As I’ve worked on my first Slavic fantasy book and this Slavic Saturday series, Harin, a friend of mine, made me promise I would do a post on probably the most well-known character in Slavic myth: Baba Jaga. I received my calendar reminder this morning, and a promise is a promise, so here we go!
(June 2021 Updated) Note: If you enjoy Slavic mythology, check out A Dagger in the Winds, the first book in my Slavic fantasy series called The Frostmarked Chronicles. You can also join my monthly newsletter for updates and free novellas (such as the prequel, The Rider in the Night) set in the world of the series.
It’s honestly hard to know where to start with a character of such renown. Baba Jaga comes mainly from Russian folklore, and she appears in far more folk tales than I can count. She’s a mortar riding, pestle wielding, and sometimes cannibalistic witch with a wild personality and a cabin with chicken legs for a home. And if that isn’t confusing enough already, depending on the story, she can be anything from the evil sorceress in the woods to a chaotic-neutral helper or simply a motherly protector of the forest.
The character has grown so much that it’s hard to know truly what the core of Baba Jaga really was, because, well, in a way she’s come to be more than just a mythological creature. She’s the face of Russian folklore, and her influence is as important as that of any famous dragon or western knight.
Typically, Baba Jaga is pictured as an old crone with long white hair. In some stories it is said that she commands the winds, blacks out the sun, and calls other types of sorcery to either hinder or aid the hero. Her house is said to have a fence of human bone, her doorpost human femurs, and the lock human teeth. Sense a theme?
Yet despite all the human bones, she cannot be considered blatantly evil. She’s paradoxical. She’s wild. She’s a rejection of every traditional social standard that was set for Slavic women at the time. As both a symbol of (and perhaps actually being) mother nature and death at the same time, she is in herself a representation of the cycle that appears so often in Slavic myth (such as the battle between Marzanna and Jaryło). The balance between life and death, the wilds and humanity, are prevalent in so many stories, and as a wild woman in the forest who adheres to no law but her own, she acts as a protector of this balance (except when she isn’t because, you know, paradox). In this, she is almost the emblem of Slavic myth with so many lessons and conflicts combined into one person.
When a protagonist does stumble upon her home, for some reason most of them don’t just turn and run when they see bones everywhere. Hundreds of them have found her through the years, and it is almost a rite of passage now for a Slavic hero to face her (or pass her tests). She is the benchmark. The (perhaps) most famous example of this is the story of Vasilisa the Beautiful, aka the Russian Cinderella.
Vasilisa was a young girl when her mother died, but before she passed, her mother gave her a little wooden doll and instructed her to feed it and give it water whenever she was in need. Vasilisa did so, and the doll comforted her during the time after her mother’s death.
When her father remarried, Vasilisa’s step-mother was cruel, as were her older step-sisters. Suitors would come by to take the beautiful Vasilisa’s hand, but the step-mother rejected them all, insisting that the elder sisters must marry first. No one wished to marry them, though, so she remained unmarried.
One day, Vasilisa’s father left for a merchant’s trip, her step-mother sold the house and moved the family into a small hut near the woods. Her step-sisters then put out all the lights in the hut and sent Vasilisa into the woods to find another source of light. She does as they said and finds Baba Jaga’s house (along with an array of riders we can talk about another time). Baba Jaga threatens to kill Vasilisa if she does not do tasks for her, and Vasilisa agrees, as she’s been forced to do all the tasks for her step-mother in the past anyway.
Soon, though, Vasilisa grew weary and unable to complete all the tasks. The doll tells her that it will complete the tasks for her, and she is allowed to rest. When Baba Jaga returns with three sets of disembodied hands, she sees that all the work is done and asks how Vasilisa succeeded when no one else had before. Vasilisa says that it is “by her mother’s blessing,” and Baba Jaga scowls. The witch wants no one with blessings near her home, but because Vasilisa succeeded, she sends her away with a skull-lantern filled with burning coals to light the home.
When Vasilisa returned home, she finds that no candles would burn for her step-family and would extinguish whenever they approached the hut. But when Vasilisa steps into the hut with the skull-lantern, it burns all of them, except her, to ash. The lantern tells her to bury it. She does and soon travels to the Tsar’s city to become an assistant cloth making. She becomes so skilled that the Tsar himself notices, and later in the story they become married.
In addition to handing out skulls in folk-tales, many modern depictions of her exist as well. The Crones in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are one such interpretation of her as three witches instead of one (which also occurs in some folk-tales). She also appears in book series such as the popular Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden.
For my own books, I can’t reveal anything too soon, but know that the witch in the woods will eventually make an appearance. She is a fascinating character. When the time comes for her to show up, though, it’s obviously important that I do her justice.
That’s all for this week’s Slavic Saturday. Be sure to keep a lookout for more posts next week, and if you haven’t seen the full series of posts, be sure to check them out.
*As always just a quick disclaimer. Slavic mythology is broad and not written in many if any primary sources, so there’s a variety of interpretations. The interpretations I’m using here are from the sources I’ve found to be reliable and as well as some creative freedom for my book series.