Compared with epic heroes such as Geser and Jangar who are widely popular among the Mongolic peoples of Inner Asia, the far less well-known epic of Shono-Baatar stems from a determinable and relatively recent historical basis: the eighteenth-century Dzungar prince Louzang Shunu and his seeking sanctuary from persecution by his relatives in the Russian Empire. While legends and short songs about this figure are widely attested from Kalmykia to Xinjiang, only among the Buryats has any full-length oral epic been preserved: a single specimen taken down from storyteller Sagadar Shanarsheev in 1936. Although Shanarsheev’s epic possesses a complex political and textual history, it was almost wholly unknown beyond a few scholars until its republication in a dual-language Russian-Buryat edition in 2015. Since then, it has increasingly become an important part of the symbolism of Buryat cultural identity and has even been hailed as a world-class epic equal to the Iliad and Nibelungenlied.
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