Epics along the Silk Roads: Mental Text, Performance, and Written Codification

The idea of launching studies on the epics to be found along the Silk Roads was born in France and Finland almost simultaneously in 1989-90. At the 25th General Conference of UNESCO held in Paris in October-November 1989, a long and bureaucratic, yet historical process was brought to a happy end when the Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore was adopted by the Conference. The aim of this hitherto most authoritative document about the importance of folklore and oral traditions for national, ethnic, and regional cultural identities and for world culture in general was to raise awareness of the role of modern documentation work in creating new cultural resources through conservation, preservation, and dissemination of fragile local traditions (Honko 1989a, 1990b). Among the members of the Finnish delegation at the conference the idea was born that a comparative survey of some valuable, fairly widespread oral traditions in the form of an international research project or conference would signal the value of oral traditions to the international community. Someone mentioned fairy tales as a possible topic. In the same session