An Analytic Survey of Dede Korkut Stories based on the Classical Patterns and Motifs Shared with Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh

Iran and Asia Minor, due to their adjacency, has long had a great deal of cultural exchanges with each other. Through examining the literary works of these cultural effects, The Dede Korkut Stories are placed in the realm of the Turkish folk literature with epic and heroic themes which includes twelve stories. Each story has a main hero, but all characters and adventures are related to each other and Dede Korkut, narrator of all the stories, as head of the nation, sometimes plays the role of a mediate and guide in the course of events. According to the author, some epic and heroic motifs of Dede Korkut stories have great similarities with the themes of the heroic period in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. These similarities are comparable in two levels: “ancient patterns” and “common motifs”. The old patterns such as hero’s trip, filicide, and testing children and suitors, and common motifs such as naming children, the unwilling battle between father and son and ruyin–tani (invulnerability) and some negligible cases have been reflected in these two valuable works and have been studied in the present paper. The behaviours of some renowned characters of the Shahnameh have also been compared with the heroes of Dede Korkut Stories which indicates the cultural ties between these two nations and the common origin of some mythical elements in folk stories and epic literature of Iran and Turkey.