Narrative Structure and Content of Vietnamese Stories Regarding Tutelary Deities of Villages (thần tích): Case Study of the Story of Yết Kiêu Spirit

Abstract

This article analyzes the Story of a fisherman Yết Kiêu (歇驕) who is worshiped as a tutelary spirit in villages of Northern Vietnam. Yết Kiêu is a semi-mythical character and he is widely credited with supernatural abilities and merits in war against the Mongols (1288). I investigate the text that belongs to thần tích genre (神). It is a manuscript written in Vietnamese at Yết Kiêu’s birthplace, which is the central place of his worship (on the basis of previous texts of the 16th–19th centuries). The Story of Yết Kiêu has a complex structure reflecting the history of the development of this particular text and the whole genre as well. The story can be divided in four parts differing in form and content: the folk layer (the oldest part), the historical narrative (likely compiled by court historiographers in the 15th–17th centuries), the legend of Yết Kiêu’s Mongolian bride (emerged evidently in a temple community during later centuries) and the description of Yết Kiêu’s cult (which appeared under the influence of the European research methods in the early 20th century). The article contains a fragment of the story translated into Russian.