Milli Folklor

Öz

The most important feature that distinguishes human beings from other living things is the mind. Mankind, thanks to his mind; thinks, dreams, and creates cultural products. Cultural products consist of both concrete structures such as shelters and temples, and folkloristic genres such as legends and epics. In this sense, human imagination plays an important role in creating cultural heritage. In these cultural products, the dream of human’s transformation into another being also took place. There are several main reasons for the dream of transformation in man: To emulate for powerful beings living in nature, to overcome them or controlling them etc. Thus, daydreaming has led to the idea of transforming into another being in man (both himself and various beings). For example, “transformation into a wolf” because it is a powerful being, or “transformation into a bird” to get out of a difficult situation, emerged from this idea. Just like in other nations, the idea of transformation has existed in the Turk system of thought and this thought was reflected in the folkloristic products of the Turks. In this context, epics are one of the important genres in which the idea of transformation is reflected, in Turks. As it is known, many studies have been written about epics of Turkic world so far. Some of these have been discussed within the framework of different theories, but generally text-centered studies have been carried out. In text-centered studies, mostly motifs belonging to an epic were examined. Despite this, motif studies about epics of Turkic world have not reached the desired level and transformation motifs have been limited to a few studies. However, it is important to reveal the idea of transformation, which is reflected in epics as a motif in the historical and cultural process. There-fore, it is important to identify the transformation motifs reflected in Turkic epics and to explain their cultural origins. In this article, a text-centered examination was made in line with the Historical-Geographic Finnish method. The systematic of “Motif Index of Folk Literature” that one of the important books of this method has been applied to 23 texts from the Turkic epics of the Kipchak area. Therefore, the material used in the article consists of the Turkic epics of the Kipchak area. Again, only the transformation motifs in the “MIFL” were considered to narrow the limits of the research. The transformation motifs in these texts are under the category of “Magic”. This category includes main headings such as transformation of “Hu-man to human”, “Human to animal”, “Human to object”, “Animal to human”. Thus, the letters and numbers of the transformation motifs in the analyzed epics were determined in accordance with Stith Thompson’s catalogue and various examples of these are given. In other words, some of the Turkic epics of the Kipchak area were examined in terms of the transformation motifs in S. Thompson’s motif index. Among these motifs, “transformation to a bird” is also analyzed as an example in the article, in comparison with the stories in Kitab-ı Dedem Korkut and the “Pigeon Story” in the Mawlid books. As a result, in this study only on the transformation motif and limited material, it has been seen that it is possible to identify the common elements in the epic texts and see the similarities and differences between them.