So for a day they fought, and for two days, but on the third, towards mid-day, sank the banner of Igor.
There on the banks of the rapid Kayala the brothers were sundered....
The grass drooped its head in mourning and the tree bowed sorrowfully earthward....
The war of the princes against the Heathen had ceased, for one brother saith to another, “That belongeth to me, and this belongeth also to me.” And of each little thing the princes say, “A great matter,” and stir up strife with one another, while on all sides of the Russian land the warlike heathen press forward.
But Igor’s brave war-men shall never wake again.... Loudly weep the Russian women, “Alas! that never more can our thoughts to our dear husbands be wafted, that our eyes shall never, never again behold them, and gold and silver never more be stored.” And therefore, brothers, Kiev groaneth aloud in sorrow and Tchernigov in grief; woe streameth through the land, and pain, in full flood, through Russia, but ever more and more were the princes growing in hatred, while the warlike Heathen raged through the land, and from every holding had as tribute a squirrel pelt....
[The despairing lamentations of the saga are changed to rejoicing over the unexpected return of Igor, who had made his escape from the Polovtzi land.]
The Sun shines in the heaven since Prince Igor is on Russian land. The maidens sing on the Danube, and their voices reach over the sea to Kiev. Prince Igor rides through the Boritchev-ford to the Holy Mother-of-God of Pirogosha. The country is gladsome and the towns rejoice.[31]
This folk-song, apart from its intrinsic beauty, is valuable as a relic of Russian thought and feeling at a time when the old pre-Christian ideas were still blended with the sentiments of the newer traditions, and it is interesting to mark how the ghosts and gods of old Slavonic myth are mixed up with the saints and virgins of the Orthodox faith. Not unworthy of notice, too, are the sage strictures on the political evils of the day, the perpetual quarrelling among the Princes of the Blood, which, however, continued with unabated vehemence despite the common bond which existed in a common enemy. On the north and north-east the armies of Novgorod and Souzdal extended the Russian influence in the lands of the Finns and Bulgars, but on the south-east, south, and west occurred encroachments which the princes were too enfeebled by internal feuds to resist. The Kuman (Polovtzi) hordes held the banks of the Dniepr almost up to the walls of Kiev and Biel-gorod, as the Petchenigs had done before them; amid the dense forests of Lit’uania, on the border of Polotzk, was rising into importance the Lettish State which was to become a formidable factor in Russian and Polish annals; and the kings of Hungary cast greedy eyes on the fair province of Galitz, held in the feeble and precarious grasp of Vladimir, unworthy successor of a line of valiant Red Russian princes.