The Tale of Igor's Campaign: Encyclopedia II - The Tale of Igor's Campaign - Reaction of 19th century scholars

The Tale of Igor's Campaign - Reaction of 19th century scholars

A passage on Vseslav the Werewolf

In the seventh age of Troyan, Vseslav cast lots for the damsel he wooed. By subterfuge, propping himself upon mounted troops, he vaulted toward the city of Kiev and touched with the staff of his lance the Kievan golden throne. Like a fierce beast he leapt away from them at midnight, out of the white town, having enveloped himself in a blue mist.

Then at morn, he drove in his battle axes, opened the gates of Novgorod, shattered the glory of Yaroslav, and loped like a wolf to the Nemiga from Dudutki. On the Nemiga the spread sheaves are heads, the flails that thresh are of steel, lives are laid out on the threshing floor, souls are winnowed from bodies. Nemiga's gory banks are not sowed goodly - sown with the bones of Russia's sons.

Vseslav the prince judged men; as prince, he ruled towns; but at night he prowled in the guise of a wolf. From Kiev, prowling, he reached, before the cocks crew, Tmutorokan. The path of Great Sun, as a wolf, prowling, he crossed. For him in Polotsk they rang for matins early at St. Sophia the bells; but he heard the ringing in Kiev.

The release of this historical work into scholarly circulation created quite a stir in Russian literary circles, because the tale represented the earliest Slavonic writing without any mixture of Church Slavonic. Ukrainian scholars in the Austrian Empire declared, upon linguistic analysis, that the document contained transitional language between a) earlier fragments of the language of Rus' propria (the region of Chernihiv, eastward through Kyiv, and into Halych) and, b) later fragments from the Halych-Volynian era of this same region in the centuries immediately following the writing of the document. The current dialectology upholds Pskov and Polotsk as the two cities where the Tale was most likely written. Numerous persons have been proposed as its authors, including Prince Igor and his brothers.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Reaction of 19th century scholars", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki