Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Oral Epics gathers six epic traditions carried by professional bards across generations rather than fixed in a single authored text.

The Epic of King Gesar is sung across the Tibetan plateau, Mongolia and Central Asia, its collected versions running past a hundred volumes, often called the largest living epic tradition in the world; many bards describe receiving the tale in dreams rather than by study, and UNESCO inscribed the tradition in 2009. The Epic of Manas, national epic of the Kyrgyz, follows the hero Manas and his son and grandson across a trilogy recited by specialist bards called manaschi; its longest recorded telling runs to about half a million verse lines. Jangar is the heroic cycle of the Oirat Mongols, sung chiefly among the Kalmyks, whose bards perform its songs of the paradise like realm of Bumba as dozens of largely independent cantos.

The Epic of Sundiata recounts the thirteenth century founding of the Mali Empire by Sundiata Keita, transmitted by the Mande griots, hereditary bards who carry it as history, praise and instruction together. The Mwindo Epic belongs to the Nyanga people of the eastern Congo, its hero born already walking and talking against his father's will; the standard version derives from a 1950s performance recorded with the song, dance and audience of a live telling intact. The Ozidi Saga, epic of the Ijaw of the Niger Delta, is performed over several days combining narration, song, dance and masquerade, following a boy who avenges his father's murder and then must face the powers his own vengeance calls up.

All six were first set down in writing only in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, long after the oral tradition took shape.