This week I’m covering two tales from the Nart Sagas, a collection of stories from the North Caucasus I introduced in the previous and first article of Litera Obscura. More specifically, the cycle I’m covering here revolves around Urizhmag, a fairly standard hero archetype but with a sensitive side that you’ll get your first glimpses of in the latter part of this article. The numbers you’ll see after direct quotations refer to pages in Tales of the Narts: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Ossetians translated by Walter May, which is the translation I used for this article.
Urizhmag and the One-Eyed Giant
This story is one of the best Nart Sagas. It narrates Urizhmag’s encounter with a cyclops, and at its best reads like a modern thriller. To show why I was so impressed with it, this post is going to compare “Urizhmag and the One-Eyed Giant” to Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus in the Odyssey, as both stories share the premise of a hero’s escape from a hulking monoculus. I don’t have any direct evidence of this on hand, but I’d guess that Urizhmag’s conflict with his cyclops is directly inspired by the Odyssey, either from the contact on the Scythian Steppes or the long-term Greek presence in the Caucuses.
In both tales the promise of food lures the protagonist into a cave, initially unaware of its danger. The Ossetians’ One-Eyed Giant and the Greek cyclops Polyphemus each lock their respective heroes into their caves using a stone slab, and each only opens their cave to let out their flocks, which they count meticulously to keep their captives from slipping out. In each story, the hero blinds his captors and escapes using the bodies of the giants’ livestock as a tactile disguise.
The above similarities make me think that “Urizhmag and the One-Eyed Giant” is a direct borrowing from Homer (as opposed to, for example, a mutual inheritance from a common Indo-European tradition). It’s very much an Ossetian take on the story, however, as the composer(s) of the saga significantly reworked the Cyclops’ character into a far more compelling adversary. When Odysseus first meets Polyphemus he formally requests hospitality with an invocation of Zeus, but the cyclops scorns his request and devours two of his crew. We know from the first moment what the giant has in store for the Greeks, and from this point the clock’s ticking for Odysseus to find a way out. In contrast the Nart Cyclops shows all proper respect to Urizhmag. There’s real psychological tension when Urizhmag meets the Caucasian rendering of the cyclops, who greets Urizhmag with the dehumanizing yet eerily cheerful phrase, “Good health mountain chick,” (pg.30). Immediately the giant is in an uncanny valley between friend and foe. The Nart Cyclops offers the Urizhmag half of one of his giant sheep for dinner as an honored guest, but locks the hero in the cave when morning comes. Tension builds, but more from when than if the giant will turn on his guest; we can guess that the monster doesn’t have Urizhmag’s best interests at heart from how he doesn’t let him leave.
The climax of the story, when the polite tension between hero and giant breaks and the two fall into open conflict, comes the next night. The giant tells Urizhmag, “‘Only for one night do we count you our honored guest,’” and asks him, “‘This evening it is your turn to prepare the supper. Let us see what you can make for us!’” (pg.30). Urizhmag points out that, having been locked inside the cave for the last 24 hours, he has nothing to make dinner with. The cyclops answers, “Very well, then, I’ll make supper myself,” and sticks his erstwhile guest with a spit and puts him over a fire.
Perhaps unused to resistance, the giant lays down for a nap while his still-living prey roasts over an open flame. Urizhmag, the best of the Narts and a real tough bastard, frees himself by pulling the spit out of his knees. He holds the pointy spit in the fire and, like Odysseus before him, sticks the cyclops in his eye. Now blinded and very much awake the giant tries to catch Urizhmag but, sightless and engulfed by a sea of wool, cannot. The monster admits defeat: “My life is ending now, without my sight,” and offers the victor a ring which contains, “all my strength, and all my happiness” (pg.31). It’s a ruse- the warrior, who really should’ve known better (the cyclops had just complimented his “cunning tricks”) puts the ring on. It latches to his finger and starts shouting, giving Urizhmag’s position away, and the chase is back on. Thinking quickly, Urizhmag cuts off the ringèd digit. When the cyclops finds Urizhmag’s disembodied finger he realizes that the human has finally beaten him. He consoles himself by telling Urizhmag that despite his best efforts he’s still trapped inside the cave, and therefore doomed nonetheless; I like how the giant puts it: “All the same you have sacrificed your head” (32). Urizhmag escapes using a similar trick to Odysseus, except that he kills the giant’s goat-shepherd and wears its skin instead of hanging onto the underside of a sheep. He leaves the cave at the head of the flock when the giant puts them out to pasture the next morning. Like Odysseus he also taunts the cyclops on his escape, bragging that he had just stolen the giant’s entire flock. Unlike his Greek counterpart, however, there is no divine punishment for this arrogance- instead the cyclops goes into a rage and aimlessly rushes out of the cave, falling off of a nearby cliff to his death. Unlike Odysseus, who is cursed to wander for years before his return to Ithaca, Urizhmag’s return home is swift and triumphant.
The contrasts between the cyclops episode from the Odyssey and its retelling in this saga are more interesting than their similarities. The Ossetian adaptation of the tale makes better use of the cyclops’ liminal state between man and monster, the giant as an intelligent adversary who at one point outsmarts Urizhmag and at first refrains from attacking him. The cyclops’s initial politesse is false, and in retrospect seems deliberately designed to toy with his prisoner. Urizhmag’s death and consumption is supposed to be a punishment for his failure to reciprocate the generosity the giant had showed him on the first night, but by keeping Urizhmag locked in the cave the cyclops had engineered a situation in which his guest couldn’t hold up his end of the bargain. The divergence between his human hospitality and the deeply inhuman act of eating people makes the one-eyed giant a compelling and frightening adversary. Polyphemus is a less complex villain, motivated by an appetite that he sees little need to justify. The emphasis is instead on Odysseus’s guile and trickery, famously telling the cyclops his name was “Nobody” so that his companions wouldn’t respond when he called to them in agony.
It’s interesting that the Ossetian bards decided to flesh out the one-eyed giant while Homer reserved the complexity for his protagonist. The Nart approach makes this specific episode more engaging, while Homer’s serves to develop a character that the narrative revolves around. The Ossetians also don’t punish Urizhmag for boasting like Homer does to Odysseus; among the Narts it seems no one expects modesty from strong men. The saga’s complexity and tension give it a distinctly modern feel, and I found it one of the most compelling of its kind.
Urizhmag and Shatana
The Urizhmag cycle actually begins with the insightful, cruel, and kind of gross story of how our protagonist Urizhmag marries his second and most important wife, Shatana. I say gross because Shatana is probably Urizhmag’s half-sister; the narrative is vague, but it seems like a wizard raised the hero’s mom from the dead and impregnated her before killing her again. Shatana was the result of this necrophilic coupling.
After growing up at rapid speed Shatana’s mind turned to thoughts of love. She wanted to marry Urizhmag, the strongest, bravest, and most superlative-rich of all the Narts and mankind more generally. She has the looks to pull it off, and Urizhmag isn’t turned off by their quasi-familial relationship, but the hero is already married. Urizhmag refuses to abandon his wife Elda, partly out of concern for her, but also because, “If I did so, how could I show the Narts my face?” (pg.22). Shatana was not about to let this stop her.
Before setting off on a long campaign, Urizhmag asked his wife to prepare a feast for him and his company upon their return. She dutifully complied, but Shatana used black magic to sabotage the wife’s efforts to brew the all-important beer. The potential for failure, and her husband’s rage, filled Elda with deathly terror. She begged Shatana to help her, and somehow didn’t grow suspicious when the latter’s price was her own wedding dress. Shatana tricked Urizhmag into sleeping with her on the night of his return, his wife dying of heartbreak when she realized that she’d lost him.
After Elda’s death shame became the barrier to a union between Shatana and the newly-single Urizhmag. At first the hero refused to marry her. “How shall I live with you before the Narts? What sort of face can I put upon things? They will cry shame on us both!” (pg.24). In response Shatana tells him to ride through the Nart village while sitting backward on his donkey, apparently a ridiculous and humiliating act. The first time he rides through the whole community mocks him. The second time “only the merriest ones mocked at him” (pg.24), while on the third, “not a single one smiled” (pg.25). Realizing that all shame is temporary, and having all too quickly gotten over his dead wife, Urizhmag agrees to marry Shatana.
Shatana’s point is essentially fake-it-till-you-make-it. If she and Urizhmag act like their relationship is normal and forget about poor Elda then soon the rest of the Narts will too. The message is at once wise in its outline and deeply cruel in its particulars. Whoever composed “How Shatana Became Urizhmag’s Wife” probably wanted to teach the virtue of ignoring what other people think of you, overcoming their shaming and mockery to get what you truly want. But in context another message is also present, one which comes down to us from Thucydides as “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Shatana is more beautiful and crafty than the naive Elda, and has magical powers, giving her the ability and effectively the right to steal her husband. Although Urizhmag initially seems to be motivated at least in part by personal honor and concern for his wife, rebuffing Shatana’s initial advances by asking her, “Have you no conscience,” (pg.22), after Elda’s death his thoughts turn only to himself. He’s happy to marry the woman who killed his wife and tricked him into sex (effectively raping him) once he’s sure no long term harm will come to his reputation. While Urizhmag’s cynicism comes into clear view by the end of the tale, Shatana comes off as outright villainous. She’s ruthless and cruel and rewarded for it in a way most readers won’t be used to. Not everything needs to be a morality play, however, and the almost Nietzschean themes of this story represent a refreshing break from the “good guy” protagonist archetype that dominates Western mass culture.
Outro
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you did consider subscribing (for free) for more deep dives into lesser-known literary works. The next article I’ll be publishing will also star Urizhmag and Shatana, this time in a tale dominated by tragedy and loss. If for whatever reason you can’t stand them don’t worry because after that we’ll be moving on to the next topic, which has nothing to do with the Narts or the North Caucasus.
Hi, I find the the information you write about very interesting and fascinating not only because it’s my culture and language but also Narts tales were my childhood favorite book and I still have it in my home library . Thank you for you interest in Ossetian history. Good luck 👍
You’ve got me Googling the Caucasus now. I’m wondering if they had an ancient equivalent to Homer or if these stories survived mostly through oral tradition.