Known for the Gong, Central Highland is also known as the home of epics, such as the “ot ndrong” of the M’Nong people, one of the world’s longest tales.
According to the M’Nong people, ot ndrong is a form of oral history, which also helps keep them entertained in their labours.
Normally, ot ndrong is told in the fields, at the communal house, or round a fire. Villagers sit around of an epic teller and listen to the legends.
An epic tale teller, Dieu Lung, 64, at Ea Ver Commune, Buon Don, District, Daklac Province, is one of very few M’Nong epic artists who remember a swathe of ot ndrong tales. Ot ndrong epics include over 200 different stories, of which Dieu Lung remembers more than 100.
Dieu Lung’s brothers, Dieu Cau and Dieu Klut, also are good epic tellers, honoured as Folk Artisans by the Vietnam Folk Art Association in 2003.
According to Associate Professor Vo Quang Trong, deputy chairman of the Ministry of Culture and Information’s Culture Research Institute, who has spent years for researching Central Highland epics, it is quite difficult to find orators, and even more difficult to convince them to perform their works live.
“We had to invite one orator back from the forest, where he was earning a good living. He refused at first and I had to try very hard to convince him”, Mr Trong said of Xedang epic artisan A Ar, who he tracked down in 2001. Trong said artisan A Ar, 71, finally understands the importance of his work, and has recorded nearly 40 of his long tales.
Trong also found another artisan, A Luu, a Ba Na man of Dac Ro Oa Commune, who told a continuous 14 hours epic, the Gong Gio, in one sitting. A Luu, now 63, learned the tales from his mother. A Luu has not count of how many epics he knows, and how many times he has performed them. He just knows that he is likely to tell an epic any where at any time, as long as he has a few wee drams.
Since 2001, a number of cultural researchers have been dispatched to the Central Highlands to collect epics. Culturists have searched 530 communes in the region and recorded epics from 363 artisans, including Ede, Gia Rai, Ba Na, Xe Dang, M’Nong, Xtieng, Ma and Cham Horoi people. Parts of these epics have been translated and published into Vietnamese language, and 75 Central Highland’s epic books will be available by 2007.
The difficulty is, almost of the minority artisans do not speak Vietnamese, apart of artisan Dieu Kau, many other epics, such as of Gia Rai people, have no translator. Since the two first Central Highland’s epic founds and translated in 1927 and 1955, Vietnamese researchers have spent nearly eight decades collecting the Central Highland epics.
