Alán-oszét adalékok az "Érzékek és vallás" c. konferencia anyagához

This paper, as the title indicates, presents excerpts relevant to the theme "Religion and the Senses" from the Ossetian Nart Saga dated back to the Alan era, and Zünargj Dyr, a set of Ossetian short stories based on ethnographic collections and published in 1984. The author translated the majority of these excerpts from Ossetic, and presents them in Hungarian for the first time, and the rest of the excerpts were translated by István Szabó from Russian and published in Szolnok in 1992. Considering that the stories of Narts are little known in the Hungarian academic life, the author will briefly present the Nart Saga, a series of legends also known as the Nart Epos. On the basis of the excerpt titled "The Hardening of Batraz", the author concludes that the predecessors and material paraphernalia (water, fat ~ oil, salt) of Christian sacraments (baptism, confirmation, anointing of the sick, holy orders) and other rites involving unction had surfaced in pottery and iron working long before the rites themselves emerged. Considering themes of heat perception, the author concludes from two of the excerpts that people identified the soul with body heat, whereby death is the body growing completely cold; this assumption also led to the custom of the death vigil. 20th century shortstories describing pipe music are a good example of the appreciation and enormous impact of instrumental music; the author argues that people considered sounds and musical instruments as coming from God, and this view manifests in the names of ancient musical instruments. In the following sections, the author quotes excerpts on the subject of taste, smell and sight, and concludes by providing examples of the importance of horizontal and vertical division of space for the Alan and Ossetian peoples. In the footnotes, the author considers the etymology of certain words as coming from Iranian languages, despite the fact that academic opinion considers them to be of different origin (avat 'to initiate' denevér 'bat', edz 'to train', ház 'house' > háztűz nézés 'courting' mesüge 'fool', menázsi 'rations', rajta 'thereon' regöl 'to sing' ~ regös 'minstrel')