“On thy bright brows I read thy doom...”. The topos “The prophet on the troops' way” in the Germanic and Celtic traditions - a history and/or a myth
The paper analyses the structural changes introduced by A.S. Pushkin into the original text: the description of prophesying “death by the horse” to Prince Oleg in Russian Primary Chronicle. The author points out that, in contrast to the chronicle, the ballad's text depicts not the Prince's own prophet but an ethnically alien Slavic wolkhv. Thus the prophecy through the mouth of a foreign magus can be regarded as a kind of a curse. Apart from this, in contrast to the depiction of the episode in Russian Primary Chronicle, Pushkin describes encountering the wolkhv who appears on the marching troops' way. The paper provides parallels to this model found by its author and also describes similar episodes from both the history of Rome and epic texts (“ Nibelungenlied ”, Irish sagas). As Pushkin's ballad's major differences from the given episodes which do not contradict the clusters of motifs of the narrative scheme, the paper points out the following: 1. In all the given examples the encounter takes place at a ford. 2. In all the given examples the prophet is of feminine gender. The author attempts to find sources for Pushkin's text outside the actual Russian history. The question of possibility of unconscious realising of motif schemes is posed as a preliminary conclusion.