364 RUSSIAN BALLADS

been supposed to refer to the Garda Lake). With the adventures
of Dietrich or Thidrek, In that saga, there go also several other
romances or strings of adventures: the affairs of Vilkinaland and
Pulaland, i.e. Lusatia and the Ukraine, are a main interest.
Samson's history is drawn into the Dietrich complex, together with
that of Detlieb or Detlev the Dane, who grew very slowly into
heroism, and then, taking leave of his parents, set out to conquer
many robbers, especially the bandit Sigurd. Among the fbylinyj
we find Samson, and the slow-developing Il'ja, whose first exploits
are against robbers, especially the great highwayman Solovei the
Nightingale. Hildebrand is a leading figure in the Thidrekssaga
next to the king himself; his one great adventure is repeated in the
career of Il'ja of Murom. Svjatogor, who cannot lift a small purse
which in reality contains the weight of the earth, or Vol'ga in other
versions, resembles the Scandinavian Thor who could not lift the
Midgard Cat. The ballad of Dobrynja and Aljosa is certainly re-
lated to the German Moringer; and the ballad-novelette in which
he casts doubt on the chastity of the Petrovici's sister (Speranskii,
Aljosa i sestra Petrovicet) reproduces in part the Imogen story, of
Italian origin; it is to be found also in the Greek ballad of
MaurianoSy so that there is no way of determining how it entered
Russia. Its foreign origin is, at least, assured.

Into another set of parallels I am unable to enter. Among the
Tatars and Georgians of the Caucasus tales have been encountered
precisely corresponding to the plots of leading 'byliny'. The
instances are given by Keltujala, but he does not inform us why
we should consider them models rather than copies of the Russian
poems. Concerning these latter we can affirm that the genre is old,
even though we may not be able to assign dates to individual pieces.
The 'byliny' undoubtedly reached their apogee in the sixteenth cen-
tury, when the ballads of Ivan the Terrible were composed in the
best style; they were substantially complete by the seventeenth.
The Caucasian parallels were gathered after the ballads had been
assembled by scholars in the nineteenth century, and we have little
cause to deem them old. They are, one might say, too close; too
close to allow for the divergences which lapse of years brings in
oral tradition. Their existence may, therefore, be but one phase
of the dispersal of the 'byliny'.

For the 'byliny' have been dispersed from their centre, like the
ballads of other European countries, but their migration has