Фольклор шорцев: В записях 1911, 1925-1930, 1959-1960, 1974, 1990-2007 годов. - 2010. (Т. 29.)

formed by throat singing accompanied on a two-stringed musical instru­ ment called the kornus . Our volume contains one of these tales, «Ак Кап», in which all musical portions are supplied with accompanying musical notes. In Mountain Shoria today, tales are performed less often; however, during expeditions in recent years we were able to document almost every type of tale: mythic tales about animals, alyp nybagy (heroic tales about bogatyrs), magical tales, tales with inclusions of singing, as well as tales of everyday life. One of the distinguishing traits of Shor tales is their broad in­ teraction with other folklore genres, such as myths, epic tales, and songs. The connection between tales and myths is manifested in the system of characters and in their poetic qualities: tales often contain mythological personages and etiological endings typical for mythic texts. It should be mentioned that minor genres such as blessings, incantations, curses, riddles, etc., have had only a limited influence on the tale. They enter the poetic system of tales primarily as intermediary formulas in monologues and dialogues pronounced by characters in the tales. Prose texts outside the genre of the tale are widespread today. These are called chook or purungu chooktar, literally «stories» or «ancient sto­ ries». They differ from tales in their vivid attempt to capture the aura of factual accuracy. Frequently, obviously fabricated events are narrated in a concrete historical context. Tellers even name a specific place where an action took place or mention the names of people who supposedly witnessed it. The style and manner of telling a purungu chook also tend to underscore the truthfulness of the narrated event. The language of the teller is almost devoid of artistic expressive techniques. Shor folklore contains stories that arose relatively recently and belong best within the genre of historical legends. These stories relate some historical event about a past hero. They are told in a free style without any set beginning or ending formula and reflect a concrete historical time period more clearly than do myths and legends. The most popular pieces of folklore in Mountain Shoria are songs. They consist of one or several four-line couplets that in the Shor lan­ guage are called uzak saryn on uzuy saryn , literally meaning «exten­ ded or long songs». At the same time, songs do not necessarily have a unified semantic content, and often there is no logical connection between the couplets.