The intensity of the lockdowns turns people inwards to entertainment, exercise or, for those just slightly more old-fashioned (or frail), reading. So I’d like to take the opportunity to review a few works dealing with the Suavs. The first is an older book, addressing early Suavic history that I should have taken the time to say something about earlier. The others are rather more recent and deal, interestingly, with the study of Suavic religion.
The first topic is Paul Barford’s “The Early Slavs.” This is Suavic history for the common man without any academic pretensions. Barford appears to be an archeologist by trade. As to his education, little is clear and it is strange that his publisher Cornell University Press does not provide any bona fides on the jacket. I confess I do not know the procedures for getting published but I would’ve thought that a major university would not just publish a walk-in author so there may be more to this than meets the eye.
Be that as it may, in this case the choice to publish this was a good one. I actually like this book. It methodically outlines the appearance of the Suavs in medieval records, discusses historical developments in Suav proto-polities and moves on to economy, warfare and cultural matters before concluding with a “where are we now.” The book is easily understandable and well-ordered. You can read those parts you are interested in without reading about topics that are less appealing to you. It is chock-full of pictures and interesting maps (for example, a map showing Suavic tribes with the same name in different geographic locations). As noted above, unlike some other books, the book does not pretend to provide definitive answers or grandiose theories and in its conception is really an introductory text.
Barford apparently has quite an agitative and dogmatic brusqueness to his personality that has irked British treasure hunters as well as some within the Polish archeological community but “The Early Slavs” itself is quite measured in its judgements. Indeed, the book acknowledges a number of what should be (though surprisingly are not if you look at Suavic historiography) refreshingly obvious observations even if Barford goes on not to embrace some of these. To quote a few:
- “It is clear that the traditional migrationary explanation cannot account or the diffusion of the language from a relatively compact area to cover half of Europe, whatever extended timescale in the early medieval period one wishes to adopt. Demographic expansion at this rate can be demonstrated to be biologically impossible. One possibility is that the Slav languages were already in use over a wide area of central Europe before the beginning of the early medieval period… [though he mentions other theories too]”
- “[S]ome of the participants at Attila’s funeral are reported to have used the word strava for the funeral feast, and this has been claimed as a Slavic term (as indeed it may well have been).”
- “The simple and hard fact is that from the finding of the sherds of a pot by excavation, there is absolutely no way that we can know what language was spoken by the user of a particular type of brooch any more than we can assume today that each wearer of Levi jeans speaks American English. Terms such as ‘Early Slav pottery’ and ‘Longobard fibulae’ used by archeologists are shorthand terms for more complex and totally uncertain situations.”
To be sure the book’s conclusions, however tentative, do not stray too far from orthodoxy (Barford assumes the Germanic nature of the Przeworsk culture) and often where they do so they come perilously close to Florin Curta’s ridiculous theories (including in, after some hesitation, dismissing the Suavic nature of the Veneti). Nevertheless, precisely because the “earliest Suavs” are not the focus of the “early Suavs”, there is plenty of other stuff here that the readers will find rewarding and useful.
If there is a particular weakness to the book it is inherent in the format chosen by Barford, that of a general, high-level exposition aimed at the Western laic (the book came out right before the admission of several Central European countries into the European Union). Such a format necessarily provides broad-stroke description of much of the material. For example, the religion chapter merely comments on the Rus gods and mentions some of the Polabian deities without acknowledging the Polish (and other) material.
Less forgivable is the occasional error – for example, no, there is no evidence, as Barford claims, for Svarog in Western Suavdom and Svarog was not worshipped at Rethra/Radogost. The only mention of Svarog, at least under that name, is from a note on a Russian manuscript of Malalas (later copied into a manuscript of PVL), likely written by someone in Lithuania (for more on that see here). At Rethra, the deity worshipped was Svarozic (see here and here). Also, Adam of Bremen does not speak of Svarog (or Svarozic) but rather of Redigast. Maybe these were the same divinities but, at least for Svarog – Svarozic that seems doubtful and, in any case, Barford does not claim that so we do not feel too pedantic in making the above objection.
Next up is the recently published “Sources of Slavic Pre-Christian Religion”. The pandemic notwithstanding, we were able to secure a copy from a local university library (thank you!). This volume is, to some extent, what this site has tried to make accessible: a compendium of pagan Suavic religious texts with accompanying English translations.
Up front let us say that this is a must-have for anyone interested in the topic. It essentially combines Meyer‘s Latin, Byzantine, Norse and Arabic sources with Mansikka‘s list of Eastern Suavic sources with a few newly discovered sources tacked in. This alone makes the book a first. It has been nicely put together by a team of Spanish (of all people) academics led by Juan Antonio Álvarez-Pedrosa.
All that being true, the book is lacking in some respects. The English of the book (both in the translations and in the rest of the volume) is awkward. There are too many examples of this to list and it’s strange to me that Brill could not have hired a native English speaker to read through the material so as to clean it up. A college student would have done nicely. While this may be excusable to some extent in the translation of the texts where the authors were dealing with (often poorly written) medieval Latin and other old forms of language, the same cannot be said for, say, the introduction. Moreover, I suspect that the language specialists – all of whom are Spanish – hired to translate the material are neither English speakers nor – for the most part – speakers of the Slavic or German language that the writers of the Latin texts were. Thus, for example, in order to translate Jan Długosz’ texts into English, ideally, you’d have someone translate who not only knows medieval Latin as it was used in Poland but also speaks Polish and English. As it is, Długosz may have had a thought in Polish, written it in Latin, then to have a Spanish Latinist translate it into English (or, worse, I suspect the Spanish Latinist translated it into Spanish and then, in turn, someone who was not a native English speaker translated that Spanish into English). I get that Old Norse or Arabic are not in the toolkit of everyone involved and that this kind of volume is by its very nature challenging to put together but I fear shortcuts may have been utilized.
Irritatingly, the authors call Meyer and Mansikka “editions”; Mansikka could maybe get there but Meyer’s volume was just a compilation of other people’s editions which Meyer put together and he certainly claimed no other status for his work. Thus, the authors will frequently list the edition used as “Meyer” but note “other” editions by Brückner or by Heyzmann. Yet, the Meyer “edition” is just a copy of Brückner or Heyzmann.
The book does, in fact, more generally appear somewhat sloppy in places. Looking just at the Latin section we have, in the section discussing the “Statutes of the Polish Provinces” (these are the statuta breviter), the relevant portion of the Latin text given as “nomina ydolorum lado yleli yassa tya que consueuerunt“. Why are yleli yassa tya not italicized – as Polish Divine Names presumably – but lado is?
On the very same page the authors state: “These statutes are preserved in the Manuscriptum Ossolinense, which dates to 1627 but refers to the 15th century.” The above reference seems to be to an actual manuscript – one of many housed at the Ossolineum (or the National Ossoliński Institute). What is the number of that manuscript? The authors don’t think they say but they do indicate above that it dates to 1627. Except that the reality is that the manuscript actually dates to the 15th century and its number is 1627. This seems like an unfortunate error in a book which is intended as a guide to source material (indeed Meyer gets it right in his description).
Or in the Neplach part, where the same entry is once give as belonging to the year 1344 and then (incorrectly) to the year 1334. We assume that this is all a result of an underpaid intern being tasked with writing the descriptions of individual entries (or of too much of a reliance on a computer?).
Putting aside the awkwardness of the English and the sloppiness in places, the other thing that irks me here is the lack of a table of contents. Meyer had one in 1931 so why did the publisher/editor think that having more titles listed (plus translations) obviates the need for a TOC?
Ok, what about on the substantive side?
The authors’ aim seems to have been just to translate the Meyer and Mansikka anthologies into English and, where possible, to update those texts for some things that Meyer and Mansikka may have missed (Boniface) and some more recent discoveries. Still, in the Latin section 44 out of 52 sources are straight out of Meyer. As to those recent discoveries (not that recent), they explicitly rely on academic work of others (the 1990s work by Słupecki and, for William of Malmesbury, also Zaroff). That is to say, there are no texts here that have not been already published elsewhere by someone else and, it seems, preferably in English.
This creates a problem since some texts have been discussed in literature (are “known”) but have not been edited. Other texts have been edited but by editors who wrote in languages other than English, German or Russian (though the authors do include a Czech original text in the case of the Dalimil Chronicle). Both of those types of texts do not make the cut – whether this is by choice or simply because the editors were unaware of them, we can’t tell (they also seem to be unaware of other compilations aside from Meyer/Mansikka such as the recent compilation by Jiří Dynda – of course, that compilation is in Czech).
Thus, the sermons of Lucas of Great Koźmin have been mentioned by Kowalczyk in 1979, by Kolankiewicz in 1999, by Bracha in 2010 and by Wolski (and I suspect Brückner himself was at some point aware of them) – but all these are in Polish (though Brückner’s opaque reference to Lucas’ sermons in Brückner’s report to the Prussian academy was, of course, in German). They mention Yassa, Lado and Nya – Długosz’ “Jupiter”, “Mars” and “Pluto”. But if you do not know how to read Polish there is even a Latin edition by Tatarzyński (or you can just ask someone to translate the Polish for you). The Tatarzyński edition is from 1988 (I believe) and we have all of it here on this site since 2017 (the relevant portions since 2014).
The same is true of Jakub Parkoszowic’s “Tractatus on Polish Orthography”. That work, widely known, among Polish scholars both of religion and, yes, orthography, contains a reference to Nya. This is apparently unknown to the authors perhaps because it was unknown to Meyer. Yet it is widely available if you only look. In fact, the Tractatus was published in print already in 1830 (by Samuel Bandtkie) and as recently as 1985 (by Marian Kucała).
Further, when discussing the Polish sermons of the 15th century, they do not include all of the relevant ones presumably because Brückner & others published them in multiple places but only one of those pieces made it into Meyer. A more complete version is available here and has been for some time.
The same is true with Jan Długosz’s Insignia Seu Clenodia Regis Et Regni Poloniae which contains another reference to Lada and predates Długosz’s Annales. The authors seem unaware of the Insignia. The authors do include portions of the Annales presumably because so did Meyer.
Speaking of the Annales, the authors (the Latin section was written by Álvarez-Pedrosa as well as Julia Mendoza Tuñón and Sandra Romano Martín) also made a couple of strange editorial decisions. In the main part of the book, they keep the portion of Długosz’ description of the “baptism” of Poland with its mention of Dziewana and Marzanna. They add to that Długosz’s description of Kievan paganism which itself is merely a summary of what is already in the PVL and adds nothing new (other than, as the authors note, Długosz does not give any names of Kievan gods – referring only to the “God of Thunder” as Vladimir’s favorite deity).
On the other hand, they move the discussion of Polish Gods in the Annales to the “Doubtful Texts” section because “the mythology presented by Długosz appears to be more an imitation of the humanistic taste for the Greek and Roman pantheon.” For good measure the authors note that “[t]he majority of names of the gods which he includes are invented.”
This statement is vacuous on its face. Długosz mentions precisely eight Gods and Goddesses. Of these eight, six are represented in texts which the authors did not deem “doubtful”. The only two Divinities that are specific to the portion of the Annales that the authors treat as suspect are Pogoda and Żywie. So either there is a math issue or, more likely, the authors pulled the statement about the “majority” out of their asses because that’s what they’ve been assuming from the start. (Some of the authors’ claims are also deceptively certain. For example, though this is debatable, śmigus–dyngus probably does not come from the German but rather from some Baltic language).
Of the texts in the Latin section, some are of questionable utility. For example, the authors added a portion of the Kadłubek Chronicle which does not have any discussion of religion (their explanation seems unconvincing). They redesignated Meyer’s Einhard as the Annals of Lorsch. Yet that passage regarding Dragovit says nothing about Slavic religion.
Then there are the more substantive errors or omissions. For example, the statutes of Andrew Bishop of Poznań are described incorrectly as those of Andrzej Bniński (bishop 1438-1479) even though they are those of Andrzej Łaskarz (bishop 1414-1426). Why? Well, mostly likely, because Meyer did not list which Andrew he was citing. However, Meyer cites Udalryk Heyzmann’s edition found in “Testimonies of Old Polish Laws” (Starodawne Prawa Polskiego Pomniki). Heyzmann clearly identifies the bishop as Andrzej Łaskarz (Laskary) from Gosławice of the Godziemba coat of arms and I am not aware of anyone having challenged that identification (Brückner agreed with it too).
Going back to the ms 1627 from Ossolineum, the authors are not aware of the fact that an earlier version of that document is present in the Zamoyski Library (Biblioteka Ordynacji Zamoyskiej). This fact has been known since at least 1957 and was “recently” (a decade ago) rediscovered by Krzysztof Bracha. Had the writers known this, they might have known that these are synodal statutes of the Poznań diocese of bishop Nicolas Peyser (Mikołaj Peyser, that is, from Pyzdry) and might have included them. This would have been helpful because those statutes clearly show that the Divinity Tya listed in the Ossolineum manuscript is, as had been suspected, really Nya. It would also have been helpful with the dating of the statutes which were written before 1414 and maybe even in the last quarter of the 14th century (as opposed to the vaguer-sounding 15th century which the book gives). Of course, a call to Krzysztof Bracha or other Polish researchers in the area would have clarified that but it seems those folks had not been consulted. Given that the list of usual thank yous at the end of the introduction lists only Spanish folks, you can only worry that the outreach to local (non-Polish) country specialists was likewise limited or nonexistent.
Other errors abound as well. When citing the Annals of Magdeburg which mention an 1147 campaign against the Redarii, the translators erroneously place the Ruthenians in the middle of the Wendish Crusade failing to recognize the scribe having gone off on a tangent to describe the campaign of Bolesuav IV against the Prussians. Then they compound their error by explaining these “Pruscos” as “a Slavic tribe.” This, even though they know that the rest of the events covered by the scribe took place in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern culminating with the the siege of the city of Malchow. Actually, they even call the area Mecklenburg-Schwerin – a name of a now expired duchy – suggesting that this description was obtained via some 19th century German text.
All that being said, the book – published by Brill – is a useful, if incomplete, anthology of texts relating to Suavic religion – both Western and Eastern. This, in and of itself, makes the volume unique in any language. The English translations are further an invaluable source of information for those amateur historians of religion who do not know Latin or Suavic languages. The fact that such an undertaking – no matter its shortcomings – was the enterprise of a group of Spanish scholars deserves praise for them (and, likewise, shame for Suavic scholars for not even having attempted to produce something like this). We can only hope that some of the issues with the volume will be fixed in future editions.
Someone once said that the history of studying Suavic religion is a history of disappointment. I do not agree with that sentiment. Rather, I think, what is too frequently disappointing is the work of those who do the studying. This is particularly unfortunate when we are dealing with English language books on the topic as these are so few and far between.
Thus, we come to “Slavic Gods and Heroes” by Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel, a book which “offers a radical reinterpretation of the Slavic pagan religion made on the basis of a thorough re-examination of all reliable sources.” This is an ambitious claim for anyone to be making but particularly for individuals like Kalik and Uchitel who appear to be newcomers to the field of Suavic religious studies. Kalik seems to be a lecturer at Hebrew University interested in Jewish history of Eastern Europe and Uchitel apparently was a professor at the same institution specializing in Middle Eastern history with an interest in religion. Pair them together (they are married) and you now have a new book about Eastern European religion. Of course, their lack of formal qualifications is not disqualifying in and of itself and a fresh perspective is frequently welcome but the bar, let’s say, is a little bit higher if you decide to opine outside of your area of expertise. With that being said, it is no secret that the bar isn’t met here. (They do radically reinterpret European hydronymy, asking “…why were there no Slavic gods at all between the Dnieper and the Order?” right in the introduction).
The central idea of the book is that the primitive Suavic society was a totemistic society characterized by animal worship with such “spirit” animals eventually anthropomorphised into legendary heroes or heroines such as Czech, Krok or Lebed. A bit like the Siberian or Turkic peoples of the steppes. Therefore, such a society never had any gods or goddesses – full stop.
I cannot escape the impression that the above is all the authors ever wanted to write about the topic (in what might otherwise have been a short article with a whiff of an opinion piece) and that somehow their publisher forced them to justify themselves. The result is a book which reads more like an almanac of unwanted chapters and entries where the authors perfunctorily (and, therefore, ineffectually) argue against (and sometimes just dismiss out of hand) all the evidence contrary to their thesis as if someone had told them they had to do that, even if half-heartedly, before they were allowed to write about what they really wanted to write about in the first place (that being, again, the alleged Suavic totemism).
As just one obvious example, they assert that “the Polish pantheon was invented only in the fifteenth century as an imitation of ‘Vladimir’s gods’ in Kiev.” The cite for this is Joannis Dlugossii seu Longini canonici Cracoviensis Historiae Polonicae libri XII, edited by Żegota Pauli and Aleksander Przeździecki, vol. 1, Krakow, 1867, 1.3. (p. 70). Now, that is the Latin edition of the work and was not published in 1867 but in 1873. What was published in 1867 was the Polish version of the same: Dzieje polskie w księgach dwunastu w przekładzie Karola Mecherzyńskiego. Moreover, while Aleksander Narcyz Przeździecki was involved as a publisher in the 1867 Polish edition, Ignacy “Żegota” Pauli was not. That said, neither the Polish nor the Latin edition makes any statement on “page 70” to support Kalik and Uchitel’s proposition. They give the same cite (also incorrectly) when stating that “Jan Długosz mentions Pogoda – ‘weather’ – among ‘Polish gods,’… but Długosz’s ‘pantheon’ is probably his own artificial construction, and this evidence is hardly reliable.” Oddly, elsewhere, the authors cite the 2nd Polish edition with a date of 1961. Now, for starters, they claim that this is Miecherzyński [sic] edition. But it is not a Mecherzyński edition but a completely new edition by Jan Dąbrowski, Wanda Semkowicz-Zarembina, Krystyna Pieradzka, Bożena Modelska-Strzelecka &, as they say, others. Quite separately, that edition has been reissued in 2009 and is freely available online so you might have thought the authors would have just used that version. As it is, it is not clear which edition the authors used and, as regards the above claim, whether they used any at all.
All of this is before we even get to the following statement: “We did not use Długosz in our discussion of Slavic pagan gods as it cannot be a reliable source for this information. However, with some hesitation, his presentation of Polish historical tradition will be considered, since it includes some valuable additional details, which numismatic and epigraphic evidence may possibly corroborate.” This time the authors do not provide even an incorrect cite for why Długosz’ information “cannot be a reliable source”. As to the disarmingly charming statement made above, it seems the authors chose to look at Długosz where Długosz’ tales could be used to support the totemic theory that the authors are purveying but to ignore the same author where what Długosz wrote would not have otherwise jived with the thesis of their book.
Of course, Aleksander Brückner did dismiss some of the members of Długosz’ pantheon but the authors do not cite Brückner. As far as the claim that Długosz was copying “Vladimir’s gods” from the PVL, I am not aware of anyone who has made such a claim before the authors and the authors provide neither research on the topic nor any citations for the proposition. And more importantly, Brückner wrote a century ago (incidentally, in a manner that these days would hardly be allowed to pass – he also had a major problem with footnoting) and much ink has been spilled contradicting his views since. Kalik and Uchitel, however, give the awful impression of not being familiar with any of the arguments made against the positions they so casually espouse.
Presumably because they are newcomers to the field, the authors seemingly had to do a lot of basic research first. The book reflects this as the authors pedantically plough through various sources as a university student might to keep track of newly learned material in preparation for the final exam. In other words, do not expect a synthetic approach. Rather what you have here is a strange listing of some well-known sources with a smattering of more obscure learning (though there is a whole bunch of material that the authors just missed or willfully ignored). The lists include religious source material but also Suavic chronicles – much of which the authors come across as having first learned about in the process of writing their book. Again, the book reads more like an outline and its entries might make a suitable blog. In fact, as a blog, this compendium would have been quite fine but as a book it is lacking. (To be fair Gieysztor’s book feels the same in places and in his case we know that his publisher made him dumb his work down so, you might say, the authors are in decent company).
What about the substance of their claim? Well, first it’s not exactly original. Whether the authors know it or not, others have made similar claims about Slavic folk beliefs literally more than a hundred years ago (for example, check out Henryk Biegeleisen’s work). That being said, the claim is not sustainable. For one thing, there is plenty of evidence of Suavic worship of divinities in various contexts (reading this site might be helpful at least when talking about West Suavic Gods and Goddesses). Beyond that, it is, of course, the case that animals played a very important role in all early belief systems. This is no more true of the Suavs than of say Teutons – just see how many a Germanic bears a name with the suffix -ulf (wolf). And none of the Suavic idols are reported to have featured as a central figure an animal. That Suavs painted eagles on their banners makes them no more totemists than the Romans who were said to have come from brothers raised by a wolf and who carried the Roman eagle in front of the legions (look up aquilifer). Huginn and Muninn do not make Odinists into totemists and the popularity of the Lion of Judah does not make Israelites into totemists either. By the authors’ reasoning the Franks’ original religion could also have been “totemic” since Merovech, according to their own fabulists, may have been fathered by some sea monster.
Why Suavs were no totemists, methinks is quite simple: the Suavs did not originate in the steppe where totemic beliefs were common. They originated in the forest zone (maybe in the forest steppe, though I have my doubts). Thus, they were not influenced – at least on this point – by the nomads that populated that steppe. I suppose they could have invented their own totems… but they didn’t. Kalik and Uchitel’s “founding myth” ingeniously made up from a patchwork of legends taken from various Suavic people’s “histories” does not convince me (yet 🙂 ).
Finally, the above examples of sloppiness are hardly far and few in between. A mildly competent editor with a knowledge of the languages involved (this seems to be a theme) could have pointed out some of the errors noted above but the authors don’t seem to have had one. As it is, we get such pearls as “Misrrz Wincenty” or Kazimierz IV Jagiellońszyk (including, in the index for good measure). In a day and age where Wikipedia (usually) gives you the correct spelling, this would be barely forgivable in a magazine article let alone in what purports to be a book focusing on Suavic topics.
Overall, the authors are altogether too ready (for a purported scholarly work) to make sweeping assumptions and jump (hop hop, pochopnie) to conclusions. For example, the suggestion that Svarog’s name may be cognate with the German schwartz I made, tentatively, some time back. The authors, however, exhibit far fewer reservations and enthusiastically make the possible cognate into a borrowing carrying it back to the reconstructed Germanic *svartaz (further connecting it with the Slavic chort and, naturally, Chernobog) so as to declare confidently that this is “the most likely source for the West Slavic Svarozhich [emphasis added].” (Given the lack of attribution, I am assuming they came upon this idea on their own).
Are there positive aspects of the book? Sure. The very fact that a book has been written in English on this topic is better than if the book hadn’t come out at all. Any publicity is good publicity. The authors provide a nice compilation of examples of Suavic hippomancy, setting those rituals in the wider Indo-European context. They also give interesting anecdotes and factoids here and there. My favorite is the astute remark that Christian observers sometimes “tended to interpret [in the authors’ view] totemic cults as monotheistic religions citing as an example the following statement by a papal legate visiting a Mongolian khan: “They believe in one God, and they believe that He is the maker of all things visible, and invisible; and that it is He who is the giver of the good things of this world as well as the hardships…” This, of course, conjures up the famous passage by Procopius or, for that matter, the later description by Helmold of the Suavic God of Gods.
The book is published by Routledge whose recent duds include “Slavs in the Making” – Florin Curta’s exercise in digging himself in deeper.
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