David of Sassoun Home Page


Index

Cycle 1: Sanasar and Baghdasar
Cycle 2: Medz Mher
Cycle 3: David of Sassoun
Cycle 4: Pokr Mher
Click here for a photograph of the statue of David of Sassoun in Yerevan



Introduction

The Oxford University Press's Traditional Epics: A Literary Companion, ed. Guida M. Jackson (1994), has the following entry for David of Sassoun:

"This tenth-century Armenian folk epic, now lost, tells of the battles of David the Great of Tayk against Arab invaders. Some of the same period is covered in the Turkish cycle of Dede Korkut" (p. 115).

This entry is cross-referenced with another, on Sasuntzi Davith (David of Sassoun), which is based on an entry in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger et al. (1990):

"The Armenian folk-epic (ninth century), now lost, deals with the exploits of King David of Sasun (or Sasoun) and his son Mehr the Younger, who are Christians, in their battles against the invasions of Arabian Muslims from Persia and Egypt. Despite the Christian flavor of the epic, numerous fantastic creatures, good and evil, influence the action. In 1873 the poet Thoumanian finally wrote down Sasuntzi Davith from the surviving oral tradition still popular among street bards."

Not to be misled by the imprimatur of Oxford and Princeton Universities, these encyclopedia entries are wrong in virtually every detail. Sasna Dzrer ("Daredevils of Sassoun"), also called Sassountzy David, "David of Sassoun") was never written down during the ninth or tenth century , although oral stories about the pahlevans of Sassoun were being sung by bards then and even earlier. It is probably true that the Sasna Dzrer narrative became more or less fixed during the tenth century, since the many historical allusions in the epic do not go beyond the tenth century.

The epic is not "now lost," pace the encyclopedia entries cited above. It was first published in full in a 3-volume collection of 65 dialectal variants edited by Manoug Abeghian and Garabed Melik-Ohanchanian, called Sasna Dzrer, published by the State Publishing House at Yerevan in 1936-1951 (volume I, 1936; vol. II part 1, 1944; vol. II part 2, 1951). Three philologists who were leaders in collecting and editing dialectal material from village bards, Manoug Abeghian, Kevork Abov, and Aram Ghanalanian, edited a unified, coherent version of the epic under the title Sassountzy David, Hye Zhoghovrdakan Epos (Yerevan: Armenian Academy of Sciences, 1939: "David of Sassoun, The Armenian Folk Epic"). This text of more than 11,000 lines of poetry, based on fifty of the 65 dialectal variants, was edited to form a coherent narrative, but every line in it can be authenticated from one or more variants. By means of these publications, Armenian philologists have made Sasna Dzrer available both in the variorum format required by serious scholars, and in a "literary" form necessary for literary criticism and aesthetic appreciation of the epic. The literary version was translated into English by Artim K. Shalian, David of Sassoun (Ohio University Press, 1964). The plot summary in this website network is based on Shalian's translation.

Hovhannes Toumanian (1869-1923), the Armenian poet who is mentioned in the Princeton and Oxford reference sources, like many nationalistic writers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was interested in native folklore, and wrote Sasuntzi Davit, a short literary version of the third cycle of the epic; it was indirectly based on oral sources, but Toumanian was neither a folklore collector nor a philologist. The work of collecting and editing oral poems belonging to the Sassoun epic was pioneered by Bishop Karekin Srvantzdiantz, an amateur folklore collector, who transcribed a composition of Grbo, a village bard in the Moush dialect area, recounting the stories of David and Pokr Mehr; this was published as Krotz ou Brotz yev Sassountzy David gam Mhery Dour (Constantinople, 1874: "Literary and Folk Lore and David of Sassoun, or Mher's Door"), representing what we now recognize are the third and fourth cycles of the epic. Bishop Srvantzdiantz's work was followed by that of Manoug Abeghian, who published a Mogk dialect version of the third and fourth cycles as David yev Mehr (1889).

Sasna Dzrer, then, is an oral epic, circulating in several Armenian dialects, consisting of four cycles, recording, in turn, four generations of pahlevan heroes of Sassoun: the twins Sanasar and Baghdasar, Medz Mher ("Great Mher"), David, and Pokr Mher ("Lesser Mehr"--an ironic epithet, since Pokr Mher is by far the strongest of the Sassoun heroes).