Slavic & Baltic
Being · 945 CE
Perun
Two Oaths and a Demolition
Known almost entirely from the account of his destruction, by the church that destroyed him.
Who they wereOak, thunder and the axe: a sky god sworn by on weapons, whose tree was the oak and whose weapon fell as lightning. What survives is mostly the account of his image being dragged to the river — a god known through the record of his removal.
The FindingAlmost all that survives of Perun is the account of his demolition in 988; the famous duel with Veles is Ivanov and Toporov in 1974, resting on their own equation of the chronicle's Volos with Veles, and no Slavic source records the combat.
Being · 971 CE
Veles
Sworn By, Never Described
East Slavic god sworn by beside Perun as skotii bog; read since 1974 as the serpent Perun strikes down.
Who they wereSworn by as skotii bog, the cattle god — so wealth, herds and the dead all belong to him, which in an agrarian society are one domain. Later scholarship pairs him against Perun as the serpent below to the thunderer above, and the storm as their quarrel.
The FindingVeles is known from two treaty oaths and one epithet — skotii bog, which Donald Ostrowski translates 'god of tribute' rather than 'cattle god' — and almost everything else attached to his name is modern: the duel with Perun is Ivanov and Toporov's reconstruction of 1974, and the scripture published under his name from 1957 is a forgery.
Object · Northern European Folk○
The Sampo
A magical object forged, fought over and broken in the Finnish Kalevala, whose actual nature was never explained by the singers who sang of it.
What it meansScholars have proposed a world pillar, a mill, a coin die, and a Byzantine treasury — genuinely unresolved. The entry's real content is not what the Sampo was, but the documented history of who has guessed what, and when.