Link
https://mongoltales.cceh.uni-koeln.de/
Runtime
2014–2020
project participants
Mongolian Studies (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn), CCeH, DCH, North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. Mainly responsible: Dr. Elisabetta Chiodo (NRW-AWK). Project coordination: Prof. Dr. Klaus Sagaster (University of Bonn). For other parties involved, see https://mongoltales.cceh.uni-koeln.de/team.html.
Funding
Supported by the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts and the Foundation of Friends and Sponsors of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.
Description
In the project “East Mongolian Oral Literature”, the Heissig Collection of the International Tape Archive of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts was indexed and made available via the Language Archive Cologne (LAC, see https://lac.uni-koeln.de/collection/11341/0000-0000-0000-271F). The collection originated from trips by † Prof. Walther Heissig (University of Bonn) in 1984, 1986, 1991 and 1995 to various regions of eastern Inner Mongolia, during which he recorded oral performances by bards (quγurči, huurchi) on audio tapes. Other narratives were recorded by his assistants Prof. Rinčindorǰi from Baγarin (Baarin; Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing) and Mr. Nima from Jarud (specialist in Mongolian folklore, Beijing). During their stays in Bonn in the 1990s, Prof. Rinčindorǰi and Mr. Nima took on the task of writing down most of the stories in 90 large-format notebooks in Mongolian. After Prof. Walther Heissig’s death in 2005, the entire collection of tapes and transcriptions was donated to the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts in Düsseldorf in 2006 in accordance with his wishes.
The collection presented in the project contains digitized tape recordings and scans of the respective transcripts. It comprises 130 tape cassettes and 66 large-format booklets with a total of 7258 pages of transcribed texts (in Uyghur-Mongolian script). In terms of content, the collection documents 21 epic tales of heroes, which are recited in Eastern Mongolian “fiddle songs” (quyur-un üliger). Catalog descriptions were prepared by Dr. Elisabetta Chiodo (University of Bonn). The transcriptions are available in eXist as TEI-XML and are integrated into the website using XSL transformations.
Picture credits
The bard Nimaodzer from Bayarin, photograph from the Heissig Collection, documented in: The Walther Heissig Collection of Mongolian Oral Literature (= Abhandlungen der Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste; Vol. 126), ed. by Elisabetta Chiodo, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011, p. 106.