Pavlína Rychterová

Old Slavonic in Great and : Origins, Traditions, Interpretations

The introduction of the Old language and literature in early medieval Moravia constitute the beginning of the history of dissemination of Old Church Slavonic in the regions of Europe inhabited by 1. The texts written in Old church Slavonic extant from the period in focus (9th–10th centuries) and from the given area are very scarce and do not offer any coherent narrative on the events accompanying their origin . Research of the given period and area is deter- mined by the fact that there are few written sources in general . Some of the key written sources therefore which play an important role in the respective historio- graphic narrative are extant in much younger than the alleged time of their origin in the period these sources describe . Also, the respective manuscripts were written far away from the place to which they refer . The majority of extant sources is bound not only to the specific story of the origins of the Old Church Slavonic language and literature but was also always crucial for the beginnings of the individual Slavonic literacies and is of course significant for the question of how Old Church Slavonic is related to the individual in the relevant regions, meaning Moravia, Bohemia, the Balkan Peninsula, and . That means, the narrative about the origin of Old Church Slavonic literacy and/ or about Slavonic literacy in general has been an issue of competing concepts of individual Slavonic philologic and historiographic schools from the beginning of modern humanities in the 19th century . This essay will sketch how the medieval story of the Slavonic mission in Moravia influenced the scholarly hypotheses regarding the beginnings of Slavonic literacy; hypotheses produced and reproduced by the scholarly disciplines involved, lin- guistics, Slavonic studies, historiography and archaeology, in the past and in the present . It devotes more attention to the history of the Slavonic studies and to early medieval historiography in Bohemia and in the Czechoslovak Republic (1918– 1993) than to other national philologies and historiographies 2. That is because the Great Moravian narrative was developed during the 19th and 20th centuries mainly by Czech Slavonic studies and historiography as linked to the history of the formation of the Bohemian Duchy .

1 The research leading to these results has received funding from the European research Council under the european Community’s Seventh Framework programme (FP/2007–2013) / ERC grant agree- ment No . 263672 . I am very grateful to my colleague Jakub Sichálek for many valuable ideas, advices and corrections which improved this text significantly . 2 On the Croation philology and the discussion of relevant written sources see the article of Mateo Zagar in this volume p .185–197 . 166 Pavlína Rychterová

From their beginnings in the 19th century, the Slavonic studies concentrat- ed their efforts on the identification of most ancient texts which could be more or less accurately regarded as monuments of the ancient Slavonic literacy . These efforts resulted in the collection of texts called now Old Church Slavonic corpus . In the corpus very few manuscripts form the period of question (9th–10th centu- ries) appear beside texts extant in younger or much younger material but dated by the linguistic and philological research into the period of question . The dating of individual text remains matter of recurring scholarly discussions 3. The majority of extant manuscripts containing texts of presumably Moravian ori- gin is of later Bulgarian or Russian origin . There are only two extant manuscripts from the Moravian and Bohemian area: the so-called Prague Fragments4 and the so-called Kiev leaves .5 Together with the so-called Freising Fragments6 they are the only extant texts attesting the use of Slavic vernaculars (or their artificial, church Slavonic variant) in the Christian liturgy and catechesis in Europe until the 11th century . No other Slavic texts than liturgical or semi-liturgical are extant from the first period of Slavic (Slavonic) literacy . From the beginning, research on the texts belonging into the Old Church Slavonic corpus had been conjoined with the research on the language (or lan- guages) in which they were written . The attempts to attribute individual texts to concrete Slavic linguistic groups heavily influenced the questions from the area of literary studies and historiography the researchers tried to answer as well as the literary and historical contextualization of the individual texts . So, for example, the research on the Freising Fragments began as a collaborative and at the same time parallel enterprise of European Slavicists in the first decades of the 19th cen- tury . The first editors of the texts, Alexander Vostokov7 and Jernej Kopitar, came to totally different results concerning the character of the language of the fragments . Vostokov indentified the language used in the fragments as Old Church Slavonic, whereas Kopitar found in them an ancient form of Old Slovenian – the argumen- tation depending in both cases on very fine differences in the transcription, which

3 Keipert, Helmut: XVI . Altkirchenslavisch und Kirchenslavisch . 90 . Kirchenschlavisch-Begriffe, in: Die slavischen Sprachen – The . Ein internationales Handbuch zu ihrer Struktur, ihrer Geschichte und ihrer Erforschung – An International Handbook of their structure, their History and their investigation . Band 2/Volume 2, ed . by Karl Gutschmidt/Sebastian Kempgen/Tilman Berger/Peter Kosta . Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswisenschaft – Handbooks of linguistics and Communication Science HSK 32 2,. Berlin/Munich/Boston, Walter De Gruyter 2014, 1217 . 4 Recently on this Bláhová, E .: Literární vztahy Sázavy a Kyjevské Rusi, in: Svatý Prokop, Čechy a střední Evropa, ed . by Petr Sommer in: Nakladatelství Filosofia, Praha 2006, p . 219–234 . 5 See recently on the Kijew leaves Josef Vašica, The Kijew Fragments and Great Moravia, in: The Cyrill and Methodius Mission and Europe . 1150 Since the Arrival of the Brothers in Great Moravia, ed . by Pavel Kouřil et al ., The Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the , Brno 2014č, p . 262–265 . 6 Stih, Peter: Slowenisch, Alpenslawisch oder Slawisch zwischen Donau und Adria im Frühmittelalter, in: Sprache und Identität im frühen Mitelalter, ed . by Walter Pohl/Bernhard Zeller . Verlag der ÖAW, Wien 2012, p .171–184 . 7 I leave the edition of Peter I . Köppen aside, because of further discursive insignificance .