Slovo o polku Igoreve

[Katya Hirvasaho]

To reply:

Individual instances of similarity between _Slovo_ and _Ossian_,, such as
"the trees bent down in sorrow," "they drank the blue wine," "the sank like
three pillars into the sea," are among those MINOR ones, pointed out by
Nabokov as well.  Some of the major ones, from the perspective of a
literaturoved, steeped in textual and cultural analysis would be:

1) a modern concept of a nation as an imaginary community bound together by
certain values and bearing symbols of such allegiance (such as the "Russian
land"--we, the sons of the Russian land are somehow different from sons of
some other lands);

2) the image and the role of the bard as carrying a special distinction as
the repository of the nation's past, who alone can point a way to the
future by showing how the glories of the past ages were achieved.  The role
of the bard has some other, not minor, consequences for a work of the late
18 C, namely

3) generic implications.  The quntessential Ossianic genre was the
historical elegy, which _The Poems of Ossian_ themselves were considered to
be, despite their being written in rhythmic prose (as is _Slovo_).  A
requisite component of an historical elegy was the reminiscence of the
(military) glories of a bygone age, which the bard recounts (as the singer
of the _Slovo_ does in recalling Igor's forefathers). A typical Ossianic
historical elegy would be Pushkin's first "Vospominanie v Tsarskom Sele,"
for anyone interested in checking out the genre.

4) Russian Ossianism wasn't a mere imitation of _The Poems of Ossian_; it
was part of the emerging concept of Russia as a "northern" nation, very
much along the lines of the German model of Ossianism.  The Russian states
had been founded by the Scandinavians, who are the enemies of the Celts in
_Ossian_ and who, consequently, were seen as part of the Ossianic world.
So, Scandinavian mythology came to provide the spiritual aspect of both
German and Russian Ossianism.  That meant that the mention of Scandinavian
(pagan) gods was also part of the recitation of the glories of the bygone
era; thus even Baratynskii, as late as 1820, in his historical elegy
"Finliandiia," calls the Finns "syny Odenovy," under the mistaken notion
that the Finns are part of the ancient Scandinavian world. These works of
Russian Ossianism are, of course, overtly imitating _Ossian_ and the
Scandinavian antiquities (such historical elegies formed a sub-genre,
"podrazhanie skandinavskomu"), whereas _Slovo_, purporting to be an
original from a post-Scandinavian era, could not mention Scandinavian pagan
gods, hence the Slavic ones.

MacPherson had no "original" Gaelic text.  No more than minor fragmentary
evidence was found among his papers of his actually having collected
folklore.  However, there were ballads about Ossian circulating in the
Highlands in his time.

Katya Hirvasaho