Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the landscape structure and nomenclature of Selkup folklore and its interaction with the Selkup everyday landscape nomenclature and the environment of the Selkups within the last several centuries. Names of objects most important for the structuring of folklore space are analyzed.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the landscape structure and nomenclature of Selkup folklore texts and its interaction with the Selkup everyday landscape nomenclature, on the one hand, and with the traditional environment of the Selkups within the last several centuries, on the other. Selkup is an endangered Samoyedic language spoken today by no more than 600 people in the Upper and Middle Taz and the Turukhan basins (Western Siberia). Our main data is a corpus of folklore texts in local dialects of Northern Selkup recorded during the last century (about 100000 running words). Northern Selkup landscape nomenclature was described by Ariadna Kuznetsova in (Kuznetsova et al. 1980: 59-77), she also compiled a word list of Selkup toponyms of the Taz basin (Kazakevich et al. 2002: 209-215). The data of these two works is also used. Selkup folklore texts do not contain much of landscape description, but for the travelogues. There are two types of Selkup travelogues: descriptions of shaman's travels and descriptions of ordinary people's travels. Specific features of the landscapes of both types will be described. The folklore space consists of three worlds: the middle world of people, the upper world of sky creatures and the underground world of devils and dead. The centre of the middle world is the dwelling of the hero. From here he starts his way and here he usually returns. The dwelling is surrounded with a forest and there is a river nearby. It's remarkable that the river is always present, but is not often mentioned.