Baba Yaga (was RE: [lbo-talk] Marketing the Chronicles of Narnia)

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Mar 11 12:13:24 PST 2005


Shane:
> Her "House on Fowl's Legs" is musically depicted in the penultimate
> section of Moussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition."

Yes, and it is a very popular character in children tales in Eastern Europe.

While we are on that topic, the concept of "vampire" comes from Eastern European folk tales as well, and is a mixture of two creatures - one was a person with two souls, as one (main) soul died the body run by the other one wandered aimlessly through the wood - it was call (wapierz, upyr, vypyr etc in various EE languages, all having the connotation of something "washed out" i.e. washed out of the original soul). This was a harmless creature that wanted only to rest in its grave, so to help it one only needed to drive a wooden stake through its heart.

The other creature was blood sucking and could take the form of various animal forms - any animal would do. The Polish name was "strzyga" (pronounced "stshygha" - I do not remember other language names at the moment).

The "vampire" is a literary mixture of these two folk tales embellished by the stories of the notorious Vlad the Impaler.

Wojtek



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