Following a now well-established procedure, after that delightful but short offering from Thames & Hudson, I turn to a longer collection of the source material from Flame Tree. MOAR SLAVIC MYTHS, I SAY !
The Review Bit
Except, not really. Flame Tree's Slavic Myths and Tales (introduced by Ema Lakinska) from their "Epic Tales" series doesn't bear much resemblance to Charney and Slapšak's The Slavic Myths at all. While Lakinska here presents a nice introduction to the Slavic pagan gods, claims that any of the tales contained herein actually have much of a direct connection to the earlier theological beliefs are not exactly convincing. Oh, no doubt some of them do. But without expert guidance as to exactly which ones and why, along with counter-arguments, any guesses here would be like throwing darts at a board.
My second disappointment comes from the collected tales here not being nearly as vampire or werewolf-focused as I was hoping for. The horror-story aspect here isn't anywhere near as prevalent as in TSM, so much so that I need to find another book to better explore this.
And... some of the stories here have been sanitised to the point of incoherence. This is weird, because the publisher says they've preserved the original translations in spite of their, ahem, dated terminology. They do indeed contain some horribly racist and misogynist elements : murderous, scheming Jews, Turks who serve no narrative function except to be slaughtered, supernatural temptresses who are cruelly drowned, as well as a good deal of mutilation, ludicrous over-reactions, and even passages which are pretty much straight-up homoerotic. All the stranger, then, to find that some of the tales they include have had all the good bits taken out to absolutely no benefit. It'd at least make sense if they'd all been child-proofed.
What saved this one from being a disaster is that plenty of the stories here do have all the juicy bits left in, and many of the tales are just very good. Also, this time I would query ChatGPT on pretty much every story I read where there were parts that made no sense. And this has helped a lot. ChatGPT provides citations to alternative versions of the texts which are (sometimes) a lot more coherent, as well as suggesting symbolic readings that make the apparent acausal chaos of the narratives far more understandable. I give this one a solid 7/10.
What follows here is my own readings aided by ChatGPT inquiries. The text here is purely my own and I leave out bits where I think the LLM is clearly just wrong.
Themes
I think Lakinska has some interesting but sometimes very questionable points. She says, very reasonably, that ritual leads to myth which leads to folk tales. The role of folklore is to preserve the essence of a myth while giving it changed characters and settings which are more appropriate in a new (i.e. Christian) context. The old gods survive in the stories as legendary, fantastical figures, renamed and left to the reader's interpretation for their symbolic importance. Some stories really are, or at least contain elements of, truly ancient mythology, in that they are about the fundamental nature of the world : cosmology masquerading as morality. They were once believed to contain true explanatory power, but survived long after the belief faded because the story was still emotionally resonant.
That's all fine as far as it goes. But claims that specific tales can tell us about specific gods seems dubious : a recurring conflict between the young and old might represent a theme of renewal of the year*, but it could also persist purely as literary inheritance; things may endure not so much as a direct vestige of paganism, but because they appeal to more primal instincts. And sometimes, as with the cow whose ears are a literal hemp factory (Papalluga, Serbian), or the key-throwing psychotic bear whose ears are portals to another realm (The Bear In The Forest Hut, Polish), or the tit-sucking Prince Marko and his 600 kg hammer (Prince Marko, Croatian), are memorable precisely because of their sheer surrealist madness, not because of any deeper symbolism.
* One particularly egregious example : the story of Princess Miranda's sleeping kingdom has been interpreted by the same analyst as both representing the seasons, light and darkness, and German oppression of Poland.
And there is a lot of memorable surrealism here. ChatGPT is resolute that none of this is due to substance abuse, but I'm not so sure. Feeding bits of oneself to a giant rainbow bird to rescue twelve suicidal eagles (The Eagles, Polish) is not, in my view, the sort of thing that one just comes up with. Yes, mixing of narratives, forgotten symbolism, and plain bad writing can explain a lot. But the choice of the specific decisions as to which motifs to mix, especially when there's no clear causal connection between them, I think we really can attribute to addled brains. Badly-joined stories, especially when chopping the head off one's horse after only moments before learning the language of animals (Ivan, the Firebird and the Wolf, Russian) simply can't be explained by faulty memories or even regular shitty writing.
But in ascribing this to some mental aberration, I don't necessarily mean literal drugs or mushrooms. It can (also) be malnutrition, poor hygiene, and the stresses of living in a world which didn't recognise personality disorders or mental illness (or neurodivergence) as clinical conditions. I think we have to take these kinds of factors very seriously when we're dealing with stories in which people who readily give all their money to charity are subject to repeated moral lessons about the virtues of poverty and the sin of greed. Never mind the one in which God endorses cannibalism (Bulgarian Hospitality, Bulgarian), or the one where the hero realises his tragic mistake only to immediately and pointlessly die by falling down a well*.
* Actually, into a spring. ChatGPT's suggestion that the Croatian "How Quest Sought The Truth" is about how knowledge isn't good enough, and that a previous mistake can't simply be undone, is not implausible. But this is a children's story, and I would have much preferred a straightforward redemption arc : for the hero to finally understand his error only to snuff it in a pointless accident just doesn't work for me, and the metaphysical symbolism of reconciliation in heaven is going to sail over the heads of most ten year olds.
One other questionable claim from Lakinska is more straightforward. She says that the early Slavs had no concept of destiny, but this is confusingly contradicted by tales in which destiny is front and centre. Sometimes it's inescapable, with the protagonists' very attempt to thwart fate being precisely what leads to their demise. This is a time-honoured plot device that's found well beyond fairy tales, of course.
Sometimes it's more subtle. The Serbian story simply called "Fate" has a complex morality in which a good man is dealt a cruel lot in life simply because he was born on an unlucky day, but he manages to work within it by giving everything he has to his literally born lucky daughter-in-law. One day he accidentally refers to a field as his, whereupon it bursts into flame until he corrects himself. This is not a moral tale of "be good and be rewarded, be bad and be punished" – his lazy but lucky brother gets all the wealth – but rather a way of working within assigned destiny. This rather undermines any claim that there was no Slavic belief in fate : there certainly was, and it was philosophically sophisticated. Sometimes there's a lot of thought underneath the surrealist surface.
Common trends
But there are certain recurring motifs which do seem distinctly Slavic. One simple literary device is to suddenly veer into the first person and sign off with " and I was at that feast and I got pissed", which is apparently the equivalent of "once upon a time*". Another is the ineffectual "I told you so" moment, like when a horse warns its rider that the next action is going to cause it serious pain and then notes "oh look, that actually happened", or an eagle who taunts a man (by repeatedly nearly letting him fall to his death) in mimicry of the time when the man was threatening to kill him (a sort of "look what I had to go through" moment). The odd thing is that these aren't the punchline. They are simply short internal events that don't advance the plot, but keep happening again and again.
* The Belarusian "Little Rolling Pea" has a seriously weird intro sequence which thankfully never caught on, which the author promises the reader two cloaks, a sexy lady, and the equivalent of £1.50 for reading his story. Even "It was a dark and stormy night" makes more sense than this.
One other micro-motif that crops up repeatedly is the supernatural creature who promises their guest a gift as a reward (for example, a giant Daddy Snake to the shepherd who rescued his son – The Language Of Animals, Bulgarian), refuses their specific request, but then acquiesces when the guest decides to leave. It's not stated directly, but it feels like they are honour-bound not to let their guest leave empty-handed. This could be an ancient law of hospitality, but it might also be more of a case of simple fairness : I have to reward you for services rendered.
A larger recurring theme is the reward of charity. Again and again we get brothers rescuing animals and acquiring hordes of bestial helpers, usually three, but sometimes up to six. Often this is initially to their personal impoverishment, with the reward of this personal Animal Attack Squad only becoming apparent later on. This also fits nicely with another theme, where most of the hero-protagonists only succeed thanks to their many helpers. Their virtue, unlike the poor chap who gets repeatedly tortured to stop him being greedy even though he's the nicest guy in the story*, is directly and tangibly rewarded.
* The Polish story of "The Good Ferryman And The Water-Nymphs". It must be said that he does keep abducting sexy mermaids, but remember, I said nicest.
Not every hero follows this path though. Some are essentially superheroes who gain powers through magical objects or animals. Prince Marko literally sucks the tits of a fairy-like creature (and he's not a baby or anything) to give him the super-strength to wield his massive hammer; another becomes a hero by passing through the ears of a storm horse (going in reverse removes his powers – The Whirlwind, Polish). A few are simply innately overpowered, especially the nameless prince in the Serbian tale "The Dragon and the Prince". Here, the protagonist is also notable in another way : he meets a mysterious old lady, but instead of telling him how to defeat the dragon, he tells her everything she needs to do. For no reason at all, he already knows everything and also happens to have super strength. It's a tale which is truly boring in its inexplicable weirdness. There's no reason for anything, no moral growth... like a Michael Bay movie, it may have plenty of spectacle, but it's all wasted.
Uncommon tendencies
And the diversity of the stories goes much further. Some are misogynist, some are hugely liberal. One of the more interesting is the Czech tale of "The Wood Lady", which has a young girl quite unmistakably falling in love with a fairy princess : she reacts with physical pleasure to the sight and touch of the fairy and spends all day dancing with her. Her mother's reaction, interestingly, isn't "wicked child !", it's "damn shame she disappeared". Whether the fairy's vanishing is a metaphysical commentary on how same-sex relations are forbidden at a deeper level (e.g. by society) rather than individuals... who knows. But you could certainly read it like that. No such degree of tolerance is found for the seductive temptresses in the Czech "Grandfather's Eyes" though, in which the women are first bound with brambles before being drowned*. Kinky.
* This story also features a sequence in which the eyes of different animals give different perspectives on the world. It doesn't go down this route, unfortunately, but it comes intriguingly close to asking "what is it like to be a bat owl ?". A missed opportunity for a pre-Nagel philosophical inquiry on panpsychism and idealism...
Even within the individual stories, things are diverse in the extreme. They can veer from deeply metaphorical one moment to completely mental the next : one features a hero who inexplicably forgets his horse can fly and has to be reminded of this by his horse (Princess Miranda, Polish). Or in another, we get a guy who is repeatedly lectured at great and extremely tedious length on how he needs to be a good boy, only for the story to have him reform not through stories at all but through experience (Silyan The Stork, Macedonian). Irony, thy name is fairy tale.
But we also get more sophisticated storytelling, in particular, a lot of tragedy. As we've seen recently, literary tragedy is arguably the result of conflicting moral goods, with characters having needs that simply can't be reconciled. The Ukrainian tale "The Serpent's Wife" is a nice example. Like the Selkie stories, a snake-woman has to leave her husband because he calls her a serpent when she doesn't attend to her duties. But the tragedy here is much more developed : the man, formerly lonely and introverted, becomes arrogant and prideful and forgets himself for just a moment, and she still loves him : unlike most Selkie tales, she takes the time to kiss him goodbye and give him the parting gift of knowledge. The fact that, by her own instruction, he gets to use this to marry the Tsar's daughter about five minutes later feels distinctly off, but doesn't undermine the intended message.
Various other tales herein contain similar variations on the theme. As well as being compelled to leave by unstated magical destiny for breaking assorted rules, the wife – and I think it's always a wife – often chooses to wish the husband farewell. In some cases they are later reunited, quite unlike the Selkie versions where the woman leaves even her children without a word.
The fact that we get this deep tragedy mixed with a total lack of common sense only makes the stories all the more intriguing. In the Czech tale "The Three Doves", the man gets a telepathic nosebleed that warns him his wife is leaving; when they reunite in a magical castle, she's delighted... but utterly fails to warn him that the forbidden room contains a three-headed dragon*. Of course, in classic fairy tale fashion, Chekhov's Dragon is released by the particularly imbecilic man who gives him water for no reason, whereby his wife is abducted so they're parted again. Moron.
* Both men and women in fairy tales are capable of being thick as shit, and here they're both the latter. Point out the forbidden room : fine. Sensible, even. Not telling him why it's forbidden is idiotic, but he's at least equally brainless for not asking the question.
Old magic
Sometimes, this lack of reasoning fatally undermines any message the story intends. We need to know what the characters are thinking to understand the chain of causality, and without this, the tales often feel like just a "bunch of stuff that happened".
But in other cases it may not be bad storytelling at all, but the whole point. ChatGPT tells me that Max Luthi – and I've not looked this up for myself – had the idea that the emotional depthlessness, or weightlessness, of the stories is by design. Instead of giving us a detailed description of a character's inner monologue or emotional turmoil, emotions are cast as external symbols. The emotions are found not in direct descriptions of what the characters are thinking, but what they do and what they encounter.
So to an extent, the apparent shallowness is superficial. The imagery shouldn't be interpreted literally : not only the text but the symbols themselves must be read. Conventional stories have character depth and specific lessons to impart; the wonder tales sacrifice depth for breadth and versatility. This makes it damn hard to interpret their original intent, but also makes them far more widely applicable.
And this helps explain how they can get away with sometimes horrific levels of violence. In the Czech tale of "The Golden Spinning Wheel", the main character has her hands and feet cut off and her eyes gouged out. Instead of being traumatised for life, she just gets on with things. Likewise, talking animals and shapeshifters cause absolutely nobody the slightest bit of surprise because they all occupy the same narrative space : everything is used as a symbol. Nothing is literal. So to say the stories lack depth needs an important qualification that it depends how you read them; in some ways, some of them might be just as deep as any Greek myth.
Quite likely, some of these themes really do extend back to pre-Christian era. Certain motifs like the "obstacle flight", or the "duck horcrux*" are so common that they almost certainly do have pagan origins, even if we can't be sure of the details. I think of them as descended beliefs. They aren't a straightforward record of what early people's believed, but the result of continuous change and development from genuinely early origins.
* A common motif in which a sorcerer hides their power inside a sequence of animals, often ending in an egg inside a duck.
A really interesting possibility here is that some of the animal beliefs might be shamanic, whereby humans and animals are thought to form a continuum. Essentially, an animal is just a human wearing a skin, or indeed vice-versa : we're all the same underneath. This explains the apparent bestiality in, for example, the Czech story "The Bear, The Eagle and the Fish" in which the daughters of a count are all married to various animals and produce actual animal babies. But again, I doubt the author really had this directly in mind when they wrote it. More likely, they inherited a literary tradition but one which did have genuine archaic origins from a truly ancient belief system.
And so I don't think the author here is really quite correct to say that there are aspects of the god Perun in the bear in "The Bear In The Forest Hut". Or rather, it needs more qualification and development : the psychotic key-throwing bear* (the one with the Tardis ears**) might have ideas inherited and developed from Perun, but I don't think it's at all likely the tale was recorded in a deliberate attempt to record any beliefs that if you go down to the woods today, the gods will give you a big surprise.
* In her summary, the author utterly neglects to mention that the bear tries to kill the girl and instead only notes that he "gives her treats", which is a bit like saying that Darth Vader was a competent administrator and neglecting everything else.
** Hemp factories, portals to kingdoms, and superhero costume changing room.. ears are tremendously useful in Slavic tales, but nobody seems to know why.
Conclusions
I want to end with a few more mentions of some of my favourite stories :
- Bulgarian Hospitality : in which god comes damn close to approving cannibalism and the man in question is absolutely happy to murder his own child. Even weirder, the emotional weightlessness doesn't work here, because he does the deed in secret so as not to upset his wife.
- The Serbian tale of The Three Brothers : a case of a ruined text. In the original Serbian (so sayeth the chatbot), the three brothers have a sister. While they go off into the world and each rescue animals, she gets a set of iron teeth, a whetstone, and becomes a cannibal. She kills, roasts, and eats their own mother until one of the brothers spots her and his rescued dogs kills her. The contrast between the brother's selflessness (with the animals having further roles in helping them later on) and the daughter's utmost selfishness could not be greater... and all of that is lost in this version. Oh, and it ends with one of the brothers leaping over a fucking massive ditch for really no reason at all.
- The Czech tale of The Devil's Brother In Law also has the most interesting bits excised. Our hero is driven away by his evil stepmother, but in the original he experiences forced conscription and gets to (unwittingly) boil his stepmother and other tormentors in cauldrons in Hell. Fascinatingly, the Devil here doesn't tempt anyone into sin, but actually plays an active role in saving them from damnation. Rather than the Prince of Evil, he's more like the ultimate backstop : he doesn't actually want to torture anyone, but he absolutely will if people are beyond salvation.
- Another Czech story, The Bird With The Golden Gizzard is a messed-up version of the goose that laid the golden egg. Here, the bird has giblets than give power and wealth : the heart will make you king, the gizzard gives gold. The introductory characters are completely lost, the boy who eats the gizzard is (much later) drugged by a bar wench to vomit it back up whereupon she immediately eats it, then he just happens to find leaves that turn people into goats and back again so he uses that to revenge himself. Then he marries Gizzard Girl because of course he does.
- The Ukrainian tale of The Vampire and Saint Michael is one of few stories here with genuine horror elements. The vampire in this one is more a case of demonic possession in which a princess forgets to cross herself before bathing and gets taken by the devil. Placed in a coffin in a church, nobody can enter to pray for her because she eats them and leaves only the bones. The hero hides in her coffin to save her by demanding marriage, so what we have here is literally a demented sexy vampire that could have been lifted straight out of True Blood.
- The Serbian version of Saint George is a sort of mash-up of The Silmarillion and Aliens. Here the saints order the world among themselves much as the Valar do following the song of the Ainur. Seeing the Trojans turn to sin, Mary – yes, that one, the compassionate nice one – decides that the best solution is to nuke the site from orbit (i.e. with thunderbolts), whereupon the thunder god (a.k.a. Saint Elias) says, "no no Mary, let's give them a terrible winter first. Oh, that didn't work. Okay let's try smallpox. Bugger. Right, bring on the dragon, and if that doesn't work, then we'll get smiting". This all puts things in a very different context from how the tale is usually told.
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