The only manuscript of the ''Tale'', claimed to be dated to the 15th century, was discovered in 1795 in the library of athe Transfiguration Cathedral in [[Yaroslavl]], where the first library and school in Russia had been established in the 12th century, but there is a controversy about its source.<ref name=eohou>Kotlyar, M. ''[http://resource.history.org.ua/cgi-bin/eiu/history.exe?Z21ID=&I21DBN=EIU&P21DBN=EIU&S21STN=1&S21REF=10&S21FMT=eiu_all&C21COM=S&S21CNR=20&S21P01=0&S21P02=0&S21P03=TRN=&S21COLORTERMS=0&S21STR=Slovo_polku A word about the Igor's Army (СЛОВО О ПОЛКУ ІГОРЕВІМ)].'' Encyclopedia of History of Ukraine.</ref> Monastery superior Joel (Bykovsky) sold the manuscript to a local landowner, [[Aleksei Musin-Pushkin]], as a part of a collection of ten texts. Aleksei realised the value of the book and made a transcription for the empress [[Catherine the Great]] in 1795 or 1796. He published it in 1800 with the help of [[Alexei Malinovsky]] and [[Nikolai Bantysh-Kamensky]], leading Russian [[Palaeography|paleographers]] of the time. The original manuscript was claimed to have burned in the [[Fire of Moscow (1812)|great Moscow fire]] of 1812 (during the [[Napoleon]]ic occupation), together with Musin-Pushkin's entire library.
The release of this historical work into scholarly circulation created a stir in Russian literary circles, as the tale represented the earliest [[Slavic languages|Slavonic]] language writing, without any element of [[Church Slavonic]]. After linguistic analysis, [[Ukrainians|Ukrainian]] scholars{{Who|date=October 2014}} in the [[Austrian Empire]] declared that the document contained transitional language between a) earlier fragments of the language of ''[[Ruthenia|Rus']] propria'' (the region of [[Chernigov]], eastward through [[Kiev]], and into [[Halych]]) and, b) later fragments from the [[Halych-Volynia]]n era of this same region in the centuries immediately following the writing of the document.
