Abstrakt
The name Soviius was attested in Chronograph in 1262. There are three etymologies of this name: (a) Jonas Basanavičius and Norbertas Vėlius derive it from the Lithuanian pronoun savas 'one's own'; (b) Algirdas Julius Greimas relates it to the Lithuanian verb šauti 'to shoot', and Bronislava Kerbelytė reinforces this interpretation by folklore evidence; and (c) Vladimir Toporov traces this name to Proto-Indo-European *saue- (*sū-, *sue-) 'the sun'.
A more thorough examination of the fifteenth-century Archival copy (kept in the Russian State Archive of Early Acts, Moscow) and of the sixteenth-century Vilnius copy (Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Vilnius) reveals a previously overlooked fragment of the text about Soviius. This paper presents a textological analysis of the Soviius legend.
A more thorough research leads to the conclusion that the legend was most probably translated by a person of Baltic extraction. The text contains a number of dative constructions (dativus absolutus) peculiar to Old Lithuanian and rarely met with in Old Russian texts.