The Four Revenges on the Drevlians

The most famous and most clearly legendary of all the Olga material: the Chronicle’s saga of the widow’s fourfold revenge for the murder of her husband Igor — the boat tipped into the trench, the bathhouse set ablaze, the funeral feast turned massacre, and the burning of Iskorosten by birds. This file narrates the four episodes strictly as the Russian Primary Chronicle tells them, with the source named at every turn and the historicity of the cycle held open; the interpretive reading of the saga is reserved to a separate file.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Equal-to-the-Apostles)

How This File Must Be Read

What follows is a saga. It is reported here as a saga — as the narrative the twelfth-century Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest’ vremennykh let) places in the mouth of tradition under the years 945 and 946 — and it is not, in any of its four episodes, certified as a report of historical fact. The repository’s METHODOLOGY §3.5 requires exactly this discipline: hagiographical and legendary material is to be pinned to the source that attests it, narrated as that source’s testimony, and never quietly promoted to event. The revenge cycle is the textbook case. Its motifs — the riddling embassies, the threefold-and-then-fourfold escalation, the impossible tribute paid in birds — are the great forms of Norse saga and folktale, not the residue of a chancery record (see The Primary Chronicle and the Sources for the layered character of the whole narrative, and Reading the Saga for the folkloric structure analyzed in its own right).

So throughout this file, every “Olga did X” is to be read as “the Chronicle reports that Olga did X.” The Chronicle is a magnificent storyteller, and the four revenges are its set-piece; the point of telling them in full is not to believe them but to see clearly what the tradition made of its avenging princess before the Church made of her its Equal-to-the-Apostles.

The premise is given in the entry that opens her narrative proper. Igor (Ingvarr), prince of Kyiv, had gone back among the Drevlians — the Slavic tribe to Kyiv’s west — to extort a second round of tribute, and they killed him for it (Russian Primary Chronicle, anno mundi 6453 [945]; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor; on the marriage and the threshold of the regency see Princess of Kyiv). The Drevlian prince Mal then conceived the design that triggers the whole cycle: having killed the prince, he would take the princess and the principality together. The Chronicle has the Drevlians reason that they had slain Igor “like a wolf, creeping in and stealing,” and resolve to win Olga and her young son Svyatoslav and do with them as they pleased. From that proposal the four revenges follow in their escalating order.

The First Revenge: The Boat and the Trench

The Drevlians, per the Chronicle, sent their best men to Kyiv to make the offer — “twenty of their best men” — rowing up to the city by boat. Brought before Olga, they delivered Mal’s suit: they had killed her husband, “for thy husband was like a wolf,” but their own princes were good and just men, and she should marry their prince Mal.

Olga’s answer is the first of the saga’s riddling reversals. She received the proposal with every appearance of honor. “Your proposal is pleasing to me,” the Chronicle has her say; “indeed, my husband cannot rise again from the dead.” But she asked them to return to their boat for the night and to await, the next morning, a signal honor: she would send her people to carry them, and they were to demand to be carried up to her court in their boat. Meanwhile, that same night, Olga ordered a deep trench dug in the courtyard of her castle, outside the hall — the great pit prepared in secret beneath the show of welcome.

In the morning her messengers came down to the envoys, who, primed to insist on their dignity, refused to walk or ride and demanded, as Olga had arranged, to be carried up in their boat. The Kyivans took them up — boat and men together — and bore them into the court, and there tipped them, boat and all, into the trench. The Chronicle then gives the scene its grim, characteristic close: Olga “bent over the trench” and asked the envoys, buried where they lay, “whether they found the honor to their taste.” And they answered that “it was worse than the death of Igor.” At her command they were buried alive.

The exchange is the signature of the whole cycle — the courtesy that is a trap, the question put to the doomed, the answer that measures one horror against another. It belongs unmistakably to the world of saga, and the Chronicle relishes it.

The Second Revenge: The Bathhouse

The first embassy had gone into the ground in secret; the Drevlians did not yet know their men were dead. So Olga, the Chronicle continues, sent word back to them. Let them send, she said, their most distinguished men — their best and greatest — so that she might come to their prince Mal in fitting honor, for otherwise the people of Kyiv would not let her go. The Drevlians, flattered and unsuspecting, gathered “the best men who governed the land of Dereva” and sent them.

When this second embassy arrived at Kyiv, Olga offered them a courtesy before their audience. After their journey, she said, let them refresh themselves; a bath had been made ready, and they should come to her once they had bathed. The Drevlians went in to wash. And as they entered the bathhouse, Olga’s people barred the doors from outside and “the bathhouse was then set on fire from the doors, so that the Derevlians were all burned to death” (Russian Primary Chronicle, anno mundi 6453 [945]; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor).

Two embassies were now destroyed, and the Drevlians at home still did not know it. The doubling is itself a saga device — the trick that works once and then works again on a fresh set of victims who walk into it the more readily for having sent the first.

The Third Revenge: The Funeral Feast (Tryzna)

With both embassies in the ground and the flames, Olga now took the war to the Drevlian land. She sent ahead to announce that she was coming to them — but as a mourner, not yet as an avenger. Let them prepare great quantities of mead, she said, in the city where they had killed her husband, that she might hold a funeral feast over his grave. The Drevlians, the Chronicle says, brought together much honey and brewed it, and Olga came with a small retinue to Igor’s grave to keep the tryzna — the old pagan funeral feast, the rite of drinking and lamentation over the dead.

She wept over Igor and bade her followers heap up a great burial mound, and when the mound was raised she gave the order for the feast to begin. The Drevlians sat down to drink, and Olga directed her young men to wait upon them and pour for them. The Drevlians asked after their envoys — the embassy they had sent to Kyiv — and Olga answered that the men were following behind with her husband’s bodyguard, a lie to keep them at their cups. So the Drevlians drank deep, and when they were thoroughly drunk Olga withdrew and gave her retinue the command to fall upon them. The Chronicle counts the dead with its usual flat precision: “they cut down five thousand of them.” Then Olga returned to Kyiv and prepared an army against those who survived.

The number — five thousand — is the kind of round, towering figure that saga and chronicle alike reach for; it is the scale of legend, not of muster-roll.

The Fourth Revenge: The Siege of Iskorosten and the Birds

The fourth revenge is the most famous, and the most plainly folkloric. In the next year the Chronicle takes Olga, with her son Svyatoslav and her host, into the Drevlian country in open war. The Drevlians came out to meet her in the field and were beaten; the survivors shut themselves up in their towns, and Olga laid siege above all to Iskorosten (Korosten) — the very city where Igor had been killed, and the stronghold of those who had killed him. There she sat, the Chronicle says, for a full year, and could not take it.

So she resorted to a stratagem dressed as mercy. She sent into the city to say that she did not mean to press them as she had pressed the others; she asked only a light, token tribute, that the siege might be lifted and she go home. And what she asked was almost nothing: three pigeons and three sparrows from each household. The besieged, the Chronicle reports, were glad of so small a price and gathered the birds and handed them over, household by household, relieved to be quit of the war so cheaply.

Then Olga gave out the birds to her soldiers, and to each bird she had a small piece of sulphur bound up in cloth and made fast with thread. As night fell she ordered the birds released. They did what birds do: every pigeon and sparrow flew straight home to the city it had been taken from — to its own nest under the eaves, to the dovecotes and lofts and the dry timber of the houses. And the smouldering sulphur, carried home with them, set the whole city alight at once, from a hundred points no one could fight. The Chronicle drives the totality of it home: “There was not a house that was not consumed,” and there was no quenching it, for all the houses caught at the same moment.

The people fled the burning town, and Olga’s men were waiting. She took Iskorosten, the Chronicle says, and seized its elders, and of the remaining inhabitants she killed some, gave others into slavery to her followers, and left the rest to pay tribute — laying a heavy tribute on the survivors and going on through the Drevlian land to fix the tributes and the tithes (Russian Primary Chronicle, anno mundi 6454–6455 [946–947]; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). With that the cycle of four closes, and the Chronicle turns from the avenger to the administrator — the imposition of the regularized tribute that the regency-and-reform files take up (see Regent for Svyatoslav and Administrative Reforms).

What the Saga Is and Is Not

It must be said once more, flatly, that none of this is offered as history. The bird-tribute in particular is a wandering folktale motif with close analogues across the medieval world, and the fourfold structure — trench, fire, feast, fire again — is a literary architecture of escalation, not a sequence of remembered acts. The interpretive case for reading the whole cycle as saga and folklore, with its Norse and comparative parallels, is set out in Reading the Saga and is not developed here; this file’s task is only to narrate the episodes faithfully as the Chronicle gives them.

What can be said about the factual core is narrow. [Disputed: the historicity of the revenge cycle as a whole. Igor's death at Drevlian hands around 945 has some independent and structural support — Leo the Deacon, writing in the later tenth century, reports a Rus' prince killed by a Germanic tribe in a manner echoing the Chronicle, and a princely revolt over excessive tribute fits the period; the four revenges themselves, by contrast, have no external attestation whatever and bear every mark of saga and folktale. The modern consensus (e.g. Franklin and Shepard, *The Emergence of Rus*) treats the murder as plausibly rooted in fact and the fourfold trick of vengeance as legendary elaboration. The figures — twenty envoys, five thousand cut down, a year-long siege broken by birds — are the round numbers of saga, not data.]

The point of preserving the saga in full is not credulity but understanding. This is the Olga the tradition remembered before, and beneath, the saint: shrewd, terrible, and undefeated, a pagan widow who out-thought every move made against her. The Chronicle sets this avenger immediately before the convert, so that the reader meets the wisdom of the baptismal dialogues as the same wisdom that dug the trench and counted out the birds. Whether the four revenges happened is, for the tradition, almost beside the point; that they were told of her is the fact this file records.

References

The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Translated and edited by Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. The revenge cycle under anno mundi 6453–6455 (945–947). Quotations cited inline: the buried envoys answering that the honor “was worse than the death of Igor”; the bathhouse “set on fire from the doors, so that the Derevlians were all burned to death”; at the funeral feast “they cut down five thousand of them”; and of the burning of Iskorosten by the birds, “There was not a house that was not consumed.”
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. On the composite and layered character of the Chronicle, the plausibility of Igor’s death as a factual core, and the legendary character of the revenge elaboration.
Leo the Deacon. History. (The later tenth-century Byzantine notice of the death of a Rus’ prince at the hands of a tribe, cited for the limited external support of Igor’s killing — not of the revenge cycle.)