Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/130

94 might easily have happened that we could not find even a, slight proof of the hop being known to the Slavs at a yet earlier age. Happily we possess weighty testimony in the Chronicle of Nestor. Under the year 985 we find the following: "In the year 6493 Volodimer marched against the Bulgarians, and Volodimer made peace with the Bulgarians. And the Bulgarians took an oath and said: 'Peace shall no longer be between us, when the stone begins to swim, and the hop to sink.' And Volodimer came to Kiev."

The picturesque connection of the heavy stone and the light hop is of great moment to us. In a solemn oath the half-savage chief would not use the name of a foreign or a recently introduced plant; he would not employ it in a rhetorical phrase intended to convince the prince of the improbability of breaking the peace. To heighten the contrast, he chooses an object of which the qualities are generally well known. If the stone is the symbol of heaviness, and water the scale, we must acknowledge that the hop was very well chosen as a symbol of lightness. We shall not be far from the truth in asserting that the saying was a kind of proverb, or a form of oath. In Polish prehistoric time we had an oath: "by the stone in the water," and the expression remains to this day: "lost as a stone in the water."

Knowing that in the 10th century the hop was a plant known and used by a people recently come from the banks of the Volga (the strobils being called hops, as is generally the case at present) we may conclude, appealing to our manuscript document, that this knowledge was at least several centuries old. Even if the literal accuracy of the speech recorded by Nestor would be questioned, the fact that he used the expression would be sufficient proof that the object, crystallized in a common form of speech, was known to his contemporaries since ages.

Consequently, if the hop at that time was not an indigenous plant in Southern Russia, its introduction would have to be put back to the 7th century at least.

Nobody will contend that at the time when the hop only became known in western Europe, it at once was introduced into a country which for many years following was deprived of the blessings of mediæval civilization. This would be