The Book of Dede Korkut is an epic of the Oghuz, one of the major branches of the Turkish peoples. Better known as Turkomans, the name they acquired after their conversion to Islam, the Oghuz migrated farther west than most of the Turkish tribes to become eventually the Turks of Turkey. Both the Seljuks and the Ottomans were descendants of the Oghuz, as were the interim Ak-Koyunlu and Kara-Koyunlu dynasties. Their epic, presented here in English for the first time, constitutes one of the most important literary and historical documents from the world of the Middle Ages. That a book so significant should appear in English only at this late date cannot be attributed either to oversight or to neglect but rather to a set of circumstances peculiar to the work itself. The epic was long lost, even to the Turks themselves, and its restoration has been fraught with numerous and perplexing problems of language and history. Not all of these cruxes have been resolved satisfactorily, but scholarship on the subject has finally reached a vantage point from which the work as a whole can be viewed quite clearly. We know now, with reasonable certainty, when and where this epic was composed, how it was transmitted, who some of its dramatis personae were, and from what cultural milieu it emerged.

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