Colour Symbolism in the Folk Literature of the Caucasus

Colour Symbolism in the Folk Literature of the CaucasusAuthor(s): David HuntSource: Folklore, Vol. 117, No. 3 (Dec., 2006), pp. 329-338Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30035378 .

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Folklore 117 (December 2006): 329-338

TOPICS, NOTES AND COMMENTS

As contributions to this section, the Editors welcome comment and debate on topical issues or on recent articles or reviews appearing in the journal. Shorter accessibly written items of general interest, reports on work in progress, notes and queries, are all also welcome.

Colour Symbolism in the Folk Literature of the Caucasus

David Hunt

Abstract

Colour associations are analysed indirectly by a study of oral traditions and legends, using methods developed in structural anthropology. Colours are considered not in isolation, but mainly in contrasting pairs or in sequences. It has been found that a specific colour could have different associations in different conditions, and that generally the associations are more abstract than concrete.

Introduction

Why use folk literature, and why from the Caucasus? The answers to these questions lie in the quality of the evidence. One method of gathering data about associations of colours in the minds of people is to use some kind of psychological tests. An alternative method is to make use of the ideas incorporated in folklore and folk literature, which have been handed down through generations of narrators and listeners. During this process, the narrators have unconsciously filtered the material to ensure its relevance to their community. This latter is an indirect method-as nobody actually answers the questions of the experimenter, the colour associations must be derived by inference from the context.

The advantages of using folk literature from the Caucasus is that almost the entire culture of the indigenous population, with the exception of the low-lying parts of Georgia, was oral until the early 1920s, by which time alphabets had been developed for their various languages to be written down. Between around 1860 and 1920, before writing was developed for most of the mountain tribes, this oral literature was extensively recorded. These records cannot therefore be dismissed as just the stories of ignorant peasants, but were the "classical literature" and the entire actual culture of these people, who had committed it to memory rather than being able to record it in writing. Although the Caucasus is usually considered a part of Europe, its indigenous culture is blended with those of Turks, Persians and Mongolian peoples, as well as with those of Europe. And, in spite of local variations, scholars have concluded that there is a distinct Caucasus culture. For example, Abayev, when referring to the mountain dwellers, states: "Among all the ISSN 0015-587X print; 1469-8315 online/06/030329-10; Routledge Journals; Taylor & Francis c 2006 The Folklore Society DOI: 10.1080/00155870600928989



330 Topics, Notes and Comments

impenetrable mixture of languages of the Caucasus, a single world takes shape in its essential characteristics" (Abayev 1982, 51). This was partly dictated by the special living and economic conditions of life in the mountains. At the times when most of these folk traditions were collected, even religious differences had only a relatively superficial effect on the local folk literature, since most of the ethnic groups in the mountains had passed through a series of religious changes, resulting in mixtures of pagan, Moslem and Christian traditions (Nauka 1988, 495-7). Dirr came to the conclusion that "by studying the mythological ideas and beliefs of the Caucasus peoples one cannot avoid the thought that there used to exist in the Caucasus one religion, which was subsequently obscured ..." (Dirr 1915, 13-16).

The present paper is based on some selected examples of references to colour in Caucasus folk literature. The selection is based on only those colour references where the narrator could actually choose the colour, and therefore its choice could well have significance for the narrator and the audience. The selection of material in this paper has avoided obvious colour descriptions such as "blue sky," "green grass," and so on.

Approach to Analysis The traditional approach to the analysis of colour symbolism is to look for associations between a colour and a meaningful symbol. Thus, for example, red might be associated with blood, blue with sadness, and so on. While this approach can yield useful results, a more fruitful one is often that of structural anthropology, in which colour combinations or colour contrasts are studied. Much of the early development work on structural anthropology was done by Claude Levi-Strauss (for example, Levi-Strauss 1963), but a simplified version was published by Edmund Leach (1976). One of the principles of this method is that many symbols can be considered as contrasting pairs, or even meaningful sequences. Thus, for example, we can define "night" as the absence of daylight, and "day" as the absence of darkness, making day/night a symbolic pair. In the human mind, neither would mean much without the other; in fact, the actual existence of each word depends on the other. A second principle is that if there is a "boundary" between the two components of the pair, then the boundary and anything that resides on the boundary has special symbolic importance: in the above example, it is sunset and sunrise. Thus, according to the well-known saying, the shepherd looks at the colours of sunrise and sunset to assess the weather prospects for the following day or night. In the Caucasus they have a similar saying: "If evening turns red, prepare supper; if morning turns red, prepare cover" (to understand the first half of this saying, it needs to be known that Caucasus shepherds usually sleep out of doors in order to look after their enormous flocks of sheep and protect them from wolves) (Kiselev 1940, 279).

Some Examples of Colour Associations The preliminary findings of a survey of the use of colour in folklore in the British Isles were published in 1991 (Hutchings 1991, 56-60). Some of their findings are summarised here because, although there has not been a similar survey in the Caucasus, the results appear to be qualitatively similar. Out of a total of seven hundred and ninety-seven entries, white, red and black at five hundred and fifty-six



Topics, Notes and Comments 331

(or seventy per cent) accounted for the majority of them, with white at two hundred and nineteen entries, black at one hundred and seventy-six, and red at one hundred and sixty-one. These were followed by green at eighty-three, blue at forty-eight, silver at twenty-four, and gold at eight. The remaining colours in decreasing order of importance were: yellow, brown, grey, pink, purple, cream, khaki and orange. The three main colours were also supplemented by references to the colours of salt (fourteen times), soot/coal (ten times) and rowanberries (four times).

In Caucasus folk literature the colours of white, black and red are also absolutely dominant. They are even used in combination to describe a beautiful woman: black hair and eyes, white face and bosom, red lips and cheeks (see, for example, Dolidze 1971, 205). Of the remaining colours, green only occurs rarely in Caucasus stories. In British stories green is "regarded with apprehension," and mainly associated with a "civilised/ wild" or "human/other" contrasting pair- as, for example, the wicked witch or magician in the pantomime is often green (Hutchings 1991, 56-60).

Blue The colour blue takes two forms in the Caucasus legends, dark-blue or light-blue- but light-blue is rarely specified. The colour dark-blue is used not only for cases of a strong blue hue, such as the sea or sky, but also for some other cases where the hue is quite faint, such as skin that has turned blue from cold, or for the specification of a horse that we might call "grey." Such horses are often depicted by artists with a clear blue colour. Apart from obvious references such as dark-blue sky and dark-blue sea, the epithet dark-blue is also used for the flame that issues from the mouth of a monster (Malsagov 1983, 26) or from a deportation-train [1] (Bardavelidze 1996, 101), for dark-blue cows with white heads or muzzles [2] (Dalgat 1972, 303 and 319), and for a dangerous woman with "dark-blue eyes and brown hair" (Malsagov 1983, 170), which is possibly a reference to a Russian or another outsider. But the most common use of dark-blue is nearly always with regard to a "dark-blue stone." There are two curious legends from Georgia in which a blue stone is associated with a figure named Samaal (Samuel), who is evidently the devil. In the first legend, "The creation of the world," God and two archangels followed a set of footprints on the dried-up sea bottom, which led to a blue stone (Virsaladze 1973, 257). They lifted the stone and Samaal jumped out from under it. Samaal seized God by the throat and tried to strangle him. Peace was made by God agreeing to become Samaal's "sworn brother," and therefore his equal. Later, Samaal advised God how to separate the sea from the dry land. In the second legend, "God and Samaal," God and the archangels were walking through the world, and rolling along in front of them was a blue stone (Virsaladze 1973, 260). This stone was getting on God's nerves, and he decided to smash it, against the advice of the archangels. When he did this, Samaal jumped out and seized God by the throat. In return for releasing him, God endowed Samaal with eternal life. There is no indication in these two legends of why the stone was blue.

There might be a clue as to the significance of a blue stone in the large number of variants of a legend about the birth of the legendary Caucasus hero known variously as Sasrykva, Sosruko, Soslan, Solsa, and so on. The variant from Abkhazia about Sasrykva is typical (Bgazhba 1985, 50). The hero Sasrykva was conceived




inside a (blue) stone, from a shepherd who was standing on one side of the River Kuban and the semi-divine virgin heroine who was hiding behind the stone on the other side of the river. The shepherd was enamoured of the heroine but was unable to cross the swift current. Accordingly, he told her to stand by the stone, then he "shot an arrow" into the stone: "the arrow dug into the stone, and on it there was formed a human shape." After the gestation period, the hero was cut from the stone by the blacksmith Aynar, who was also the Abkhaz culture hero. When the hero Sasrykva was taken from the stone, nobody could touch him: "he was red-hot." The primordial blacksmith then picked up the baby with his tongs and lowered him into molten steel, in order to harden his body. Because the blacksmith was holding him with the tongs by the right leg, that part remained unhardened, and his enemies eventually killed him by wounding his vulnerable part, in a parallel motif to that of Achilles. In the Adyge (Circassian) variant, the arrow is named "the arrow of love," and the hero is cooled by dipping him "seven times into cold water from beneath the grindstone" (Gadagatl and Vetrova 2000, 44). Thus the blacksmith is processing the hero as if he is made of steel. Bearing in mind that the traditional blacksmith not only forged iron, but also smelted it from the original iron ore, the (almost) invincible hero Sasrykva appears to have been made from start to finish by the steel- making process. Since the colour "blue" may have been described loosely, the blue stone may well have been hematite iron ore, whose purplish colour could well be described as blue to distinguish it from other rocks. In this case, the colour is part of the contrasting pair: blue stone/ordinary stone.

Black The colour black is generally associated with something impure, bad or dark. For instance, in a Karachay legend a villainous ogre kept his black sword in a black chest, and moreover the chest was "booby-trapped." The hero poked the chest open carefully with a long pole, whereupon the sword flew out of the chest and sliced through an iron post near it (Khajieva and Ortabayeva 1994, 378).

In a Balkar legendary song, the heroine Satanay, who was the daughter of the Sun and Moon, was kidnapped and hidden by the Sea God. As a result:

The moon became shadowed, her face became black, She was sad, and she was grieving. For Satanay there are eclipses of the Moon and the Sun: Because of her they tremble and quake ... (Khajieva and Ortabayeva 1994, 306).

In an Adyge legendary song, the arch-villain Totaresh is conveying a "mighty black army" across the River Volga in a "mighty black boat" (Bardavelidze 1994, 38).

White

The colour white is generally associated with good, purity and a lack of blemish. It also has the connotation of virginal-a blank sheet of paper or raw cloth on which nothing has been printed-so to speak. A young virgin's bosom is usually described as white, and an especially beautiful girl is often described as having a throat so transparent that water or wine can be seen going down her throat. There is more than one heroine called, for example, "Ak-Biyche," which means literally "white lady" (Khajieva and Ortabayeva 1994, 306 and 349). In one of these, the




lady first appeared as a white doe, but only on reaching home pursued by the heroic hunter did she change into a white lady. The white doe is part of a contrasting-colour pair: white doe/normal doe. This white/normal colour pair often occurs in Caucasus hunting mythology; basically the white animal is "special," belonging to the hunting goddess, or perhaps even being the goddess herself or a daughter of the hunting god (the very ancient hunting goddess was generally superseded by a male hunting god after the introduction of Christianity in the first millennium AD). For this reason it is considered very dangerous to hunt and kill a white animal, and there are many legends about hunters who did so and then died from apparently "natural" causes (Virsaladze 1976). There are several versions of the dramatic Balkar-Karachay "Song about Biyneger," in which the hunter Biyneger is to be punished by the hunting god for killing too many animals, and the god's daughter chooses to carry out the punishment. She changes into a white doe (the special milk of which the hunter is told he needs to cure his brother of skin cancer). She lures him up on to a high ledge on Mount Elbrus, from where he finds that he is unable to descend; eventually, starving, he throws himself off a cliff (Khajieva 2001, 270-85). As a postscript to the danger of killing a white animal, it is widely held in the region of Bad Ischl, where the Austrian Imperial Family had a summer home, that Prince Franz Ferdinand had hunted and killed a white chamois shortly before his assassination at Sarajevo (Bernauer 2002).

In an Adyge song of praise to the local hunting god Pshimezitka, it is specified that "a big-homed white goat is being brought to him as a sacrifice"-evidently both the white colour and the big horns make the animal worthy for sacrifice to the god (Bardavelidze 1994, 39).

Red The colour red appears to have the connotation of potency, and sometimes of poison. For instance, the Balkarian primordial blacksmith used red water for the tempering of steel (Khajieva and Ortabayeva 1994, 597). When the semi-divine Balkarian heroine Satanay was a child she used to like playing with her "little red stones" (coral beads). There is a tradition about a siren who sits on a "Red Crag" in the mountains of Georgia, "letting down her red hair and combing it with a large comb"; she calls to travellers, "Come to me," but if they do so they are likely to be eaten by the cannibal ogres (Virsaladze 1973, 72). There is an Avar tale in which a sorceress summons a herd of magic red cows, whose milk she used to rejuvenate some centenarians (but not the wicked king, who was drowned in it) (Atayev 1972, 106). In some cases, poison is concocted from red creatures. The strong hero Narchkheu was courting a lady whose brothers opposed the match and they decided to get rid of the hero by poison. For this they laced the wine with a red snake and a red frog, chopped into small pieces. Narchkheu persuaded the eldest brother to drink first, with dire results; but then he himself "strained the wine through his steel moustache," and so escaped its effects (Bgazhba 1985, 75).

There are various items of literature in which a character has red hair. There is a suggestion, based on archaeological evidence, that this is associated with northern foreigners with red hair and blue eyes, possibly Russians or Scythians (Pachulia 1986, 9). In the North-Caucasus Nart-literature there are legends involving a




character called "Red-Haired Fuk," a kind of semi-deity who demanded sacrifices from the people, and if they hesitated he sent down a drought to punish them. He lived in a palace in the sky, but eventually the hero either flew there, was fired from a cannon or ascended in a balloon, and killed him (Khajieva and Ortabayeva 1994).

The significance of the colour red can be summarised as neither good nor bad, but potent. This conclusion will be amplified in the consideration of colour contrasts.

Some Examples of Colour Contrasts

White/Black Contrasting Pairs The most important associations with the white/black contrasting pair are good/bad or day/night, although they also include life/death. An example of the first pair is the Georgian tale of the hero who was obliged to visit the world of the dead; on his way he saw various strange sights, including a woman bending over a hot oven (traditional Georgian bread ovens are cylindrical with their axis vertical). She was putting in white dough and the bread was coming out black: this was a punishment for her miserliness during her life, for refusing to give bread to beggars or hungry travellers (Dolidze 1971, 32). Another example of divine punishment is found in a Georgian legend in which God changes a raven from its original white colour to black, as its punishment for telling lies: "'You have a nasty tongue, and there is no pity in your heart. You must not be white, but as black as night, in the same way as your soul is black', and he threw a charred log at him. Since that time the raven became as black as pitch" (Virsaladze 1973, 268). The colour of the buffalo was also changed from white to black because he was late for Noah's ark and did not have time to wash off the black mud in which he had been wallowing (Virsaladze 1973, 147). In a Vaynakh legend (the Vaynakhs are mostly Moslem), the hunter-hero sees two snakes fighting: the stronger black one was evil, male and Christian, while the weaker white one was good, female and Moslem (Dalgat 1972, 292). An example of the second contrasting pair is the tale of a couple escaping from an ogre using two horses, one black and the other white: "during the day nobody can outstrip the white one, nor at night the black one" (Bgazhba 1985, 208).

An example of a mixture of the two pairs is a frequently encountered motif of a hero being stranded in an underground world, after descending a well or the equivalent. He is warned that he will encounter two sheep-one black and one white. If he grabs the white one it will transport him to the upper "sunny world," whereas the black one will bring him to a lower world. Of course, he unintentionally grabs the black one (see, for example, Dolidze 1971, 25). In other tales there are three levels of other-worlds, and again it is the white animal that would lift the hero to the sunny world (Malsagov 1983, 36).

There is a noteworthy association of life/death with white/black in a Tatar variant of the Rustum saga, in which Rustum has been told by God that his slain son will revive if he carries him on his head for forty days. On the thirty-ninth day he sees a man at a river washing black wool in order to make it white. When Rustum points out that it was impossible to wash black wool white, the man convinced Rustum that it was equally impossible for a dead man to come to life.




Thus Rustum was persuaded to abandon his dead son when he was just on the point of reviving (Menzies 1925, 243).

The black/white contrast can also be associated with the presence or absence of snow. This is indicated by the places where three little birds nest: the white one nests where the snow is permanent, the black one with a white breast nests where snow falls only in winter, while the black one nests where snow never comes (Virsaladze 1973, 50).

Red/White Contrasting Pairs For this colour pair, the individual colours tend to retain the associations that they have on their own, as described earlier. In other words, the red option is potent or active, the white option is good, passive or possibly neutral with respect to the red. Some examples are in an Adyge "Nart" legend in which there is an amazing tree producing apples that are red on one side and white on the other. It was said of the apple:

If a barren woman tastes of the white side, Then to her will be born a daughter With hair silken white. If a barren woman tastes of the red side, Then to her will be born a Nart son, A great son, a white son, With hair silken white (Colarusso 2002, 12).

The idea of red for a boy and white for a girl fits in with the Adyge concept of a boy being active and a girl being passive. The white hair and the white son have the connotation of good, so that this one legend contains two different associations for the colour white.

In a Georgian folk tale the hero discovers a crop of grapes, some red and some white. He discovered that a person who ate a few of the red grapes was changed to a donkey, while the white grapes transformed the donkey back to a human form. He uses these to take his revenge on a cheating princess, putting a halter on her in her donkey form and making her carry bricks (Dolidze 1971, 80). In another Georgian tale, two brothers are going hunting in the mountains. The elder brother persuades the younger one to hunt on "the white mountain; that is a good place and the animals are small. I will go on to the red mountain; there the animals are big and the place is dangerous" (Dolidze 1971, 177).

There are several tales where a red/white contrast is used as a life token (Motifs E761 ff). These include Motif E761.1.1 in which water turns to blood (Dolidze 1971, 177), Motif E761.4 in which a shiny knife rusts (Bgazhba 1985, 206), a test of whether an arrow shot into the wall would produce a drop of milk or of blood (Atayev 1976, 116; Malsagov 1983, 140), and a test of whether the foam on the sea entered by the hero becomes white or red (Malsagov 1983, 84 and 92). In these examples, white has a neutral significance while red means danger of death (the hero is always saved in the end).

Red/Black Contrasting Pairs

Again, the colours tend to retain their connotations of potency for red, evil for black. An example is a Georgian tale of an orphan boy who sees two snakes




fighting, one red and the other black. The black one is stronger and chases the red snake in order to kill it. The orphan hides the red snake and dismisses the black one; as a reward, the red snake gives the boy one of its scales, with which the boy can make wishes that come true (Dolidze 1971, 76).

White/Red/Black Sequences With these sequences the red generally takes an intermediate position within the white/black pair. This parallels the day/dusk/night sequence mentioned earlier. For example, a Georgian legend describes the appearance in a mountain settlement of some evil spirits bringing diseases. "They arrived as a trio on three donkeys: black, red and white. The black donkey was loaded with arrows having black feathers on their ends, the red one with arrows with red feathers, and the white one having white feathers. The black-feathered arrow killed a man on the spot, the red one half-killed him, but the white one left him alive" (Virsaladze 1973, 114). A Georgian folk tale describes the hero's duels with three ogres-in succession a white one on a white horse, a red one on a red horse and a black one on a black horse (Dolidze 1971, 143). Here again there is a gradation of danger, with the black one being the most dangerous. Another Georgian folk tale involves an evil ogre who can only be killed by locating and killing his external soul (Dolidze 1971, 22). This is in three parts, residing in three little birds: the red bird contains his strength, the white bird his reason, and the black bird his actual soul. The symbolism here is not clear, except that the ogre was very strong but stupid, so that his most potent attribute was his strength contained in the red bird, which had to be killed first. His evil soul was contained in the black bird.

A pertinent example of this trio of colours is the colour of clothing traditionally worn by women among the Cherkess, Abkhaz and Chechens, according to Byhan (1936, 140). White was worn by young girls, red by wives and blue by widows. It is tempting to interpret this as white for purity, lack of blemish, a "blank page," so to speak, red for the potency of a woman in her child-bearing capacity, and blue for a woman with neither of the two potentials.

Other Colours and their Associations There are some other colours that are significant in Caucasus folk literature. The most common of these is probably gold. This is a complex symbol, since gold is also associated with wealth and value. Its more abstract associations are generally good and/or potent. An example of the first abstract association is the epithet of the Karachay-Balkar culture hero and primordial blacksmith-"Debet the Golden." His female counterpart also had golden hair, and another of their main heroes carries a golden spear and wears a golden helmet (Khajieva and Ortabayeva 1994, 375). An example of the potency of gold items is contained in a Georgian legend about the hunting goddess who has golden hair (Dolidze 1971, 134). The goddess lives in a cave and starts a love affair with a hunter. While they are asleep his jealous wife comes and uses the goddess's golden scissors to cut off her golden hair, which she takes away; the result being that the goddess will die, but the foetus that she was carrying develops into the Georgian "Prometheus." In another example of the potency of gold-coloured items, the hero is sent on a quest




by his sick father to obtain, as medicine, a golden fish living in a golden trough and owned by a sorceress with long golden hair (Khajieva and Ortabayeva 1994, 383).

Another intriguing colour specification is "multi-coloured," usually associated with potency or magic. The importance of this may have been its association with the jewel-encrusted objects found in churches, particularly in Georgia, and may therefore possibly have a religious or magical connotation. In the traditional tale of the magician and his pupil, the former, who is also named as the devil, has multi- coloured eyes (Dolidze 1971, 109). The Abkhaz hunting-god brothers, the Aergi, have a palace in the mountains that changes colour according to the weather; grey on a cloudy day and blue on a bright day (Bgazhba 1985, 65).

Two references to the colour yellow have been found. In one of these, the colour refers to pollution of water, and is caused by giants urinating up-stream, causing the hero's tongue to go yellow (Khajieva and Ortabayeva 1994, 493). In the other case, the giants gathered yellow stones, which were eruptions from the sun-god during the creation of the universe, and threw them at one another (Khajieva and Ortabayeva 1994, 302)

The colours of horses fit into a special category, since there are many specialised names for these. Moreover, the wild Caucasus mountain landscape, with its few roads, lends itself to a horse culture. The really exceptional legendary horses are generally either red or multi-coloured, however. The first is often described by a phrase such as "red stallion, like a snow leopard" (see, for example, Dalgat 1972, 381). The second may be "dappled," such as the legendary horse Durdura (Menzies 1925, 204), or be a "horse with apples," who was "the best horse of all" (Colarusso 2002, 288), or the "chestnut stallion with a mouse-coloured back standing in an iron shed and eating iron, and his dung is of iron" (Khajieva and Ortabayeva 1994, 559).

Conclusions The symbolism of colour can be a rather complex subject, partly because some colours have different associations in different contexts. An attempt has been made in this paper to analyse colours in pairs or sequences, in order to bring some order to this complexity. It is clear from the analyses that the associations of colours are relatively abstract, such as "active" or "passive," and that simple concrete associations are unlikely to be found, except in some specific cases. An advantage of using oral folk-literature examples is that during their oral transmission the motifs have developed over centuries or even millennia, thereby developing colour symbolism according to popular intuition.

Notes [1] This was a poem about the mass deportation of entire ethnic groups, at Stalin's order, in 1944. [2] According to U. B. Dalgat in a note about the dark-blue cows: "this is a quite regular

characteristic of the homed animals in the Vainakh epos; the blue colour of the animals is purely epic, not corresponding to reality" (Dalgat 1972, 428).

References Cited Abayev, V. I. Nartovsky Epos Osetin. Moscow: Nauka, 1982.

Atayev, D. M. Avarskie Narodnye Skazki. Moscow: Nauka, 1972.




Bardavelidze, J. Adygskiy Fol'klor. Tbilisi: Kavkazsky Dom, 1994. . ChechenskyFol'klor. Tbilisi: Kavkazsky Dom, 1996.

Bernauer, E. Personal communication, 2002.

Bgazhba, Kh. S. Abkhazskie Skazki. Sukhumi: Alashara, 1985.

Byhan, A. La Civilisation Caucasienne. Paris: Payot, 1936.

Colarusso, J. Nart Sagas from the Caucasus. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Dalgat, U. B. Geroicheskiy Epos Chechentsev i Ingushey. Moscow: Nauka, 1972.

Dirr, A. "Bozhestvo Okhoty i Okhotnichy Yazyk u Kavkazskikh Gortsev." Sbornik Materialov dlya Opisaniya Mestnostey i Plemen Kavkaza 44, Part IV (1915): 13-16.

Dolidze, N. I. Gruzinskie Narodnye Skazki. Tbilisi: Merani, 1971.

Gadagatl, A., and Vetrova, L. Samoupravlyaemaya Strela Narta Tlepsha. Maykop: RIPO, 2000.

Hutchings, J. "A Survey of the Use of Colour in Folklore-A Status Report." Paper presented at the Folklore Society and Colour Group Conference on Colour and Appearance in Folklore, London, 1991.

Khajieva, T. M. "Karachayevtsy i Balkartsy: Yazyk, Etnografiya, Arkheologiya Fol'klor." Seria Kavkaz: Narody i Kultury. Part I. 270-85. Moscow: 2001.

and R. A. -K. Ortabayeva Narty. Moscow: Nauka, 1994.

Kiselev, P. Checheno-Ingushskiy Fol'klor. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1940.

Leach, E. Culture and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Levi-Strauss, C. Structural Anthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, 1963.

Malsagov, A. O. Skazki i Legendy Ingushey i Chechentsev. Moscow: Nauka, 1983.

Menzies, L. Caucasian Folk-tales. London: Dent, 1925. Nauka. Istoriya narodov severnovo Kavkaza. Moscow: Nauka, 1988.

Pachulia, V. P. Padenie Anakopii: legendy Kavkazskovo Prichornomorya. Moscow: Nauka, 1986.

Virsaladze, E. B. Gruzinskie Narodnye Predaniya i Legendy. Moscow: Nauka, 1973. Gruzinski Okhotnichiy Mif i Poeziya. Moscow: Nauka, 1976.

Biographical Note David Hunt was formerly a Visiting Professor at South Bank University, London, UK. His special research interest is the folk literature of the Caucasus region. Recent publications include a chapter of a book on fairy tales, and research papers on aspects of Caucasus folk tradition.



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Colour Symbolism in the Folk Literature of the Caucasus

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