As a cosmogonic beginning for both epics, The Creation illuminates the respective mythological structures at work in its oral and literate renderings. In the present paper these transformations are going to be assessed by analyzing generic intertextuality, reported speech, and spatial description in Kalevala-metric epics. These factors seem to suspend narrative progression by describing, motivating, and expanding on themes, and they are often trivialized in narratological models and hierarchies of textual organization. Variable and subordinate to the narrative mainstream as they may be, however, they never remain epiphenomenal. They show that the epic, despite its textual, mythopoetic, and historical authority, is profoundly contextualized discourse emerging from a definite "now," "here," and ego.Issue title; "Epics Along the Silk Roads.
