Slavic & Baltic
9 findings, grouped by tradition.
Slavic7
- PerunNo medieval source has Perun fight Veles: that duel is Ivanov and Toporov's 1974 reconstruction, from Baltic myth and Belarusian tales of thunder hunting a devil or serpent.
- VelesThe Primary Chronicle gives Volos one epithet, skotii bog, which Ostrowski in 2011 rendered 'god of tribute', not 'god of cattle'. His duel with Perun is Ivanov and Toporov's 1974 reconstruction, told in no Slavic source.
- Afanasyev and Propp: How Baba Yaga Was MadeReading Baba Yaga's hut on chicken legs as an initiation threshold is not in the tales. Vladimir Propp proposed it in 1946, arguing that in the rite the hut 'stands on the border of two worlds'.
- The LeshyWhen squirrels migrated in great numbers in 1843, peasants said a Vyatka leshy had gambled his away to one in Vologda. In Ralston's 1872 account the forest's beasts, though under the leshy's protection, were also his flocks, driven from wood to wood and lost at play like property.
- The DomovoyThe domovoy as 'a trace of the ancestor worship of olden days' is a reading Ralston gave English readers in 1872. He rested it on peasant usage: the name 'grandfather', embers carried to a new house, and districts where the household dead were credited with his work.
- The RusalkaRalston in 1872 tied the name to water, deriving rusalka from rus, an old word for a stream, or rosa, dew. Max Vasmer's etymological dictionary (Russian edition 1964–73) derives it instead from Old Russian rusaliia, the spring festival before Trinity. That came through Greek or straight from Latin rosalia, originally a feast of roses.
- Koschei the DeathlessWhat Koshchei hides is his death, not his soul: 'в яйце моя смерть', 'in the egg is my death', says Afanasyev's tale 156, from Perm province. The soul is a comparativist's gloss: James Frazer filed the tale under 'The external soul in folk-tales' in The Golden Bough (1890).
Finnic1
Russian Esotericism1