This deliverance the Lord granted on a Friday, in the evening. He then walked eleven days to the town of Donéts, and thence he went to his Nóvgorod, and they were much rejoiced. From Nóvgorod he went to his brother Yarosláv in Chernígov, to ask for help in the Posémie. Yarosláv was glad to see him, and promised him aid. Ígor travelled thence to Kíev to Grand Prince Svyatosláv, and Svyatosláv was glad to see him, as was also Rúrik.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] For notes consult the Word of Ígor’s Armament (p. 80 et sqq.).
[20] A Finnish tribe.
[21] Town in the country of the Vyátiches.
[22] The country along the river Sem.
The Word of Ígor’s Armament. (End of XII. century.)
No other production of Russian antiquity has roused so much interest in Russia and abroad as this version of Ígor’s expedition by an unknown poet of the end of the twelfth century. Thirty-five translations into modern Russian, numerous translations into Little-Russian, Polish, Bohemian, Servian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, German, French, witness to the enormous popularity this production has attained. The historical background of the poem is found in the recital from the Kíev Chronicle, which is given on pp. 71-80. The disasters which befell Ígor and his army are probably told with better effect in that prosaic version; but the superior value of the Word lies in its being a precious relic of the popular poetry of the end of the twelfth century, such as no other nation can boast of. The Nibelungenlied and the Chanson de Roland are chiefly productions of a literary character, while the Word bears every evidence of representing the untutored labour of a popular bard.
Who the author was, when he lived, for whom he sang, are all unanswered questions, but from internal evidence we glean that he sang for his contemporaries while Ígor was still alive. From his apostrophe to Yarosláv Osmomýsl, who died in 1187, we may infer that the poem was written before that year, and it is not unlikely, from his vivid description of the battle at the Kayála, that he was an eye-witness of the expedition which took place in 1185. From the absence of biblical references it is generally assumed that the author was not a member of the clerical profession. Here, however, various difficulties arise. It is quite incomprehensible why there should be so many references to pagan divinities at a time when Christianity had been deep-rooted in Russia for fully two centuries; why, except for the evident imitation of many passages in the Zadónshchina, there should be no reference to the poem by any medieval writer, and why only one copy of so remarkable a work should have been preserved. If this poem came so very near being lost to posterity, how many other remarkable productions of that early period have disappeared? It is not at all impossible that there existed an extensive popular poetry, of which only the barest traces have come down to us. This suspicion is strengthened by the emphatic mention by the author of the Word of a poet Boyán who had lived before his days.
A copy of the poem was discovered by Count A. I. Músin-Púshkin, Procurator-General of the Holy Synod, in 1795. He it was who in rummaging St. Petersburg bookstalls had discovered the manuscript of Néstor’s Chronicle. From a monk he procured a collection of eight pieces, the fifth of which was this poem. He published the Word, as this poem is called in the manuscript, in 1800, with a modern Russian translation. The manuscript itself was burnt in the Moscow conflagration of 1812. The poem has since been edited a countless number of times, and equally large is the mass of critical essays to explain the many dark and corrupt places of what now must pass for the original. When we consider that there are not less than six versions of the Word in French, it seems strange that it is now first rendered into English in its entirety. There is an imperfect translation of a small part of it in H. H. Munro’s The Rise of the Russian Empire, Boston and London, 1900.