I always laugh when I hear complaints about the paucity of information regarding Slavic mythology. The question I have is “as compared to what?”
There are several phases of the study of religion & customs. First, there is the initial appearance of stories. These stories get passed around and are told to the next generations. They vary with the storyteller, morph and change widely. This is the organic phase.
Second, there comes a time where a polity arises. If the polity’s citizens are in some percentage literate then the stories get written down. This could be done by local writers or poets as arts develop in this pagan polity. This could also be done by government sanctioned scribes who are hired to present the officially approved version of the stories (perhaps tying them to the local dynasty’s claims on the throne). Either way, when such writers write the folk stories down, they necessarily have to choose which versions to write down, what to emphasize, what to downplay or outright omit. The inhabitants of the polity may believe such myths, may just enjoy them or, importantly, may simply value them for as part of their heritage.
Third, there may come a time when the old myths are no longer commonly widely believed and the polity may have even chosen a new direction in terms of official mythology. Yet there may still exit people who value these old wives’ tales and stories. These then become ethnographers and scriveners of the old ways. Thus, we have the birth of mythography.
In the Slavic case, there clearly was a vibrant phase I and for the last few hundred years we have also enjoyed phase III. However, most Slavic countries did not experience a phase II – a pagan society into a state form with a decent level of literacy. If you don’t write it down, it’s like it didn’t happen. After all which IE societies did preserve their mythologies? Well, we have:
- Greek myths
- Roman myths
- Persian and Indian myths (or, in the latter case, still functioning religions!) in the East
But that’s about it.
Slavic (?) idol from Germany with the ever present drinking horn (cornucopia)
There is not much more preserved Celtic mythology than Slavic mythology. There is no Germanic mythology. You might object that we have Germanic mythology but the reality is that what has come down to us is not Germanic from Germany, it’s not even Scandinavian. What we have is basically Icelandic. In that one remote part of Europe one or two guys decided to act as anthropologists and wrote some old stories down. We think that other Scandinavians had similar myths. We think that, by extension, so did continental Germans but there is literally no proof of this. It’s possible. With some Scandinavians it may even be likely but it’s hardly certain. The reason for this that neither Celts nor Germanics nor Scandinavians developed literate pagan state structures. But for the efforts of Snorri Sturluson we would have no inkling of Icelandic mythology. And his mythology is not mythology – it was too late for that even in Iceland – it’s mythography. Snori was an anthropologist, an ethnographer, perhaps a historian but not a believer or representative of a pre-Christian government writing the official version of state religion.
In fact, the famous Fontes historiae religionis slavicae, collected by Karl Meyer was the fourth Fontes volume of ancient myths published in the 20s and 30s. The others dealt with Persians (volume 1), Egyptians (volume 2 – multiple parts), Germans (volume 3), Celts (volume 5), primitive and pre-IE religions (volume 6) and Indian (volume 7). Some of these come in multiple parts (the Celtic volume has three parts) but others do not. The Slavic pamphlet does not look shabby in comparison with these others. (Note that the sources are those sources that were written in Greek or Latin only).
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