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The Silent Debate Over the Igor Tale

The Igor Tale, or Slovo o polku Igoreve, is the only epic tale of its kind to reach us from the Kievan period. It celebrates a military campaign undertaken in 1185 by a minor Russian prince, Igor Sviatoslavich, against the Polovtsy, or Kumans, the perennial steppe foe of Rus' at that time. Igor was defeated and captured, but he later managed to escape and return home. The tale survived in a single manuscript that evidently dated from the sixteenth century. It was published in 1800, about a decade after it was discovered, but the manuscript itself was destroyed during the Napoleonic occupation of Moscow in 1812.1 A number of details in the tale suggest that it was written down in the thirteenth century (Mann 2005:98-112). For two centuries the Igor Tale has been treated as a poem that was composed by a literate writer.2 Only a few dissenters have argued that the Igor Tale was originally an oral epic song, and the question has not attracted much attention among specialists in early Russian culture. It is, however, worthwhile to reexamine some of the arguments formulated by the leading twentieth-century scholar in the study of Old Russian literature, Dmitrii S. Likhachev. His ideas went far to shape the views of scholars throughout the world, yet certain aspects of his argumentation have been ignored by his followers. When one takes a closer look at Likhachev’s line of reasoning, it becomes clear that the hypothesis of a literate poet who penned the Igor Tale, accepted as axiomatic by many students and scholars, stands on extremely shaky ground. The evidence for an oral epic tradition of court songs in the Kievan era includes the Igor Tale itself (regardless of whether it is the text of an epic song or a writer’s stylization of an oral epic) and its allusions to the court singers Boyan and Khodyna. The Hypatian Chronicle mentions “the famous singer Mitusa” who refused to serve Prince Daniil Romanovich of Galich in the first half of the thirteenth century.3 The Pskov Apostol of 1307 contains what appears to be Oral Tradition, 30/1 (2016):53-94