are analyzed. Narratives of this type are typical for the New World but are also occasionally found in Europe and the Far East. In narratives based on the “Wanderer” motif, the character accidentally loses his way, encounters and kills various monsters or escapes from them. The world of monsters is opposed to the ordinary world not so much in time as in space. In stories with the “Transformer” motif, the hero moves through familiar terrain, episodes are tied to real toponyms, and the hero easily defeats any opponents and turns monsters into ordinary animals. In Europe, Odysseus and partly Theseus are close to the “Wanderer”, and Egóri the Brave is a typical “Transformer”. The areal distribution of the episodes under consideration, found in the west and east of Eurasia, but not in its central regions, is typical of many Eurasian motifs that have correspondences in the New World. In the Old World, such narratives seem to be relics of the era of peopling of America, so that the oral traditions of the Indians and Eskimos can give some idea of the state of Eurasian traditions at the end of the Pleistocene.