Once a year the Khan of Khans, Bayindir Khan, used to make a feast and entertain the Oghuz nobles.
The Book of Dede Korkut is considered a national epic of the Turkish people, focusing on the specific conglomeration of various indigenous tribes of the region which coalesced to form the national identity of many modern Turks. That conglomeration of tribes came to be known collectively as the Oghuz and thus this work takes the form of a patriotic epic tale combining a little bit of history, a little bit of myth and a little bit of pure literary imagination.
“The poison winds are not blowing, Kazan, yet my ears are ringing.
I have not eaten garlic, Kazan, yet I burn within.
The yellow snake has not stung me, yet my white body rises and swell.
In my breast, which seems dried up, my milk is leaping.”
The narrative sections of the work are written in prose, but switches over to verse for the passages of dialogue. This particular excerpt is a prime example of how the verse is used, as it often is when put in juxtaposition with prose within a single work (as in Shakespeare, for example), to elevate the level of language. While the prose narrative is certainly not without aesthetic flair, the Book of Dede Korkut is yet another illustration of how the writers of ancient literature placed a much greater value on poetry than they placed on prose. This makes the Book of Dede Korkut of valuable use for any historical study of the difficulties that the novel had making inroads into its earliest days. Thousands of years of convention which inherently assumed that poetry was artistically more satisfying than prose assisted the rebellion posed by the subversive elements of the novel. What is especially interesting in this regard is that much more so than many other national epics of its ilk, the Book of Dede Korkut often reads more like a novel than ancient epic verse.
It was Dede Korkut who came and told the story and declaimed. "Let this story,’"said he, "be known as the Story of Wild Dumrul. After me let the brave bards tell it and the generous heroes of untarnished honour listen to it."
From a purely literary standpoint, this is where the work gets interesting. It is the narrator who tells of the coming of Dede Korkut and puts into quotation marks what Korkut said. The title is quite literal: this is a book in part about Dede Korkut that is also told by Dede Korkut. In other words, the narrator is Korkut and thus this passage is essentially Korkut talking about himself in the third person. This idiosyncratic quirk is usually attributable to those suffering a rather serious narcissistic disorder, but the use here has more to do with simple mechanics. Unlike many similar ancient epics which follow a single figure on a pathway to heroism, this is more like a novel constructed of interconnected short stories which situate different characters at the center of the narrative. The unifying device thus becomes the narrative connective tissue of Dede Korkut who enters at the end of each story to present interject himself and his role as narrator in much the same way as exemplified above.
