Stephanie W. Jamison, H. Craig Melchert, and Brent Vine (eds.). 2015. Proceedings of the 26th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference. Bremen: Hempen. ###–###. Grains Not Famous and Traces of Indo-European 1 Phraseology in East Slavic 2 CLAIRE LE FEUVRE 3 Université Paris-Sorbonne 4 1. General problems 5 The East Slavic oral tradition consists of epic oral poetry in the form of ballads, 6 called byliny. 1 It is less studied than the South Slavic oral tradition, which, after 7 Parry and Lord, was extensively investigated. These byliny continue the Indo- 8 European tradition of celebrating heroic deeds. The problem is that the corpus 9 was collected very late, mainly in the nineteenth century or in the beginning of 10 the twentieth century, and it comes almost exclusively from northern Russia; that 11 is, it is geographically circumscribed. We know that oral tradition is conservative 12 and can preserve traditional elements which are centuries old and that that con- 13 servativism can compensate to a certain extent for the lateness of the recording. 14 But at the same time, oral tradition also innovates and does not stick to frozen 15 patterns, so that we have a constant reworking of old patterns into new ones, 16 through lexical renewal or syntactic reformulation. The first difficulty is thus to 17 sort out what is old and what is not. A second difficulty lies in the fact that the 18 East Slavic oral tradition was not isolated, but had contacts with other poetic tra- 19 ditions, Germanic, Finnic, and, at a more remote time, Iranian. This makes it dif- 20 ficult to determine what is genuinely Slavic and what was borrowed from a 21 different tradition. 22 On the other hand, East Slavic has the oldest written tradition of original 23 texts, that is, not translated from Greek, unlike OCS. There are written documents 24 in Old Russian from the eleventh century AD on. There is no Old Russian poetry, 25 properly speaking, and texts like the Igor Tale and the Zadonščina, an epic prose 26 poem of the fifteenth century, are in prose, not in verse. But still, these medieval 27 documents can preserve ready-made phrases or syntactic patterns which are 28 found in the byliny. The problem here is also to sort out genuine Slavic material 29 from external influence. In that case, the main source for borrowings and calques 30 1 The original name of these ballads is stariny, meaning ‘old tales’; the name byliny meaning ‘things that happened, deeds’, was mistakenly given by a nineteenth-century scholar, Sakha- rov, who in 1839 published an anthology called Byliny of the Russian People.