Textual Criticism and Text Reconstruction: Approaches to Early Russian and Welsh Poetry
Elena Parina
Russian Academy of Sciences
Abstract
The Tale of Igor’s Campaign and The Gododdin, two poetic texts crucially important for the history of Early Russian and Welsh literature respectively, have a very dark history. Both are preserved in only one reliable source and are supposed to be composed about 600 years before this edition or manuscript was created. Anna Dybo and John Koch however propose an attempt of reconstruction for the Ur-Text of these poetic masterpieces. In this article we compare the framework within which these reconstructions were created. Whereas Anna Dybo relies mainly on contemporary texts, John Koch in the absence of such monuments has to rely more on historical interpretation.