Baba Yaga

Russia
East Slavic area: European Russia, with Afanasyev's variants concentrated in the central and southern Great Russian provinces and in the Russian North; lexical cognates in Poland (jędza) and Bohemia (jezinka)

Baba Yaga — the old woman who, in Russian folktales, lives alone deep in the forest in a hut on hen's legs, and tests whoever reaches her before sending them back with fire or with a horse.

Variants and names

Russian Баба-яга (Baba-yagá), also яга-баба and the adjective ягая; Ukrainian баба-яга, язi-баба, язя; Belarusian баба-яга; Polish Baba Jaga. Baba means «old woman, grandmother», and in current Russian and Polish also «woman» in a low, dismissive register. For yaga Vasmer reconstructs a Common Slavic *(j)ęga and lines up Old Church Slavonic ѩѕа «illness», Bulgarian еза «torment», Serbo-Croatian jeza «horror» and jeziv «dangerous», Slovene jeza «anger», Old Czech jězě «lamia», Czech jezinka «forest witch», Polish jędza «witch, evil woman» and jędzić się «to grow angry»; outside Slavonic he compares Lithuanian ìngis «idler», Latvian îgt, îgstu «to waste away», Old Norse ekki «grief» (Vasmer, Etimologicheskiy slovar' russkogo yazyka, Russian translation with Trubachov's additions, vol. IV, pp. 542-543). The derivation from an *ož set beside Sanskrit ahi «serpent», proposed by Afanasyev in the nineteenth century, is not accepted by modern dictionaries.

What is told

In the Russian variants collected in the nineteenth century she is an old woman living alone deep in the forest, in an izba that stands on hen's legs and turns round at the right formula; around it, in some texts, a fence of human bones with skulls that give light. Her nose reaches the ceiling, in some redactions one leg is of bone, and she flies in a mortar, driving herself with the pestle and sweeping her tracks away with a broom. She smells whoever arrives — «there is a Russian smell here» — lights the stove and threatens to roast her guest; then she feeds him, washes him, puts him to bed, sets him impossible tasks and, if he passes, hands over fire, a horse, a piece of advice, an object needed later. In some tales there is one of her, in others three sisters of the same name. She commands mares, geese and the beasts of the forest. She is neither reliably hostile nor reliably helpful: her function shifts from one tale type to another, and Andreas Johns titled his book on exactly that ambiguity.

What it was forthe author’s reading

In the tales her house is the last station before the other world. Whoever reaches it has left the village, and to get back must obtain something the home did not hold: fire, a horse, the stolen brother, the bride. The function is threshold and ordeal — the old woman questions, feeds, washes, loads with tasks, and the passage in front of her stove separates those who return with a gain from those who do not return at all. She is the device that makes the border between the house and everything else narratable, and that forces the protagonist to become someone able to cross it. Popular writing also makes her a bogey for keeping children out of the forest: likely enough, but I have not found the period collection that documents it.

Where it is attested

The dated first attestation that the whole literature repeats is Mikhail Lomonosov's Rossiyskaya grammatika, 1755 (printed 1757), where «Yaga baba» is said to appear twice in a list of Slavic figures set beside Roman deities: the claim is Andreas Johns's, Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale, New York, Peter Lang, 2004 (International Folkloristics 3, vii+357 pp.), p. 12. I looked for that passage in the full OCR of the 1755 edition on Internet Archive and did not find it: the printed grammar contains neither «яга» nor any list of Slavic gods with Roman equivalents. The real corpus begins with Aleksandr Afanasyev, Narodnye russkie skazki, eight fascicles, Moscow 1855-1863, second and posthumous edition 1871. In the canonical numbering of the academic editions (1957, then «Literaturnye pamyatniki» 1984-1985) «Baba-yaga» is nos. 102 and 103, «Vasilisa Prekrasnaya» no. 104, «Tereshechka» no. 112, «Gusi-lebedi» no. 113, «Knyaz' Danila-Govorila» no. 114: numbers that come from the second edition, not from the fascicles. The international types invoked are ATU 327 «The Children and the Ogre», 480 «The Kind and the Unkind Girls» and 313 «The Magic Flight»; «Gusi-lebedi» sits in 480A*, «Vasilisa Prekrasnaya» in SUS 480B*. The studies: Vladimir Propp, Istoricheskie korni volshebnoy skazki, Leningrad 1946, Italian Einaudi 1949, reads the hut as a sentry post on the threshold of the kingdom of the dead and the old woman as a residue of initiation rites; Johns 2004 remains the reference work. For the lexicon, Vasmer-Trubachov, vol. IV, pp. 542-543.

Caution

Grade B and not A for one precise reason: the dated first attestation does not hold as it is written down. The OCR of Lomonosov's 1755 grammar contains neither «яга» nor the list of Slavic and Roman deities; eighteenth-century OCR proves nothing, but I could not open the page of Johns that underwrites the claim, and I suspect the passage cited lies in the «Materials towards the Rossiyskaya grammatika», in volume VII of the collected works, 1952. Until that volume is opened, 1755 should be handled with tongs. On Heinrich von Staden I found nothing: no source connects his Muscovite notes to Baba Yaga. What resembles one is Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth, London 1591, whose chapter on the Permians, Samoyeds and Lapps speaks of the «Slata Baba, or the golden hagge» — the Zlata Baba of the Ob Ugrians — and who dismisses her himself as a fable: several Russian pages turn her into «Yaga-baba» and offer her as the first mention. It is not the same figure.

The rest does not hold either. «Pre-Christian Slavic goddess» has not a single medieval source: Baba Yaga appears in no list of idols. The identification with Mokosh — attested in the Primary Chronicle under the year 980 and in the sermons against paganism — is a twentieth-century conjecture, of the family of Boris Rybakov's reconstructions, whose method Slavists reject. The «triple goddess» is a scheme of English-language neopaganism resting on the variants in which the Baba Yagas are three sisters. «Baba Yaga equals shamanism and fly agaric» has no studies behind it: the one work tying her to mushrooms, F. M. Dugan in Fungi 10/2, 2017, deals with ethnomycology and old women healers, and keeps its distance from speculation. The «wild wise woman» reading comes from Clarissa Pinkola Estés, 1992: Jungian psychology, not folklore.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.