#slavic folk stories

[cha-mij]

Obviously a lot of the monsters found in the world of the Witcher are based on Slavic folk tales/mythology.

But also Elder Speech/Hen Llinge is heavily based on Welsh and Irish.

I'm trying to figure out if the Grrnichora/Gvaern Ichaer is based on any pre-existing myth, or was it devised by CDPR for Throne breaker?

Anyone know?

[mauzeart]

Perun and Dodola. I think they look good together. Their relationship is such that with her he's a lovely bunny and with others he's a fierce beast. Hmm. Love them))

[thebowlercapfairy]

Killing Koschei the Deathless always involves an egg. You have to break an egg & the means of killing him is hidden inside. I will never be over the imagery of the seed of death being found within the seed of life. Mortality wrapped up in rebirth.

[kapyushonchan]

They adapted "Чур меня!" "as "Begone!" in English trasnaltion of "And the Haze will take us". -_________________________-

It is not that it is comepletely wrong, it is simply... bland. Chur menya! is a spell/hex for protection from dark forces, according to some sources it's a call to ancestors for protection, but I suppose historians and linguists can argue about that. Well, and translation of Lada's hex against her sister trying to break out of the other world in the forest - no, just no, magic of the words is just gone.

Scratch that, they translated Volkhv as Magus, lmaooooo. AGAIN, it's not wrong, but it's super bland. It's like "Let's find a synonym or equivalent for any obscure word from Slavic languages, why broaden people's horizons".

While people are fighting over inclusivity in the Haze, I'm dying on the hill that English is too bland for translation from Slavic languages, proven by The Witcher games.

[zaireetoo-draws]

Veles, the god of Underworld and harvest

Accompanying piece to a Veles video I did (:

You can watch it HERE if u were interested :D

[romanceyourdemons]

when i was a kid, every collection of books—large or small, public or private—had at least one small grubby volume called “fifty japanese fairy tales” “african folk tales” “who’s a-knockin at my door and other scary stories” “haunting mysteries of the sea” “golden threads: slavic fairy stories” “the unabridged grimm’s fairy tales,” and that book would contain at least one short story bizarre and haunting enough to permanently rewire your brain. and babey i was a fucking bloodhound hunting them down

[playa-pariah]

I recently completed a front and back cover for this story :)

from my recent uni project- Baba Yaga and the Little Brother

[gorjee-art]

I love your COTL art! I was wondering, what are your design inspirations for the Lamb’s clothing, if you have any off the top of your head? It’s gorgeous!

Oh I've been waiting for this question. Ok! Design Inspo time! I like clothing that represents the character, and Lamb (mine at least) is a person who came from a folk culture. I think of Slavic clothing: Belarus, Czech, Serbia etc. etc. You get the point. I grew up with Slav fairytales and drooled over these illustrations when I was younger.

I wanted to capture the spirit of these illustrations cause I thought it's a perfect fit for my vision of the story in "Cult of the Lamb". Now, Slavic clothing is a BIG inspo for their clothing but it's not only, It's also Indian, Moroccan, Swiss, Greek, Balkan, and Swedish even, it's an eclectic mess of everything.

What all of these clothing have in clothing have in common is ornate patterns, big flowing comfortable cloth, and bright colors. Which for me fits perfectly with Lamb's white wool.

[elenamegan14]

Yandere One Piece - Irish/Nordic Fae Folk Myth X F!Reader - Prologue

It's a spooky season, and I have yet to see any Yandere One Piece reader fics based on Slavic myths and legends! Blame me for being too invested in Bramble: the Mountain King game.

---

Once, there was a childless couple who lived in a quaint village. Although the village is rich in tradition and harvest, it was also a fearsome place. Not far from them lies a great forest called the Grand Line, a home of every fae folks, each more astounding and nightmarish than man had ever known. 

But that was where our story began. 

One night, on a full moon during a winter’s eve, the couple is visited by a frail, old woman. They immediately brought her in, warmed her, and fed her. When all is done, she transforms into a beautiful fairy. A member of the fairy monarchy, Rogue. 

To thank the couple, Rogue rewarded them with something they had yearned for years: a child. And so, on the first day of Spring, a healthy baby girl was born. 

Alas, even the fairy world has it;s own rules, and the rule is crueler than the rules of mankind. A baby who is granted life by the fairy must be returned back by the ripe age of thirteen. Rogue did not want her work to go to waste, so she told the couple that they must move the child away from the village, never to enter any fairy rings at any cost, and give their child a pair of special earrings made of iron to protect them. 

Thus, the family evaded the pursuit of the fae folks beyond the age of thirteen. In retaliation, the fae folks began to terrorize the villagers - they would not stop to torment them until the child was given to them. Furious at the fleeing family for putting them into this bedlam, the villagers set up a trap to return the child back to the Grand Line. 

Eighteen years have passed, and the child grew up in the Kingdom of Goa. With each passing day, the blessings from Rogue had made the child cunning, wise, and attractive. The child was a curious oddity amongst her peers, but there was one person who despised her existence more so than the others. 

Sarie is the daughter of a notorious monarchy in the Goa Kingdom. Although she has everything in the palm of her hand, she is wicked jealous of the child’s charm and beauty. Her opportunity stuck when a vengeful villager asked her to cooperate to rid of the child’s existence in the mortal world. 

Soon after, Sarie begged her fiancee, Sterry, to arrange a special trip only for his classmates, the child included, straight to the child’s original village. Sterry and his cohorts lured the child to the edge of the forest, right before the entrance of Grand Line. Once there, Sarie threw her scarf into the middle of the fairy ring and asked the child to pick it up for her. 

The child is confused. Why should she follow such a petty instruction? Also, the child pleaded that she was not supposed to enter the fairy ring at any cost. However, Sterry and their classmates loudly demanded her to do so. 

When the child reluctantly tried to enter the fairy ring, Sterry once again ordered the child to take off the child’s iron earrings for Sarie. She tried to refuse but Sterry warned her that if she disobeyed, he would make sure that she became the enemy of Goa. 

The child had always wanted to be accepted by Sterry and Sarie - she did not understand what she had done wrong to receive his ire. The child also knew that Sarie and Sterry’s family had more power than her family did. She hastily took off her earrings and gave them to Sarie. With a heavy heart, she entered the fairy ring. 

Sterry and Sarie’s deception became light once she turned around inside the fairy ring, only to find herself alone in a strange forest. She ran back and forth, calling for her classmates. 

None answered. 

Alone, terrified, and confused, the child trekked into the woods of Grand Line on her own, in hoping to find her way home… not knowing that she had fulfilled her promise…

And break the village’s curse. 

---

You are wandering around the fogged oath, unable to see what's beyond. Suddenly, you heard footsteps. Behind you, in front of you, everywhere! You barely have a moment's rest when a mischievous-looking human-like creature appears before your very eyes. Shrieking, you fall back behind, astounded by what you see.

"Shishishi! Did I scare you?" The creature grinned hugely, enhancing his unique shaggy features with a stitched scar underneath his left eye.

Monkey D. Luffy, the Pookah, has arrived. Next

[whencyclopedia]

The Frog Princess

The Frog Princess is a Slavic folktale focusing on the importance of recognizing someone’s inner beauty, regardless of their outward appearance, as well as the possibility of redemption after failure. The tale has many variants and appears in Czech, Hungarian, Italian, and Russian folk works as well as many others.

In the most popular version of the tale, from Russia, a prince who has married a frog discovers she is a beautiful and magical maiden but betrays her trust, forcing her to leave him. He must then embark on a quest to prove himself and win her back. The frog princess in this version is known as the fairy Vasilissa the Wise, but the heroine is not the same character as Vasilissa the Beautiful from the folktale of the same name featuring the witch Baba Yaga.

The Russian version is well-known for the dramatic twist it puts on the character of Baba Yaga who is seen here as a helpful entity, rather than as an evil, child-devouring hag, whose mystical powers are symbolized by the number three as there are three baba yagas, each of whom progress the plot. The tale is representative of the animal bride and offended supernatural wife motif, which appears in several legends from different cultures. The Slavic tale has nothing to do with the modern-day novel The Frog Princess by E. D. Baker which formed the basis for the 2009 Disney animated film of the same name.

Origin & Motif

The form of the story derives from one of the most ancient, the animal tale, made famous through Aesop’s Fables but first appearing in Mesopotamia. An animal tale uses animals as characters either to explain something (e.g. how the dog got its tail) or to impress some moral on an audience (as in the well-known Aesop tale, The Fox and the Grapes). Scholars Maria Leach and Jerome Fried comment:

The line between the literary and folk fable is not easy to determine, since tales from collections like that attributed to Aesop have had wide popular circulation and have been taken from and gone back into oral traditions of large groups of people. However, the area of contact between the didactic, moralizing fable and folklore is slight, for the animal tale proper is meant essentially to entertain. The hearer is required to suspend belief and see the animal speaking, thinking, and acting like a human being. (61-62)

In the tale of The Fox and the Grapes, for example, the fox behaves like a petulant child when he cannot reach the overhanging grapes and finally walks away saying they were probably sour anyway (inspiring the phrase "sour grapes" referring to someone who rationalizes a failure to get what they want). For the tale to be effective, an audience must accept the world of the tale in which foxes can speak, reason, and rationalize. In this same way, The Frog Princess relies on the suspension of disbelief at a talking frog who is able to perform transformational magic.

The tale is similar in many ways to the better-known The Frog Prince (also known as The Frog King) in which the youngest of three princesses drops her gold ball into a well by accident and it is retrieved by a frog after she promises she will be his companion. Once the frog returns her ball to her, however, she breaks her word and runs away. The frog then follows to force her to keep her promise. The princess only accepts the frog once she finds out he is actually a handsome prince and, according to different versions, she is either rewarded for her kindness or punished for being shallow and selfish.

The Frog Princess also has the main character show kindness to the creature but later betray its trust and also uses the device of the youngest of three as this was a popular motif in folktales. The youngest son would usually receive no inheritance, and the youngest daughter was married last and so might have the poorest dowry. Folktales balanced this perceived injustice by frequently featuring the youngest of the family as the hero or heroine.

Continue reading...

[olderthannetfic]

Here's a random observation I made recently about dumb buzzword salad in trad publishing. And another reason I have a big fucking beef with how lazy and copy paste trad publishing is, and how little of a shit they actually give about properly representing their talents and the talents experience.

My local bookstore has a section which is basically just the "written by diaspora" corner. If you're "diaspora"-(insert other country) your book will probably end up there. It's a bit weird but makes sense when you consider the community in my town and surrounding area.

I saw a book that was a "(Asian) reimagining of a (Western) story" Here's where the buzz-description came in. The blurb on the back praised the author for combining their own heritage, with that of a "Western" story. This is a fake example to not put any negative attention on the book: Dealing with being Asian in the UK. The focus of the blurb was 100% on them being a diaspora and how that affected their writing. If you've seen one of these blurbs you basically know all of them.

The thing is, the story they reimagined had absolutely nothing to do with the "UK" UK culture, folk lore or anything else. Let's pretend it was Baba Yaga. Nothing else implied that they had any other connection to the the culture Baba Yaga comes from. Yes it's a reimagining, but how does reimagining a story with absolutely no ties to your life count as fusing your specific experience of being diaspora and living the UK?

Once again, the example isn't real, and just to explain the basics of it: If a Chinese-British person wrote a book reimagining the story of Baba Yaga with a "Chinese twist." You can do that, could even be super fun. But a British person, Chinese heritage or not, Baba Yaga isn't "your culture". The UK and Russia are not interchangeable, neither is Chinese and Russian. So why does trad publishing treat it like the Chinese-British writer is just conflating the two? Why not make the focus on the Chinese-British writer having a passion for Slavic folk tales, specifically Baba Yaga? No, instead they do this copy paste fusion bullshit, that doesn't even match the experience.

It just makes it so painfully obvious how little trad publishing cares about the writers works. And I've seen this several times, some times with more obvious examples. Some times titling the Western story with a general wording, so it isn't too blatantly obvious that the story's from the completely wrong country and culture.

It's be just as silly if a European, Idk Swedish lived their whole life in Thailand, and then in order to "deal with being a Thai-Swede" wrote a book reimagining Indian folktales with a Swedish twist. "UK and Russian" isn't interchangeable. Thai and Indian isn't interchangeable. So why does trad publishing have the guts?

--

[mirjam-writes]

Good Midsummer Omens: A Rec list

A rec list of Good Omens fics celebrating the Summer Solstice of the northern hemisphere! Feel ree to reblog with additions!

Happy Summer Solstice, everyone! 🔥

The Feast of Fairies by MM2022

Aziraphale & Crowley, G, 1.2k, fairy & human AU, Celebration of Litha (Germanic Neopagan celebration of summer solstice)

Marriage of Fire and Water by KissMyAsthma

Aziraphale/Crowley, G, 2.4k, Celebration of Kupala Night (Slavic folk holiday for summer solstice).

On nights like this anything is possible by shanimalew

Aziraphale/Crowley, T, 2.3k, AU, Kupala Night celebration in 10th century Poland.

Choose Wisely by JoyAndOtherStories

Aziraphale/Crowley, T, 6.6k, A Choose your Own Adventure story with a brief visit to a midsummer festival at Externsteine, Germany.

Be Still My Soul: The Romance by Mirjam

Aziraphale/Crowley, Explixit, 25.4k, Human AU with the climax set in Finnish Midsummer in 1917.

Beloved by Ack_Emma

Aziraphale/Crowley, Explicit, 40.9k, Elizabethan human au with Midsummer celebrations on chapter 8! Mind the tags!

Midsummer Canoodling by Quefish

Aziraphale/Crowley, Explicit, 1.4k, Swedish Midsummer

[draconesmundi]

Asking for both writing my own stories and also special interest: what are some of the best sources you’ve found for more obscure dragons? I’ve studied so much dragon folklore that it’s been getting really difficult to find new stuff…

So for very obscure things, asking people from other countries is the best bet - folklore, lore from the folk, means asking folk. Sometimes people have access to books with no English translation with local folklore, sometimes there are stories passed by word-of-mouth ("our town has a local legend about a dragon"). It's not a peer reviewed academic textbook, but asking questions will get you some obscure dragons! The internet means you can ask people all over the world :)

Second bit of advice; GET CURIOUS! Photos of statues of dragons often have a story behind them. Is this a statue of Saint George and the Dragon as an allegory on a World War 2 monument, or is this Vahagn the Dragon Slayer showing off local legends and heritage? Is this 'made in Indonesia wooden charm' linked to more Indonesian mythology or just something for tourists? A lot of statues and artifacts can be connected to mythology too!

Third bit of advice; keep an open mind on definitions of dragons and the language used to describe dragons: searching '[country] dragon mythology' into a search engine turns up fewer results than '[country] serpent mythology', and the best results are usually '[country] [local word for serpent/dragon] mythology'.

Finally, region-specific dragon folklore is easiest to find in region-specific sources: a book like an Encyclopedia of Russian & Slavic Myth and Legend by Mike Dixon-Kennedy will have more highly specific Russian and Slavic dragons than a book focused solely on dragons. To learn more about dragons you really have to generalize and read about mythology as a whole!

For a more concrete answer:

Giants, Monsters and Dragons by Carol Rose, as this has a themed index section where you can look up things like 'wolf monsters' or 'things that drink blood', so obviously has a 'dragon' and 'serpent' index section too

Te Ara online encyclopedia is good for Aotearoan/New Zealand folklore: https://teara.govt.nz/en/taniwha

Native Languages website for Native American Folklore is pretty great: http://www.native-languages.org/legends-serpents.htm

A Book of Creatures website from @a-book-of-creatures has a source list on each entry (reading list for learning even more folklore!) and an extensive tagging and organizational system.

[sombredancer]

Recent visually beautiful and generally watchable Russian fantasy movies

(because I start forgetting they exist at all) Ironically, all of them are adaptations of books/comics.

I Am Dragon / Он — дракон (2015) This movie is a very free adaptation of the novel "The Rite" / "Ритуал" by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko (Марина и Сергей Дяченко). It's a reinterpreting of an ancient tale about a maiden, a hero and a dragon. I don`t like the novel because it's very postmodern, wracks the typical fairytale plot and hurts my escapist feelings by ugly reality, but the movie is pretty fairytale-ish and nice. Firstly, it is visually beautiful and represent Slavic pseudo-medieval lore the way it should have always been in Slavic fantasy.

Secondly, as a love story between a monster and a maiden, it has got A PLENTY of tropes I'm usually looking for in Chinese dramas, so I understand very well why it was pretty popular in Asia.

Thirdly, when I said it's visually beautiful I wasn't joking. The main hero is played not by an actor, but by a male model, who is shirtless all the time (and sometimes pantless) and has a very fit and good-looking body. It's something unbelievable that someone in Russia made a movie to please women's eyes! Really, it's insane!

The folk-rock band Мельница wrote an insanely beautiful song "Обряд" (The Rite) for this movie (more matched to the book plot, though), but it was never used as OST, which is a shame. The song is about a black sheep girl, who is denied by society and asks a dragon to come for her and to take her away, because the dragon is denied by this world just like her. You can listen to it here. The band also has a song "Змей" (The Wyrm) (based on Lev Gumilev's poem), which is more accurate to the plot of the movie: the wyrm kidnaps maidens to make them its wives, but they are all dying during the flight; at the end of the song a hero-knight is ready to shoot it in order to stop it. Listen to it here.

It ends with HE, which is better than the book's obscure ending, so it is pleasure for me to rewatch it till these days.

Major Grom: Plague Doctor / Майор Гром: Чумной Доктор (2021)

It is an adaptation of Russian comic series "Major Grom" by Bubble comics. I am traditionally not very happy with the source material, but it is very good reworked to be the screen play of this movie.

It's very beautifully made in terms of director's, cameraman's and screenwriter's work, which is a rare thing for Russian movies. Also, the actors are young and handsome, especially the villain, which is a rare thing not only for Russian movies, but for the current Western movies, too. It has got a lot of allusions to Russian reality and a lot of beautiful views of Saint Petersburg, the second capital of Russia and one of the most beautiful Russian cities. And it has got some unusual visual solutions that turn it into a comic it should be.

The plot revolves around a mysterious serial killer (kinda bad Batman), a black sheep police officer and Russian Mark Zuckerberg (kind of). Mark Zuckerberg is the best guy of this movie and I like him a lot! Серёёёёжа! 🧡🧡🧡

This movie wasn't popular in Russia because of political situation in the country by the moment of its release (the both sides found out in there something insulting for them and banned it), but even if it has something like that, I honestly didn't pay attention to it. It's just a nice blockbuster with a tragic and handsome villain. The villain also has got his own BL-drama (in the comics they are really lovers, it`s as obvious as it could be shown in a Russian comic).

By the way, the villain is hot, insane, ruthless, sensitive and suffering. How does he contain all of this character treats in one personality? you may ask. He doesn`t. He has dissociative identity disorder, I would answer.

I don`t know if it works by now, but some time ago you could watch this lovely movie on Netflix.

The Master and Margarita / Мастер и Маргарита (2024) This is a loose adaptation of Russian classical novel "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov. I genuinely hate this book, but the adaptation reinterprets it, divides it into very interesting layers and makes it understandable and beautiful.

It`s layered, so it will probably be hard to understand what layer are we currently on if you are not familiar with the original story. The first layer is an ugly Soviet reality, the second layer is a plot of the novel that the main hero is writing, a story within a story. The third layer is the insane intertwining of the first two layers. On the reality layer the Master loses his job and freedom because of friend's denunciation and becomes star-crossed lovers with a married woman. On the novel level he meets devil, who visits Moscow by chance, and the devil gives him and his woman opportunity to live their lives being free from everything that usually tortures people IRL. Somewhere among those layers is a little plot about Jesus and Pontius Pilate.

The movie is visually beautiful. Although it feels pretty anti-Soviet, Soviet visuals of the movie are gorgeous. There were used the Stalin-times concepts of Moscow of the Future, the CGI buildings in frame came from the real architecture projects of those times. The Stalin Empire architecture style and views are typical for Moscow (but as I know, ironically, this all was shot in Saint Petersburg). It seems to me that this movie is heavily stuffed with visual allusions to the Western works: devil's escort looks like bunch of Pennywises, Margarita is Enchantress from Suicide Squad I, the scene of blood dripping is from Blade I etc. Usually, when I see it in Russian movies, it feels like plagiarism because I can recognize the reference but there is nothing except for these references . But here we have got the plot, so the allusions work as allusions and don`t irritate me.

The movie is dark, disturbing, uncomfortable. It really makes you feel as if you watch devil and his escort marching around you; they ravage, kill and destroy everything and you can only breathlessly, helplessly and in fear watch them. The German actor playing devil is insanely good. He stole the movie and I understand why it should have been named Woland (the devil's name) instead of the current movie's name. You may want to watch it, because it's very unusual in terms of plot and visuals experience, especially when you are not familiar with the book.

[snowyavis]

Pirot Kilim ornaments

Чурлињак (čurlinjak) - The most basic motif, representing a cross section of the lower part of the whisk for mixing ingredients (called čurlinjak).

Врашко колено (Devil's knee) - The motif comes from the pre-Christian Slavic religion. It symbolises movement in circles (kolo dance) and the flow of life, and provides strength, bravery and defense against evil.

Корњача/жељка (turtle) - The most popular pattern of the Pirot Kilim. It symbolises durability and longevity and brings fertility, healthy life and protection from danger.

Ченђели (čenđeli) - Represents a grappling hook mounted on a wooden pole, used for hanging things.

Бомбе (bombs) - It beard this name due to its semblance to handgranades, but the motif has existed since before handgrandes were invented. It provides strength and energy, especially to men, so the kilims with this motif were usually gifted to boys for their life milestones.

Гуштер (lizard) - This pattern probably originates from modified depictions of dragons. It represents laziness and indifference, but also change, flexibility and adaptation to the world.

Ђулови (roses) - It represents a stylised cross section of a rose, showing both the exterior as well as the pistils, anthers and seeds inside. It is symbolises a young woman and her beauty. Kilims with this motif are often gifted to daughters by their mothers. Different variations of this motif exist, some of which (the roses on shackles) were, according to legends, made as rebellion of kilim weavers against the Ottoman repression.

Ђаволчићи (Little Devils) - The devil is represented as a human figure turned upside down, with the devil's head turned towards the underworld, and a bird on the other side representing the heaven.

Гугутка (dove) - Birds protect from evil spirits and diseases and connect the earth and sky. It represents family harmony, love, peace and joy, and as such kilims with this motif are often gifted to new homeowners. This motif can often be seen arranged around a pole, representing a tree full of birds.

Атапот (atapot) - It represents an octopus, and the name probably came from a distorted pronunciation of the word oktopod (octopus).

Француске бомбоне (French candies) - This motif was probably inspired by silk candy wrapped in decorative paper and brought to Serbia from distant lands. According to a folk story, when the French soldiers liberated Pirot in the First World War in 1918, the kilim weavers designed this pattern as a sign of gratitude.

Столица (chair) - It represents an antique chair and the inspiration for this pattern came from the everyday life of the kilim weavers.

Тиче (tiče) - It represents a small bird.

Source: "Ornaments of Serbia: the Pirot Kilim" by Milica Živadinović. Art by me.

[zaireetoo-draws]

Slavic vampires?? In this economy??

I made a new video! Feel free to check it out :D