'Olonkho' is the general name for the entire Yakut heroic epic that consists of many long legends: one of the longest being 'Nurgun Botur the Swift', consisting of some 36,000 lines of verse. Like Homer's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey', the Yakut 'Olonkho' is an epic of a very ancient origin dating back possibly as early as the eighth or ninth centuries.