The Ossetians, who descended from the ancient Alans, preserved their cultural heritage in the “Nart’ kadags (sagas), which were shared by other peoples with whom these nomads had contact and in whose communities they were dispersed and subsequently assimilated. Disguised by different narrative traditions, this common heritage is still identifiable in certain parts of the world. Comparative analysis of the Middle English poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” from the Arthurian cycle and two of the Nart sagas “Nart Batradz and the Giant with a Colored Beard” and “Nart Soslan and Tar’s Sons” suggest that these plots trace back to stories carried by the ancient Alans, who transmitted the story to the Normans where it developed into one of the Arthurian traditions and was preserved by the Alans’ descendants in the Caucasus region. In this paper we investigate sequential motifs in the British and Ossetian stories, namely, (1) feast, (2) audacious alien horse-rider, (3) voluntary beheading, (4) beheading game, (5) severing the opponent’s head with his own weapon, (6) carrying away the dismembered head, and (7) seduction game. The number and the nature of these parallels suggests that their similarity does not arise from multiple acts of independent creation (polygenesis) but rather from a single source (monogenesis), one that was carried across Eurasia in Roman times by the Alano-Sarmatians.

Keywords: Arthuritan cycle, Narts’ sagas, Anglo-Saxons, Alans, Ossetians, Celts, Middle English, the Ossetian language, the Green Knight, decapitation game, cephalophore, chromatic synctretism.

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