Slavic · Old East Slavic · c. 1185
The Tale of Igor's Campaign
Anonymous; tr. from the Old East Slavic
A secular Russian poem written two centuries after the official conversion, and still calling its poet the grandson of Veles and its people the grandsons of Dazhbog. The gods are not worshipped in it and are not attacked either; they survive as the vocabulary of praise. That is a specific stage of demotion this corpus can otherwise only assert.
Read The Tale of Igor's Campaign in full at the linked edition →What this text attests · 3
| Name here | Rank given | # | Powers described |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ancestor | — | The Russian people called his grandsons, two centuries after the conversion, in a poem that neither worships nor denounces him. | |
| Grandfather of the winds | — | The winds called his grandsons, blowing arrows from the sea against the prince's troops — the god surviving as a figure of speech in a war poem. | |
| — | — | Survival as a figure of speech. Two centuries after the conversion a secular poem calls its own poet the grandson of Veles, with no apparent sense of transgression — the god is neither worshipped nor denounced, he has become the word for what a poet inherits. The corpus needs the stage between cult and folklore, and this is the cleanest example of it anywhere on the site. |
