| Summary: | In my article, I shall deal with the Khanty narratives and song texts published in two volumes (the first and the third) of Ostjakologische Arbeiten. There are also 516 riddles published in the third volume but these will not be covered in the current paper. The 106 longer texts represent 9 different Khanty dialects, 68 of them are narratives, and in general outline their origins are the following: 49 texts were received from Kirill Maremianin, 18 texts from Prokop Pyrysev, 6 texts from P. Chamzarov, 5 texts from A. Olgina, 3 texts from Dimitri Tebitev, and 3 texts from G. Artanzeev. 20 texts were collected from different persons by Steinitz during his expedition in 1935, and one song text originates in Leningrad in 1963. Of the texts, 29 were written down personally by the informants and controlled or corrected by W. Steinitz, all other texts were put down by Steinitz. One story and 18 songs performed by Maremianin were recorded on phonograph records in 1936. Most of the texts have a remarkable mythological background. I personally find it interesting that 85 texts were collected from the students of the University of Northern Peoples in Leningrad. In Estonia, we are accustomed to elderly people being the main informants of folklorists or linguists. In 1936, the oldest student of Steinitz - Dimitri Tebitev - was about 30, Kirill Maremianin was 29, and Prokop Pyrysev only 18 years old. Nevertheless, some of them seemed to know a very specific song and story repertoire. How good experts of folklore and mythology were these young men? What is the position of their stories and songs on the folkloric landscape of Ob-Ugrians? I will try to seek answers to these two questions. It follows from the bear feast song texts that the festival house is situated to the north of the abode of the World Surveyor Man, but to the south of the Kazym River mistress. If we happen to deal here with the repertoire of a specific bear feast, it must have taken place somewhere between the settlement of Belogorie and the estuary of Kazym. ...
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