370 RUSSIAN BALLADS

boasting of his wife, so that Vladimir detained him and would not
set him free till she came in person. Being wise, she concealed her
sex. She carne in the character of an envoy from Greece, wrestled
with all the heroes and overthrew them. She then demanded to
wrestle with Stavr, and after conquering him she made herself
known. Her strength was due to her race, for she was Vasilissa,
daughter of the prodigious Mikula. Stavr of Novgorod is known
to have lived in 1118. The adventure that befell him is that of the
German Alexander von Metz, who is called In the ballads of Ger-
many and Scandinavia The Count of Rome, The Russian, however,
was not yoked to a plough, and his wife did not disguise herself
as a minstrel. In the Danish ballad Sister frees Brother (UDV 170,
172, Arwidsson 97) there is no mention of ploughing, and the lady
relies in the Russian fashion on brute force. These stories are
probably related, but it would be hard to say how. The legend of
Joseph and Zuleikha, followed by that of Benjamin's cup, gives us
the pilgrim's ballad of Forty Pilgrims (Rybnikov 13, 40, &c.,
Speranskii, Sorok Kalik s Kalikoju); and there is a strange history
of Solomon in Tsar Solomon and Solomon's Father's Dream
(Rybnikov 49, 50, 94), of Jewish origin.

Owing to the attraction to Kiev of heroes like Stavr, the
Novgorod cycle has only two names: Sadko the Rich Merchant,
and Vasilii Buslaev. Both have been surely identified in the twelfth
century; the one was an administrator, the other left a permanent
record of his wealth in the stone church he built. But the atmo-
sphere of their adventures belongs to the city at the height of her
commercial prosperity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or
even to her decline in the sixteenth. Their ballads are more satisfy-
ing than those of Kiev inasmuch as the plots are firmer. Sadko,
the Rich Merchant, was at first a fiddler who gained his wealth
from the tsar of Lake Ilmen, he then equipped a splendid trading
fleet for a supreme venture. His sins, like Jonah's, raised a storm,
and he was cast into the sea. By his marvellous playing on the lyre
he kept the Tsar of the Sea dancing so long that he had to release
his victim. In prose tales Sadko learns the value of salt. The ballad
exalts the worth of the minstrel's profession above that of rich mer-
chants the more effectively for being set in commercial Novgorod.
Sadko's early poverty contrasts brilliantly with his later wealth, which
is described with oriental hyperbole; but his wealth was gained by
his playing and later preserved by it from total loss. The opening is: