Martynyak I. Reception of Ukrainian Folk Tradition in Arabic Sources from the IX-XII th centuries.

The innovative approach to study and analyze of the Arabic sources of the IX-XII th centuries based on the broad understanding of the subject of folklore is developed in this research. By expanding the meaning of folklore to all phenomena of material and spiritual culture that includes language, word, poetry, music, dance, gestures, myths, rites, crafts, architecture, and other varieties of artistic creativity, the Arabic sources are involved in the interpretation of certain phenomena that subsequently had a place in the centuries-old Ukrainian history that was deliberately denied and which was suppressed in Soviet times. Taking into account the chronological division of the Arabic sources from the history of the Slavs, we analyzed the geographic descriptive works written in the IX–XII th centuries. In contrast to the sources of the earlier and later periods, they contain mostly original information, which is based on the information of the Arab merchants and travelers about the Eastern Slavs and Rus. Only a small number of information about material and spiritual culture of the Slavs in various Arab writings between IX–XII the centuries is original. Some Arab authors from the XIII th century provide the information about Eastern Slavs and Rus. However, their works mostly retell the previous sources. The fragments about Rus and Slavs, that are available to us, are researched from the point of view of how information provided by them is reflected in our folklore, whether there are analogues or, at the same time, examples of the existence of this or that phenomenon in our fields, or whether the information provided by the Arab travelers about Eastern Slavs and Rus' are not alien to our folklore tradition.