The Concept of “Hero’s Bride” in the Early Texts of the Yakut Olonkho: A Phenomenological Aspect

Abstract

The article considers the concept of “hero’s bride” in the context of the phenomenological approach based on six early texts of the Yakut Olonkho. In these texts we identified 28 suggestive epic formulas that are the main means of representing the concept being studied. As a result of the study, it was found that the nominative density of the concept “hero’s bride” includes the concepts of “female beauty,” “portrait,” “body,” “youngest daughter,” “needlework,” “clothes,” “braid,” “skylark.” The analysis of these concepts allowed to reveal the aesthetic preferences of female beauty in the minds of native speakers. It turned out that the representations of “female beauty” included such signs as shapeliness, slim body, beautiful face, long braid, white skin, rosy cheeks, thin eyebrows, shiny eyelashes, plump lips, snow-white teeth and restrained character. Particularly important were light, thin skin, through which both bones and veins are visible. The combination of these characteristics formed the idea of the “hero’s bride” — a perfectly beautiful woman who was the standard of beauty in the linguistic image of the world of the Yakuts in the late 19th — early 20th centuries. In addition, the predominance of the “braid” concept with referents “braid in sweep sazhen“ + “Kuo” indicates that this model of the concept explicated all the above aesthetic characteristics of the “hero’s bride” concept in the minds of the listeners. The foregoing indicates the presence of phenomenological associative connections, that is, the concepts once verbalized by the storytellers accumulated in the social memory of the epic audience. In other words, the phenomenon of speech activity, in which there the cumulative and interchangeable nature of concepts included in the conceptual area of the “hero’s bride” is revealed.”