Alara

Alara is a water fairy of Turkic mythology, according to popular reference pages and sites on the meaning of names. She is said to come from Lake Baikal and to be made from the love tears of a thousand women. She appears as a small, beautiful girl with wings of light. The wings scatter water as she hovers over the lake. Her beauty and youth depend on water, so she must stay near springs and lakes. She can take hatred and greed out of the human heart. This makes true love possible. Name sites add a wish ritual. A coloured ribbon is tied to the branch of a blossoming tree by a lake, shortly before dawn. She answers with a breeze or a shooting star. The retellings call her Turkish and also Yakut. Some place her among the beings of the Tatars.

The retellings do not say who recorded her, where, or when.

The sources

The Altai and Siberian material of the nineteenth century and the handbooks built on it do not name a spirit Alara. Radloff’s collection from the Altai, the Finno-Ugric and Siberian handbook of 1927, the Altaic handbook of 1938 and the Turkish collection of shamanic texts all name water masters, birth spirits and forest masters of the Altaians, Yakuts and Buryats. None of them has this name.^[1] The Yakut material in these books knows a forest master Bajanai and a birth-giver Ajysyt. It does not know an Alara.^[2]

The English-language reference entry cites one page for her. That page is an online dictionary of words and names. Its entry for Alara was added by a reader in 2005. The entry holds a request for opinions and a comment on a name given to a child. It holds no account of a spirit. The first traceable form of the figure is therefore a modern retelling.

Alara in Turkey

In Turkey Alara is a girl’s name. It is also the name of a river, a castle and a Seljuk-period caravanserai near Alanya on the Mediterranean coast. No source known here links the places to the fairy. None gives the origin of the place name.

A name of similar sound does occur in the sources. In Azerbaijani birth rites, the spirit that attacks women in childbed is called Alarvady, also Halarvady, Alanasy, Halanasy and Algarysy. Elsewhere in the Turkic world this spirit is known as the albastı.^[3] It belongs to a different region and has a different function. No source equates it with the water fairy.

Reliability

As far as the sources go, Alara belongs to the popular culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She does not appear in the sources of the Turkic peoples. What stands behind her is a modern retelling that uses Turkic names and a Siberian lake. The figure has no place in the evidence for the Göktürks. A Turkish study of mythology notes that giants and other beings beyond nature do not occur among the Huns, among the Göktürks or in the Oghuz epic. It holds that the beings of the folk tales are partly shared among the Turkic peoples and partly came from outside.^[4] Water as a sacred power is a different matter. It is attested for the Göktürks in the invocation of the sacred Earth-and-Water. Turkic Atlas takes that up under the water cult and under Iduk Yer-Sub.^[5]

References

^ Radloff 1893 (zweite Ausgabe); Holmberg 1927; Harva 1938; İnan 2017; first edition 1954
^ Holmberg 1927, p. 415, 466–467
^ Abdullayev 1995, p. 17
^ Ögel 1995, p. 561
^ Kül Tegin inscription; Tonyukuk inscription

Sources

Literature

Uno Harva, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938)
Uno Holmberg (Harva), The Mythology of All Races, Volume IV: Finno-Ugric, Siberian (1927)
Wilhelm Radloff, Aus Sibirien. Lose Blätter aus meinem Tagebuche. Zweiter Band (1893 (zweite Ausgabe))
Abdülkadir İnan, Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm: Materyaller ve Araştırmalar (2017; first edition 1954)
Bahlul Abdullayev, Mythological Image of Alarvady (Albasty) in the Azerbaijan Birth Rites (1995)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) II (1995)