The Nart sagas are spread across the northern Caucasus among the Circassians and their kin as well as among other peoples.  The Circassians, however, seem to have preserved one of the most elaborate corpora of this tradition.  Over a forty-year period, the Soviet Circassian scholar Asker Hadaghat’la collected more than two thousand pages of these sagas as told by bards in the native dialects.  These tales are of great interest, not only for their drama and stark tone but also for the numerous remarkable parallels they exhibit with other traditions within Eurasia.

The following saga is taken from Hadaghat’la’s collection.  Despite the exotic source of this tale, the reader will undoubtedly find many familiar elements.  This unique combination of the familiar and the alien makes this body of oral literature a compelling and remarkable experience for the Western reader.

How Pataraz rescued bearded Nasren,
who was chained to the high mountain

Nart Nasren was a man worthy of praise.  He had a keen mind and a kindly heart.  Whenever the Nart people were in need, he was always ready to help.

But there was another man who lived in these lands who was a misery to mankind.  Paqua Paqua claimed to be the true god and was always struggling against god. He was always in a fury and would say, "I am god!"

Years passed and Paqua paid little heed to the needs of the Narts.  In hate and in bad temper he continually brought disaster upon them.  In the Nart realm Paqua was considered very dangerous: He could bend oaks as though they were supple twigs.  He destroyed the houses of the Narts.  He made waves as high as the sky.  He made the millet and barley rot in the fields.  He split the ground and brought drought to the land of the Narts.

“What are you doing?” cried the Narts.  “Why do you do us such harm?  Why have you brought such misery to our beloved land?”

When Paqua heard the Narts complaining, he grew furious and unleashed a bitter cold wind, which swept away their ashes and coals, destroying their ovens and leaving them without fire.