The Legend of the Twelve Fridays in the Russian and Irish Traditions: An Attempt at Contrastive Analysis

The aim of this paper is to compare the versions of the Legend of the Twelve Fridays attested in Irish and Russian. Until now, three Irish texts were published, but many more are preserved in the manuscripts; for the Russian part, the study is based on the manuscript collection of the Archive of Ancient Relics of the Russian Literature Institute (the Pushkin House). The preliminary investigation shows that there are many points in common between the Irish and the Russian variants, but for the moment the comparison may be only contrastive since we lack several intermediate stages to reconstruct the prototype and to establish the most probable ways of development which brought the extant forms of the legend into existence in these two traditions. Nevertheless, a number of assumptions can be put forward which will be discussed along with difficulties preventing a straightforward solution.