Anonymous (Russian Byliny)

The byliny are the heroic oral songs of Russia, chanted by unlettered peasant singers, above all in the far north, long after the age of princes they recall. They tell of the bogatyrs, the champions of Holy Russia, and gather in cycles. The Kiev cycle surrounds Prince Vladimir the Fair Sun and his court at Kiev, with Ilya of Murom, Dobrynya Nikitich and Alyosha Popovich as its chief heroes, against steppe raiders, dragons and the Nightingale the Robber. The Novgorod cycle belongs to a merchant republic and sings of the gusli-player Sadko and the unruly Vasily Buslaevich. Older, half-mythical figures such as Svyatogor and Volga Vseslavich stand behind both.

The songs were first gathered in writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the Kirsha Danilov collection onward, and reached English readers through Isabel Florence Hapgood, whose The Epic Songs of Russia (New York: Scribner, 1886; with an introductory note by Francis James Child) is read here in full as a prose rendering. Her introduction, notes, appendix and connecting commentary are left out; only the songs themselves come in.