Abstract
TURKISH FOLK STORIES ABOUT THE LIVES OF MINSTRELS
According to tradation of Turkish folk literature the men who recite folksongs and a certain kind of popular tale have been called âşık since the fifteenth century. Although the name âşık does not occur in the history of Turkish folk literature before the fifteenth century, ancestors, so to speak, of the âşık are found. This article will deal mainly with those stories of group B which tell of the lives of minstrels. Such stories exist even today in east Anatolia and are told by minstrels. Today's biographical folk stories appear in three different forms: (1) A living minstrel composes and performs a folk story by combining his poems with events from his life. (2) A second person, himself a minstrel, puts into the form of a folk story the poems of another minstrel and the current traditions about his life. (3) Stories whose authors are anonymous and which contain information about a deceased minstrel's life and his poems-stories such as "Ercişli Emrah and Selvi," "Aşık Garip and Şahsenem," "Kerem and Asli," "Tufarkanlı Abas," "Karaoglan and Ismikan Sultan," "Minhaci and Ağgelin."
Keywords
Minstrel, folk story, poem, minstrel tradition, Şenlik, Sümmani, Kerem and Aslı
