08 — Historical Questions
The two questions on which the historian, as distinct from the venerator, must reserve judgment: who in fact ordered the killings of Boris and Gleb in 1015 — Svyatopolk “the Accursed,” as the unanimous Rus’ tradition holds, or, as a strand of modern scholarship has argued from the Old Norse Eymundar þáttr, Yaroslav the Wise himself — and how much of the surviving legend can be securely dated to the eleventh century as against the rapid hagiographical embellishment that overlay it. These files give both disputes their fullest both-sides treatment, naming the sources and the scholars on each side and resolving nothing beyond what the scholarship will bear.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Passion-Bearers; first canonized Rus saints)
The cult of Boris and Gleb rests on a settled story: their elder half-brother Svyatopolk, having seized Kiev on Vladimir’s death, sent men to murder Boris on the river Alta and Gleb near Smolensk, and a third brother, Svyatoslav, in flight — a story the Russian Primary Chronicle, the anonymous Skazanie, and Nestor’s Chtenie tell with one voice, and on which the brothers’ sanctity as passion-bearers depends. Yet that story reaches us entirely from the side that won the war and built the shrine, and a counter-witness exists: the Scandinavian saga of Eymund, which tells of a Norse warrior in Yaroslav’s service who kills a prince “Burizleif.” This section sets the standard account and the saga-based revision side by side, with their advocates and critics, and then turns to the second, quieter problem — the distance between the bare event of 1015 and the elaborate devotional narrative that grew over it within a generation or two. Both are handled per METHODOLOGY.md §4: the positions are named, the sources cited, and no verdict is asserted beyond the scholarship.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Who Killed Them | The central dispute: Svyatopolk in the Rus’ tradition (Chronicle, Skazanie, Chtenie, with Thietmar of Merseburg as outside support) versus the saga-based case implicating Yaroslav (the Eymundar þáttr; Ilyin’s revision) and its critics (Lenhoff, Franklin & Shepard). A structured [Disputed] note crystallizes the two positions. |
| Dating and Embellishment | The layers of the legend: what is securely eleventh-century (the deaths of 1015, the early cult, the translation of 1072) versus the accreted hagiographical embellishment (the speeches and psalms, the doubling of Boris and Gleb, the Christ-Passion assimilation, the growing miracle collection). Shakhmatov on the textual strata; Lenhoff, Müller, Ingham. |
See Also
- The Succession Crisis of 1015 — the political contest from which both the killings and the dispute over them arise
- The Killing of Boris — the death the saga’s “Burizleif” passage is read against
- The Primary Chronicle — the source that names Svyatopolk
- The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie — the hagiographical texts whose layers Section 03 dates
- The Russian Orthodox Tradition — the tradition in which the Svyatopolk account is settled
References
- Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953.
- Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
- Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989.
- Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996.
- Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946.