TATAR MATERIAL IN OLD RUSSIAN. 



By J. DYNELEY PRINCE. 

 (Read April 25, 19 19.) 



It seems to have been a characteristic of Russia from the earhest 

 times until the present moment to take a morbid pleasure in her own 

 failures. Whatever one may think in general of Stephen Graham's^ 

 opinions regarding Russia, he was certainly correct in emphasizing 

 the prevalence of what may be termed the gospel of incompetency 

 among the Russians of to-day. Public sympathy has been at all 

 times in Russian history with the unsuccessful, rather than with the 

 triumphant hero, and nowhere is this disconcerting trait more co- 

 gently evident than in some of the literature of the old Russian 

 period, best exemplified by the " Epic of Igor," or, more fully, the 

 "Tale of the Armament of Igor" (1185 A.D.).^ This poem relates 

 in grandiloquent style, often verging upon that of a Scandinavian 

 Saga, the defeat of the ancient Russian Prince Igorj^ Svjatoslavic 

 by the well-disciplined Tatar hordes of the Polovtsy in southern 

 Russia. The epic abounds with words and other traces of the influ- 

 ence of this and perhaps of other Tatar civilizations, a fact which is 

 all the more interesting, because this literature antedates by about 

 two generations the advent of the Golden Horde under the succes- 



1 Stephen Graham, " The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary," Lon- 

 don, 1915. 



2 The name Igor (Igorj) Hke so many other princely names of this 

 period is pure Norse (=Ingvar); cf. Rjurik=: Hrorekr ; Truvor = Thor- 

 vardr; 01eg = Helgi; Rogvolod = Rognvaldr, etc. For the poem, cf. L. A. 

 Magnus, "The Tale of the Armament of Igor," Oxford, 1915. 



3 The phonetic system of transcription in the present article is essen- 

 tially the Serbo-Croatian. Note, however, that the apostrophe is used to 

 denote the Russian hard sign ^ stop or short vowel (Scliwund) and that the 

 ;■ after a consonant = palatalization (Russian soft sign). The Russian 

 vowel yery (=i in English lid) is represented by y. As regards the abbre- 

 viations, C. = Cumanian ; CC. = " Codex Cumanicus"; OR. = Old Russian; 

 OS. = Old Slavonic, and R. = Russian ; ZDMG. = Zcitschrift der Deutschen 

 M orgenldndischen Gesellschaft. 



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