The Yakut epic poems known as the Olonkho, along with the Mongolian Gesar, the Kyrghyz Manas and the Bashkir Ural-Batyr, which are typologically and genetically related, were quite rightly included by UNESCO in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Huge poetical texts (rhythmically organized as alliterative stanzas) with an average of 15,000 lines of poetry are performed by the Olonkho-tellers (olonkhosut), in a similar way to the bards of Ancient Ireland or the aoidos of ancient Greece. It is spoken as a recitative or chanted as a song. The Olonkho is the quintessence of Yakut traditional culture.

For the translation into the English language Olonkho: Nurgun Botur the Swift has been chosen, partly because it is the most voluminous and partly because it is the one closest to the literary text. This is a heroic epic recorded, and to some extent re-created (as far as one may say that epic songs have authors), by the outstanding Yakut writer, scientist and visionary Platon A. Oyunsky. This year (2013) is Oyunsky's 120th anniversary and this publication is devoted to his jubilee. To the Sakha people Platon A. Oyunsky is what Chaucer is to the English people: he is the founder of the modern Yakut literary language, as well as the author of a number of works of modern Yakut literature. He was also an olonkhosut, who collected into one work more than 30,000 lines of poetry: In his sciencific works devoted to the Olonkho, Oyunsky has established both cosmogenic and cosmological myths, which form the background to the epic texts, giving a detailed description of the mythological picture of the world of the bearers of the Sakha (originally unwritten) epic poetry (epos). It is no accident that Nurgun Botur the Swift is in a significantly clearer form than any other epic text – revealing this particular Olonkho story before the eyes of the readers (and of course traditional listeners). According to Oyunsky, ‘Olonkho determined the world outlook of the ancient Sakha, it throws light onto the ancient period of life of the Sakha, their pre-history’.

It is difficult to establish precisly the time of creation of the Olonkho. As with any work of oral folklore, the text of Olonkho evolved through the Olonkho-tellers, enriched over time with new information about the life of the people.