Who the author was, when he lived, for whom he sang, are all unanswered questions, but from internal evidence we glean that he sang for his contemporaries while Ígor was still alive. From his apostrophe to Yarosláv Osmomýsl, who died in 1187, we may infer that the poem was written before that year, and it is not unlikely, from his vivid description of the battle at the Kayála, that he was an eye-witness of the expedition which took place in 1185. From the absence of biblical references it is generally assumed that the author was not a member of the clerical profession. Here, however, various difficulties arise. It is quite incomprehensible why there should be so many references to pagan divinities at a time when Christianity had been deep-rooted in Russia for fully two centuries; why, except for the evident imitation of many passages in the _Zadónshchina_, there should be no reference to the poem by any medieval writer, and why only one copy of so remarkable a work should have been preserved. If this poem came so very near being lost to posterity, how many other remarkable productions of that early period have disappeared? It is not at all impossible that there existed an extensive popular poetry, of which only the barest traces have come down to us. This suspicion is strengthened by the emphatic mention by the author of the _Word_ of a poet Boyán who had lived before his days. A copy of the poem was discovered by Count A. I. Músin-Púshkin, Procurator-General of the Holy Synod, in 1795. He it was who in rummaging St. Petersburg bookstalls had discovered the manuscript of Néstor’s Chronicle. From a monk he procured a collection of eight pieces, the fifth of which was this poem. He published the _Word_, as this poem is called in the manuscript, in 1800, with a modern Russian translation. The manuscript itself was burnt in the Moscow conflagration of 1812. The poem has since been edited a countless number of times, and equally large is the mass of critical essays to explain the many dark and corrupt places of what now must pass for the original. When we consider that there are not less than six versions of the _Word_ in French, it seems strange that it is now first rendered into English in its entirety. There is an imperfect translation of a small part of it in H. H. Munro’s _The Rise of the Russian Empire_, Boston and London, 1900. I