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).