Tuvan "throat singers" perform a type of vocal music native to the steppes of Asia. Tuva is a tiny country located in the exact geographic center of the continent. One group, Huun-Huur-Tu, has recently become popular in the West, touring as part of many ethnic music series. Tuvan men spend weeks alone with their horses on the vast plains, so many of the songs celebrate the bond between a man and his horse with a passion other cultures reserve for heterosexual love.

When I saw Huun-Huur-Tu in concert, they began with "Lament of the Igil", a traditional song inspired by a dream.

Bady-Dorzhu Ondar plays an igil made by Oktober Saya

"Lament" recounts how the mare of a noyon, or feudal landowner, dies in labor. He orders her colt taken to the steppe and left there for the wolves so he won'r have to pay for its food. Ösküs-ool, the peasant who is told to abandon it, rakes the colt home instead, and feeds it on goat's milk. The colt grows into a great gray stallion. Ösküs-ool rides him in races and they begin to beat all the noyon's horses. With each win, the horse and peasant become more famous throughout Tuva. The envious noyon orders his servants to kill the gray stallion by pushing him over a sheer cliff.

"Ösküs-ool looked everywhere for his horse," the song continues, "and, unable to find it, fell asleep from exhaustion. Then, in a dream, he saw his horse speaking in a human voice: 'You'll find my remains under the sheer cliff. Hang my skull on an old larch tree, make a musical instrument from its wood, carve it with my image, cover it with skin from my face, and make the strings from the hair of my tail. When you start to play this instrument, my double will come down from the upper world.' "

The peasant found his beloved horse's body and fashioned the instrument just as the horse had instructed in the dream. Then he began to play it, recalling how the colt and he had played together, how the stallion had won all the races. Ösküs-ool flushed with anger as he remembered the treachery of the noyon, and all his grief and anger found their way into his music. Then, the song concludes, the clouds parted. Down from the highest mountain galloped an identical twin of the beautiful gray stallion [in some versions, followed by a whole herd, all with his distinctive black and gray coloring.]

Ösküs-ool's dream had, of course, inspired the song. More remarkably, the design his dream called forth--the fiddle carved with a horse's head, covered with horse hide, and strung with horsehair--also came into being. The igil, or horse-head fiddle, is now the most popular accompaniment for Tuvan singers. As they perform "The Lament of the Igil," they essentially re-enact it. Tuvans say the igil is their most expressive instrument because Ösküs-ool poured into it all his love, grief, and rage.

The tale of Ösküs dream is no doubt distorted by its long oral tradition, but it is likely based on a real peasant's experience.

--Deirdre Barrett

EDITOR'S NOTES

In Sarah Wallin's online essay "Tuvan Throat Singing and the Legend of the Horse Head Fiddle", she paraphrases this tale, then adds that igils appear to go back about 1000 years; so the story (and dream) would have happened (if at all) around 1000 CE.

The European tale "the Goose Girl" and the Tibetan tale "The Boy Who Never Lies" have some echoes of the Igil's origin tale. The goose-girl's magical horse Falada advises her even after death. The boy's stallion Melingeh can speak (his love Tokida the mare can sing), and an aristocrat arranges the death of Melingeh, yet he may be reborn as Tokida's colt.

I agree with Barrett here--a tale's variants and mythic elements don't mean it never happened. Remember Troy.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Deirdre Barrett's The Committee of Sleep, 2001, pp.77-78. Barrett's and Wallin's oral source is Kombu Oorzhak, in Tuvan Traditional Musical Instruments.

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