Ilya Muromets

Healed by Wanderers

In the byliny, Ilya is the son of peasant farmers in or near the town of Murom, unable to walk or use his limbs for the first thirty-three years of his life. Wandering pilgrims (kaliki perekhozhiye) come to his family's home, give him water or drink to swallow, and tell him to rise; he does, finds himself filled with tremendous strength, and is warned to use it in service rather than for personal gain. The motif of a late, sudden, externally granted strength has no real parallel among the Greek or Norse heroes in this collection, who are typically strong from birth or gifted by a direct divine parent.

The Nightingale-Robber

Traveling the direct road to Kiev rather than the longer, safer route, Ilya encounters Solovey the Nightingale-Robber, a bandit whose whistle is powerful enough to kill or fell trees. Ilya wounds him with an arrow, ties him to his saddle, and brings him to Prince Vladimir's court, where Solovey's whistle, demonstrated at the prince's skeptical request, devastates the hall and proves the truth of Ilya's feat.

An Oral Tradition Recorded Late

The byliny about Ilya circulated as sung oral poetry for centuries before anyone wrote them down. The earliest substantial written collection is Kirsha Danilov's, compiled in the late eighteenth century and first published in 1804. The versions best known to scholars today come from fieldwork collectors who traveled to remote northern Russian villages, especially Pavel Rybnikov in the 1860s and Alexander Hilferding in the 1870s, recording bylina-singers whose repertoire was already understood at the time to be a fading tradition. There is no medieval manuscript of these songs; what survives is a nineteenth-century transcription of a tradition that claims roots in Kievan Rus' of the tenth through thirteenth centuries.