Some of the characters who feature prominently in the sagas are: The first Westerner to take note of the Nart stories was the German scholar Julius von Klaproth, who traveled to the Caucasus during the first decade of the 19th century.
[6] Based especially on the Ossetian versions, the Nart stories have been valued by scholars as a window towards the world of the Iranian-speaking cultures of antiquity, and as an important source for comparative Indo-European mythology.
For example, the philologist Georges Dumézil used the Ossetian division of the Narts into three clans to support his Trifunctional Hypothesis that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were similarly divided into three castes—warriors, priests, and commoners.
The Northwest Caucasian (Circassian, Abkhaz-Abasin and Ubykh) versions are also highly valuable because they contain more archaic accretions and preserve "all the odd details constituting the detritus of earlier traditions and beliefs", as opposed to the Ossetian ones, which have been "reworked to form a smooth narrative".
These shared motifs are seen by some as indicative of an earlier proximity of the Caucasian peoples to the ancient Greeks, also shown in the myth of the Golden Fleece, in which Colchis is generally accepted to have been part of modern-day Georgia.
[8] Shayan Javadi, the Persian translator of "Nart" by matching the Ossetian, Abkhaz, Abaza, Circassian, and Ubykh versions, has been able to identify the lineage of some characters who have only been named.