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tremendous efforts, to lift the sack which is so heavy, while the
sweat drops from his forehead. Finally, he thinks he
has got it up to his knee; but it is he himself who has
sunk down to the knees in the ground. In the little
sack, God had put the weight of the whole earth.
We finally find a characteristic incident, which reminds
us of one of our national traditions, where Sviatogor and
Ilia, after having formed a foster-brotherhood, visit
Sviatogor’s old father together. The old man is blind and
apparently impotent. He asks to be allowed to press
Ilia’s hand to see if the Russian bogatyrs (the generic
name of the national heroes) still have strong limbs and
warm blood. At a nod from his friend, Ilia grabs a huge
iron bar glowing in the fire and hands it to the old man.
“Good!” says he to the young hero. “I feel that you
have a strong hand and hot blood.” This is the story of
Holger Danske and the peasant.[1]
There is no one among the heroes of these bîlinî who
is more characteristic and typical than this Ilia of Murom.
He belongs to the cycle which has Vladimir, the beautiful
sun, for its centre; but he is treated by the poets as the
son of a peasant, with even more sympathy than the
prince. Regular geological layers can be found in all
the epic poems of Russia; we can see, more or less
plainly, how certain conceptions of nature which are
common to all Aryan peoples about the eleventh century
began to assume a constantly more decided Slavic stamp.
The mythical heroes, which were at first like those of
other countries, like those of the old North, for instance,
become decidedly Russian and decidedly Greek-orthodox.
They are born in a definite Russian village; they are
slain on a definite Russian field. The celestial
mountains, streams, and seas, which, in the oldest mythological
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