Rainbow in Kalmyk folklore representations

This article examines the history of the issue, ideas inherent to different peoples about rainbow, including existing works describing semantics of rainbow among the Mongolic peoples. The study investigates multi-genre Kalmyk-language folklore texts and their Russian translations, both published and unpublished ones. The efforts have resulted in a reconstructed concept of rainbow. In almost all Mongolic languages, rainbow is denoted by the same word. It may also be a secondary name to denote the yellow ferret. Rainbow is rarely mentioned in Kalmyk folklore, which attests to it was not a core concept in the archaic worldview of the ethnic group. There are no cosmogonic myths about rainbow, nor can one trace any signs of anthropo-morphization in epic and folktales. The representations of this atmospheric phenomenon comprise both pre-Buddhist and Buddhist layers of culture. So, a rainbow can serve a sign of a miracle, accompany the appearance of deities on earth, can serve as a path from the upper world to that of humans, i.e. connects the earth and the sky. Depictions of rainbow may vary and are largely conventional: it includes from three colors in epic texts to five colors in other narratives. In children’s folklore, rainbow is called a ‘lame old woman’, i.e. a creature with physical otherness, which indicates it belongs to another world. This motif is found among many peoples, among which the peoples of the Turkic-Mongolian community should be noted. In addition, in Kalmyk folklore, rudiments of ideas about the connection between a snake and a rainbow have been preserved, while the tale indicates that the khan and khansha kill two snakes that turn into a rainbow, which says an earlier idea of the ancestors of the Kalmyks and the presence of two colors in the rainbow.