GREAT RUSSIA 363

became reconciled to the rulers of Kiev; this piece has strongly
influenced a similar ballad concerning II Ja Muroniee (Speranskii,
IFja i Idolisce), of which the earlier group of versions set the duel
in Constantinople. IPjVs battle with his son (Speranskii, Bof IFia
s synoni) calls to mind the Greek ballad of Tsamados, as also the
history of the Esthonian Kawi-ali, of the Persian Rusteni, of the
German Hildebrand, and of the ancient Ulysses and Teiesonos,
without it being possible to assign a precise source fur the Russian
version.

The Greek stream crossed the lands of the Southern Slavs. In
some particulars the Russian minstrels resemble those of Bulgaria.
The importance they assign to snakes and to swan-women, \vho
are witches, is perhaps common Slavonic; and the same may be
the case of the approximation between the marvellous ploughman
Mikula and Marko Kraljevic, who ploughed up the sultan's high-
way. The Czechs also had their ploughman-hero: Pfemysl. The
ballad of Mihailo Potyk Ivanovicis a complex of many motifs, but
the most important have Bulgarian parallels. The name belongs
to the St. Michael of Batak in southern Bulgaria, who fought with
a lake-infesting dragon who exacted a tribute of children (in fact,
who borrowed a feat from St. George, as St. George had done from
Perseus). His relics worked miracles, and they were removed in
1206 to the Bulgarian capital at Tirnovo; the date must serve as
the 'terminus a quo' of his reputation in foreign parts. One of
Mihailo Potyk's adventures is thus a dragon-fight; the other motif
is that of the faithless wife who sides with her husband's enemy.
She is a Solomonic and Samsonic character; but the working out
of the Russian ballad is closely akin to the Bulgarian hkren and
Milica and the Yugoslav Banovic' Strahinja.

We have seen that the Germans who composed Ortnit and the
Dietrich romances were interested in Russian oral literature to the
extent of learning that IPja and Vladimir were representative
figures. It is the same group of romances which offers a number
of parallels to the fictions of the * by liny', and though the affinities
are not so close as to be decisive, they sum up to the probability of
a definite German influence on their formation. With Ortnit go
in the Heldenbuch also Hugdietrich, Wolfdietrick, and the Rosen-
garten; the whole group of poems is preoccupied with the legendary
history of Greece and Italy (though Ortnit is so only by the
accident that Holmgard, the Old Norse name for Novgorod, had