A Journey in Southern Siberia

What It's About

In 1900, Jeremiah Curtin travelled through remote towns in southern Siberia to study the religion and folklore of the Buryats, a Mongol people living around Lake Baikal. The first part of the book is a travelogue, offering a glimpse of Tsarist Siberia shortly before the Revolution. The remainder is a detailed ethnographic record: how Curtin gathered oral folklore directly from Buryat storytellers, the origins of the shamans, sacred trees and groves, the Buryat gods, and a large collection of myth-tales, including a prose summary of the Gesar epic as recited by the storyteller Manshuud Emegeev.

Key Concepts

Buryat shamanism and religious practice; the role and origins of the shaman; sacred groves and tree-worship; a body of myth-tales featuring epic horses and horse sacrifices, battles with giants, a world-mountain, and a water of life — motifs that echo folklore found across Asia and Europe, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.

About the Author

Jeremiah Curtin (1835–1906) was an American ethnographer, folklorist, and translator with a talent for languages. He spent several years working as a field researcher for the Bureau of American Ethnology, documenting the customs and mythology of Native American tribes, before travelling to Siberia in 1900 to study the Buryats. He died before the manuscript of this book was revised for publication; it appeared posthumously in 1909.