L'Aldilà disordinato dei Narti

In parallel with the military conquest of the Northern Caucasus in the early decades of the 19th century, the transcription of the tales about the Narts in the Iron and Digoron languages began in the mountain villages of Ossetia. Within the cycle of Soslan, the narrative “Soslan in the Land of the Dead” immediately caught the attention of scholars. The text recounts the journey undertaken by the hero into the Narts’ afterlife. The structure of the narrative bears a striking resemblance to the Bæxfældesun (Rite of Horse Consecration), transcribed and translated by Miller and included in the first volume of his Ossetic Studies, published in the early 1880s. “Soslan in the Land of the Dead” depicts a distinctive Nartic afterlife in which chaos appears to be the predominant characteristic. In the Nart epic, the deceased are subject to judgment and are either punished or rewarded based on their behavior during life. Although Ossetic possesses two distinct terms to denote hell (zyndon / зындон | zindonæ / зиндонæ) and paradise (ʒænæt / дзæнæт | ʒenet / дзенет), in the Nartic afterlife, the souls seem to partly share the same physical space. However, their fates differ: the blessed and the damned exist side by side, forming “couples” that serve as more instructive elements for those who visit the afterlife rather than fulfilling the purpose of reward or punishment. Moreover, nothing is mentioned about the duration of this punishment, and it is not revealed whether it is eternal for the Narts or if some form of ultimate salvation exists. Temporal elements are absent from the narrative, and the before and after are determined solely by the succession of events involving the sole “living” entity who journeys into the Land of the Dead.