| Summary: | The author of the Primary Chronicle (PC) had a dual purpose of proving the legitimacy of the dynasty of Scandinavian origin and recording the traditions of the ethnic Scandinavian and Slavic populations. The author of this paper endeavours to analyse the authenticity of information provided in the PC concerning the origin of early Slavs. Before a critical method of studying medieval narrative texts was developed in the late 19th and the early 20th century, the authenticity of medieval chronicles had not been questioned. Therefore, the 19th century historiography treated all the information from medieval texts as authentic. In Russian historiography it was A.A. Shakhmatov who while dealing with the PC, laid down the foundations of the critical method in dealing with chronicles. He was the founder of the famous school of historical philology which has placed text analysis at its centre. Despite this approach, a “new hypothesis” appeared in the last decades of the 20th century (see the linguistic theory of O.N. Trubachev) gained wide publicity both in Russia and abroad. Trubachev’s theory did not take into conssideration the results of either text analysis or the findings of archaeology and was a return to the position from the 19th century. The author of the paper shows that this theory was a blind alley.
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