İran ve Anadolu Sahasında Erselannâmeler

Abstract

As a literary work, Erselannames is a common cultural heritage of Iran and Anatolia found in both manuscripts and stone printed copies. Today, versions of it also seen in the oral traditions of the Iranian Turks. The epic shares similar themes and subjects with Danishmendnâme, Battalnâme and Şikâri Epic. Indeed, it can be considered a continuation of the same tradition in terms of motifs. There are manuscripts and lithographs of Erselannames in Iran. The only known copy in the Anatolian area to date is in the Istanbul Ataturk Library.The volume of work consisting of a stone edition contains 407 pages and 27 illustrations. The poems of Erselannames, which are written in verse and prose, are in Persian and Turkish. Erselannames also contains an example of Persian Arabic mulamma couplet poetry (E.I. 380/7-8). Poems predominate in the epic’s emotional telling; in total, the work has more than 132 poem forms in Turkish and Persian. While the Persian poems are written in prosody meter, the Turkish poems are based on numbers of prosodic units and syllables. The Istanbul copy of Erselannames was written in Azerbaijani Turkish with the Arabic alphabet. As an example of decorated prose in the literary arts, the work contains both Persian and Arabic compositions. Although the language is heavy, its style is fluent. Libraries in Iran have manuscripts of Erselannames written in Persian as well as stone printed copies. For instance, copies have been identified in the libraries of Kum and Tehran. The Persian version of Erselannames, during the period of the Qajars, differs from the Turkish version. Today, the most comprehensive variant of the Erselannames is a verbal form of the epic called “Emir Erselan-i Rumi Dastan,” found in the Iranian Turks’ minstrel tradition. It was tape recorded by Ashik Abdulali Nuri, who was from Tabriz-Karadag, in 1978 and 1979. It is more comprehensive than the written version and contains more than 400 quatrains and syllable poems. This study first describes the written and oral versions of Erselannames found in Iran and Anatolia, then compares the written versions in Persian and Turkish.