Slovo o polku Igoreve

[Robert Orr]

My question remains: there appears to be no linguistic evidence that the
Slovo is a fabrication/forgery, and until such evidence comes to light,
one might well question the value of a comparison between the
(geunine until proven otherwise) twelfth century Slovo and the (invented)
eighteenth century Ossian.

And seeing that we're dealing with comparisons, has anyone thought of
comparing the apparent controversy over the Slovo with the ongoing
suggestion that the plays normally attributed to Shakespeare were really
written by

1) The Earl of Oxford
2) Francis Bacon
3) Christopher Marlowe
4) Queen Elizabeth I,

etc., etc.

which is also great fun, but .....

Robert Orr

On Wed, 6 May 1998, Katya Hirvasaho wrote:

> 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
>