Legends & songs¶
Folk legends and in-world texts: each tale as the collectors recorded it, and as the saga tells it.
Labels. [Historical record] is attested in the sources or standard scholarship; [The saga’s invention] was made for this series.
How to use this page. Each legend has three parts. (a) The folk version [Historical record] is a short summary, in our own words, of the public-domain tale as collectors recorded it. (c) Tellers and meaning says who tells it inside the books and what it does for the plot.
The governing rule (cosmology, epigraph): the folk are always half right. Every retelling below should leave the reader feeling that the peasant version was true, and that it was also a kindness, because the whole truth is worse.
Dating caution. Many of these tales were first written down long after 1382 (the Iron Wolf dream in 16th-century chronicles, Jūratė in the 19th century). In the saga they circulate orally in 1382. That is a deliberate liberty and should never be presented in prose as a quotation from a written source of the period.
1. Jūratė ir Kastytis: how the Amber Queen began¶
(a) The folk version [Historical record]¶
Jūratė, a sea goddess, lived in a palace of amber on the floor of the Baltic, near where the river Šventoji meets the sea. A young fisherman, Kastytis, cast his nets at the river mouth and took her fish. She sent her mermaids to warn him off; he ignored them. She rose to punish him herself and fell in love with him instead, and took him down to her palace. Perkūnas, angered that an immortal had given her love to a mortal (some versions say she had been promised to the water god Patrimpas), struck the palace with lightning, killed Kastytis, and chained Jūratė to the ruins. The pieces of amber the sea throws onto the Palanga shore after storms are fragments of her palace, and the moaning of the sea in a storm is Jūratė weeping.
Source note: the tale is first known in print from Liudvikas Adomas Jucevičius (Ludwik Adam Jucewicz), 1842, and it was made famous by later literary versions (Maironis’s ballad among them). Folklorists debate how much of it is genuine oral tradition and how much is 19th-century romantic composition. The saga treats it as old; the author should know that it may not be.
(b) As the saga tells it [The saga’s invention]¶
As the amber-priestesses of Palanga tell it to a girl on the night her blood first comes, with the door barred and the shore-fire banked.
Forget the fishwives‘ tale, child. They tell it as if the sea were a jealous girl and the Thunderer a jealous husband. The sea is not a girl, and Perkūnas has never been jealous of anything. He keeps oaths. That is all he is.
Listen. Before there were dukes, Saulė wept for her faithless husband the Moon, and her tears fell into the sea and hardened. Jūratė gathered them. Every wall of her palace was a tear, so every wall remembered. That is why amber holds a working: it was grief before it was stone.
There was a law older than Jūratė: dievai nemyli mirtingųjų, the gods do not love the dying. It is not a cruel law. A god who loves a mortal will try to keep him, and a kept man is a man stolen from Laima’s thread and from Giltinė’s knife.
Kastytis was not a fool who wandered in. He was a fisherman with a sick mother and nets that came up empty, and he fished the forbidden mouth of the Šventoji because hunger is braver than piety. When Jūratė came up out of the water to drown him, he did not beg. He asked her to let him bring the catch home first, so his mother would eat. That was what she fell in love with: not his face but the bargain.
She took him down. And in the amber halls he did not age, because amber does not let anything age. Each day was the same day held up to the light. He ate and did not grow fat, slept and did not dream, and forgot his mother’s name. In the seventh year he asked to go home. Jūratė said, tomorrow. In the fortieth year he asked again. She said, tomorrow. She was not lying. A god’s tomorrow is long.
The fishermen say Perkūnas killed Kastytis in a rage. The priestesses say that on the last night Kastytis went up to the palace roof, where the sea was thinnest, and called the Thunderer’s name aloud, which is how one asks for justice. The bolt that came down was an answer, not an attack. It broke the walls, and forty years fell on Kastytis in a single breath. He died old, in a moment, and was glad.
Then Perkūnas chained Jūratė among the ruins, because a god who has stolen a death must repay one.
Here is the part the fishwives never tell. Jūratė’s grief did not die with her palace. It spread through the sea and became something that is not her any more: Gintaro Karalienė, the Amber Queen, the sea’s memory of everything gods and men have broken. It has no hands. When it needs hands it takes a woman of our line, and the woman pays back the death Jūratė stole. Not all at once. A little in each generation. Every one of us ends in the water.
So when you find amber on the beach after a storm, don’t call it treasure. Hold it to your ear. What you hear is not the sea. It is a wall that remembers a fisherman asking to go home.
Jūrate, Jūratėle, ko verki? Little Jūratė, why are you weeping? Because she was right to love him, child, and the law was right to stop her. Both. That is the grief that cannot end.
(c) Tellers and meaning¶
Who tells it: the Palanga amber-priestess line (the version above is their initiation tale); the fisherfolk tell the romantic version; the Order’s amber wardens in Prussia, who held collecting as a monopoly and punished illicit gatherers, tell it as proof that the heathens worship flotsam.
For the books: it is the charter of the Amber Queen office. It explains why each vessel ends by giving her mortality back to the sea, and why Birutė’s ch. 27 transformation is the line paying its last instalment. It also sets up why Perkūnas presses so hard on Vytautas (Cosmology §3.4 item 5): the son of the last vessel carries the unpaid half of an old judgment.
Scene use: Birutė told Vytautas the fishwives‘ version when he was small and the priestesses‘ version only once, on the night before Vilnius (ch. 3 revision). He should remember the line „a god’s tomorrow is long“ when Jogaila promises him Trakai.
2. Eglė žalčių karalienė: the bride of the grass snake¶
(a) The folk version [Historical record]¶
Eglė, the youngest of twelve sisters (with three brothers), went bathing with her sisters and found a grass snake coiled in the sleeve of her shirt. It would not leave until she promised to marry it. She promised, thinking it a joke. A host of snakes came to claim her. Her family tried three times to fob them off with a goose, a sheep and a cow, and each time a cuckoo called out the deceit, so at last Eglė went. Her bridegroom, Žilvinas, became a handsome man; they lived happily in his palace under the sea and had three sons, Ąžuolas (Oak), Uosis (Ash) and Beržas (Birch), and a daughter, Drebulė (Aspen).
Years later Eglė visited her family. Her brothers wanted to keep her and beat the children to learn the words that summon Žilvinas. The sons kept silent; the little daughter, frightened, told. The brothers went to the shore, called „Žilvine, Žilvinėli, jei tu gyvas, pieno puta, jei negyvas, kraujo puta“ („if you live, let the foam be milk; if you are dead, let it be blood“), and cut the serpent down with scythes. When Eglė called, the sea answered with bloody foam. In grief she turned her sons into the trees they were named for, her daughter into the trembling aspen, and herself into a spruce (eglė).
Source note: one of the best known Lithuanian folk tales, recorded in many variants from the 19th century on; tale type ATU 425M.
(b) As the saga tells it [The saga’s invention]¶
As the swamp-folk of the Dykra tell it, low, so the reeds will not carry it.
Nobody in the villages remembers that Eglė’s brothers loved her. That is the whole of the sorrow, so remember it.
They were not wicked men. They had watched their sister walk into the sea behind a snake. For nine years they had looked at the water every evening. When she came back with four children who had a green light in their eyes and could not bear the taste of bread, the brothers did what loving brothers do: they decided to rescue her. They took scythes to the shore the way you take a knife to a wound.
The little girl who told the summoning words was not a traitor. She was six, she had been beaten, and she believed her uncles when they said they only wanted to see her father. Children always believe that.
When the foam came up red, Eglė understood that the people who loved her had killed the one she loved, and that they would do it again, and that they would call it saving her. So she did a terrible thing. She did not curse her brothers. She cursed her children into trees, so that no one would ever be able to beat a secret out of them again. The oak cannot speak. The aspen trembles forever, because the girl remembers. Eglė made herself a spruce, the tree that stays green in a winter that kills everything else. A mother who saves her children by ending them: the villages call it a sad story and go to bed.
That is the half they know. Here is the other half.
Žilvinas was not a sea-prince. He was žaltys, the old blood of the house-snakes that sleep under thresholds and drink the milk left for them. When his body was cut, his blood went into the ground and the grass snakes of the whole land were born from it. That is why we feed them. Not because they are pets. Because they are a dead man’s children, and we owe the dead.
And the blood remembers its bride. In every generation there is one girl named for the spruce, and a žaltys finds her sleeve. The last of them kept the flame in the valley of Šventaragis. When the duke’s captain insulted her fire, she took the oldest snake from the sacred enclosure, the one with the gold-yellow cheeks, and walked out of the city into the Dykra. She did not drown in the swamp. The Root-Mother took her, the way the sea once took the first Eglė. Now she has no voice, and the snake lies around her neck like a necklace that thinks.
If she shows you the path, follow it, and leave something on the stone. If she does not show you the path, nesek jos, do not follow her. The first Eglė forgave no one either.
(c) Tellers and meaning¶
Who tells it: every Lithuanian mother tells the folk version. The Dykra version above is told by the swamp-folk and, in Books II–III, by Samogitian hedge-raganos who know who the „last Eglė“ is.
For the books: it is the mythic charter of Pelkių Eglė. The prologue priestess and the swamp-guide of ch. 15–16 are one woman; her žaltys (ch. 16) is the inheritance of Žilvinas. Her silence in ch. 15 („Ne gintaro. Šaknų.“) is the correction of Vytautas’s mistake.
The grey edge: the tale’s villains are loving brothers with scythes. That is exactly how the saga wants the Order, Jogaila and even Vytautas read in 1387: people who destroy the old world sincerely believing they are rescuing it. In 1387, when the sacred snakes of Šventaragis are killed (Cosmology §4.2, after Długosz), Eglė’s žaltys is the last of the line to survive, which makes it a target in Book II.
The motif to reuse: blood-foam versus milk-foam. A Book II scene where a priestess calls at the Neman shore and the foam comes up red is the saga’s way of announcing a death offstage.
3. The Iron Wolf: Gediminas’s dream and the founding of Vilnius¶
(a) The folk version [Historical record]¶
Grand Duke Gediminas, hunting in the forests at the confluence of the Neris and the Vilnia, killed a great aurochs on the hill later called Tauras hill. Night fell, and he slept in the valley of Šventaragis, where the old dukes were burned. He dreamed of an iron wolf standing on the hill, howling with the voice of a hundred wolves. In the morning the pagan priest Lizdeika, who as a baby had been found in an eagle’s nest, explained the dream: the iron wolf meant a strong castle and a city that Gediminas must build there, and the hundred voices meant that its fame would spread through the world. Gediminas built the castle, and Vilnius was founded.
Source note: the story appears in the 16th-century Lithuanian chronicles (the later redactions of the Chronicle of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Samogitia, including the Bychowiec Chronicle). These chronicles are late and legendary. Vilnius is first named as a capital in Gediminas’s letters of 1323. The same chronicles make Lizdeika the high priest, and later families claimed descent from him.
(b) As the saga tells it [The saga’s invention]¶
As the Krivis tells it to a Gediminid boy on the night he first carries a sword into the valley.
Lizdeika told Gediminas the truth. He did not tell him all of it. A priest who tells a duke everything at once is a dead priest, and Lizdeika had been raised by eagles; he knew how far a thing falls.
The aurochs on the hill was not game. It was a price. Žemyna does not give a hill for a city without blood, and Gediminas paid with the last bull of the old herd. That is why the hill bears its name, and why no aurochs has been seen there since.
Then the dream. Gediminas told it plainly in the morning, the way dukes tell things: a wolf, iron, on the hill, howling with a hundred voices. Lizdeika said, a castle and a city; its name will be heard across the world. All true. Gediminas was pleased and gave him a golden cup.
But I am the Krivis, and Lizdeika’s words came down to me with the fire, so I will tell you what he saw and did not say.
The wolf was iron because it was bound. It wore an iron collar that bit into the neck, and the hundred voices were not praise. They came from inside it, all at once, the voices of the wolf’s own sons and grandsons, and they were tearing at each other. A city built there would be great, and it would feed on its own kin. Every generation of Gediminas’s house would have to choose which brother to kill so that the wolf could go on howling.
Lizdeika also saw, at the edge of the dream, a second wolf with a crown of thorns and gold pressing into its skull, and he saw the two wolves circling. He did not understand it, so he did not mention it. A priest who mentions what he does not understand is a fool, and Lizdeika was no fool.
He told only one thing more, and only to the fire: the wolf howls not from hunger but from grief, because it sees its master kneeling at a stranger’s altar. Then he built the first flame in the valley, on the ashes of Šventaragis, so that the dead under the city would be warm and would not climb out to collect.
Do you understand, boy? Your city stands on the dead. The fire keeps them sleeping. When a Gediminid lets that fire die, the dead will wake, and they will be owed.
Now take the sword. And never ask a priest for the whole of a dream.
(c) Tellers and meaning¶
Who tells it: court bards and every Vilnius child tell the proud version. The Krivis’s version passes down the priesthood of Šventaragis; in 1382 only the Krivis, Eglė and perhaps Birutė know the „unsaid“ half.
For the books: Eglė’s prophecy in the prologue („Geležinis Vilkas šią nakties klyksta ne iš alkio, o iš sielos skausmo…“) is a deliberate echo of Lizdeika’s unsaid line. The collared wolf and the thorn-crowned wolf in her vision are Vytautas and Jogaila, which makes the series title literal: the Iron Wolf is the Gediminid house devouring itself.
The Pact link: the flame on Šventaragis guards the dead beneath Vilnius. When Jogaila extinguishes it in 1387 (Cosmology §4.2), the Unbinding begins in the capital first: the earliest ravenous vėlės of Book II should rise in Vilnius itself.
Caution: keep Lizdeika’s „golden cup“ and the „Krivis“ lineage as the saga’s invention.
4. Sovijus: why the dead are burned¶
(a) The folk version [Historical record]¶
A short tale preserved as an insertion in the 1261 Old Rus‘ translation of the Chronicle of John Malalas (the „Sovijus legend“). Sovijus caught a wild boar and gave its nine spleens to his sons to roast; the sons ate them. Angered, Sovijus resolved to go down into the underworld, and he found the way only with one son’s help. After his death his sons first buried him in the earth, and he complained that worms and creeping things tormented him. They laid him in a tree, and he complained of bees and gnats. Then they burned him on a pyre, and he said that he slept as sweetly as a child in a cradle. From then on, the text says, the Lithuanians and their neighbours burned their dead. The same passage names gods to whom Sovijus taught sacrifice, including a smith, Teliavelis, who forged the sun.
Source note: the earliest surviving written myth about Baltic religion; its interpretation is much debated (Beresnevičius, Vėlius and others).
(b) As the saga tells it [The saga’s invention]¶
As the žyniai sing it at a pyre, while the smoke is still white.
There were nine spleens in the boar because the boar had been fed for nine years on oaths. Sovijus knew this. He gave the spleens to his sons to roast and told them to keep them for the gods. His sons were hungry and young, and they ate them, all nine, and laughed with grease on their chins.
That was the first oath ever broken in this land, and it was broken by sons against a father. Remember that, because it has never stopped happening.
Sovijus did not shout. He went looking for someone to judge his sons. Dievas would not hear him, because Dievas never takes sides. Perkūnas was away hunting. So Sovijus went down: down through the roots, past the wells, past the river-bottoms, to Velnias, who keeps accounts.
He could not find the door alone. The youngest son, the one who had eaten least, led him by the hand. Some say the boy did it from love. Some say he did it so that his father would not come back. The žyniai do not decide. They sing it both ways, one verse each.
Velnias heard the case and said, fair is fair. Your sons owe you. But I don’t take payment in boys; I take it in knowledge. He told Sovijus a thing no living man had known: that every body has three roads after death, and only one of them goes up.
Sovijus died soon after; men who have spoken with Velnias usually do. His sons, who still owed him, did what was cheapest. They dug a pit and put him in the ground. That night he came to them dripping soil. The earth eats me, he said. Žemyna’s worms go through my eyes. I cannot climb. They dug him up and put him in the fork of an oak, the way the forest people do. The next night he came again, swollen and stung. Medeina’s bees make honey in my mouth. The birds take me piece by piece. I cannot climb.
On the third day the sons built a pyre, because they were frightened, not because they were good. They laid him on it with his spear and his dogs and burned him to white bone. That night he came for the last time and stood at the foot of their beds. He was not dripping anything. He was only smoke, and he was smiling.
Aš miegu kaip kūdikis lopšyje, he said. I sleep like a baby in its cradle. The fire took me up in one breath, past the Birds‘ Way, to the foot of the Glass Mountain. Burn your mothers. Burn your fathers. Burn me again in your songs.
So we burn them. The fire is the fastest road up. The earth is slow, and a body left in it may wait so long that it forgets the way, and comes back on the night of Vėlinės, hungry.
And the sons? They had to live knowing their father’s first two deaths were their thrift. That is why at every pyre the eldest son puts in the first log with his own hands. He is paying for a boar’s spleen.
(c) Tellers and meaning¶
Who tells it: sung by the žyniai at cremations; every pagan Lithuanian knows the ending („like a baby in its cradle“).
For the books: it is the in-world reason for Cosmology §1: fire is the road to Dausos, and the buried may linger as vėlės. It makes the Order’s insistence on burial an atrocity in pagan eyes and seeds the unburned dead of the Unbinding (Cosmology §4.3).
Kęstutis’s pyre (H4): Jogaila gives his uncle a full cremation with horses and hounds (master chronology, Aug 1382). In the saga, Jogaila putting in the first log himself, as the son of the house, is the most chilling thing he does in Book I: he is performing Sovijus’s sons‘ penance for a murder he ordered. The žyniai sing both verses about the youngest son, and everyone at the pyre hears which one is meant.
Theme: the first broken oath in Lithuania was sons against a father. Kin-slaying is the original sin of the land (Pact clause 2).
5. Birutė and Kęstutis at Palanga¶
(a) The folk version [Historical record]¶
The 16th-century Lithuanian chronicles tell that Duke Kęstutis heard of a maiden of Palanga, Birutė, renowned for beauty and wisdom, who served the gods as a vaidilutė and had vowed to keep her virginity in their service. He went to Palanga and asked for her. She refused, citing her vow. He took her anyway, against her will by some accounts, and brought her to Trakai, where they were married with great ceremony. Folk tradition adds that after Kęstutis’s murder she returned to Palanga, served the sacred fire again, died old, and was buried on the hill that bears her name. Polish tradition (Długosz) says instead that she was drowned in 1382 on Jogaila’s orders.
Source note: the marriage is traditionally dated c. 1350. The vaidilutė element and the „abduction“ come from late and partly legendary chronicle material.
(b) As the saga tells it [The saga’s invention]¶
As the shore-women of Palanga tell it, mending nets, when no men are near.
The chroniclers say he stole her. That is what men write. The women on this shore say she let herself be stolen, and that it was the cleverest thing ever done on the Palanga sand.
Birutė had sworn an oath to the shore-fire: I will not give myself to any man. An oath to a fire is an oath to Gabija, and behind Gabija stands Perkūnas, who keeps all oaths. She meant it when she swore it. She was fifteen, and the sea spoke to her through amber, and men seemed small.
Then the duke of Trakai rode up the shore. He was not handsome. He was broad and tired, with a scar where a German axe had opened his cheek. He did not bring gifts. He sat by the fire she tended and asked her, the way a man asks a seer, what the sea said about the Order. She told him the truth: that they would never stop, and that his sons would make peace with them, and that the peace would be worse than the war.
He did not thank her. He asked her to marry him.
She said, Aš prisiekiau ugniai: I swore to the fire. I cannot give myself.
And the old priestess of the line, who was listening behind the dune, said quietly: Then don’t give. Be taken.
That is the trick. A vow not to give yourself is not broken if you are carried off. It is Velnias’s sort of cleverness, the letter against the spirit, and the women of our line have always been Velnias’s equals at it. So Birutė struggled, loudly, where the fishermen could see. Kęstutis’s men threw her on a horse. The chroniclers got their abduction, the gods got their letter kept, and Kęstutis got a wife who loved him all his life and never once lied to him.
But a god cheated by the letter is still owed by the spirit. The fire wrote the debt down. The sea wrote it down too, because the old priestess had not stolen Birutė only for love. She had placed the Amber Queen’s vessel in the Gediminid bed. The line wanted a duke’s son with the sea in his blood.
So the debt sat for thirty years. When Kęstutis was strangled and Jogaila’s men threw Birutė into the sea with stones in her skirts, the sea threw her back. Three times it threw her ring back to her feet, and three times it threw her back too. A debt that has not been paid in full cannot be collected early. The sea was not finished with her.
Two years later she walked into the water at the full moon and paid all of it, the vow, the trick and the son, and left only a kneeling woman of amber on the sand.
Kęstutis knew. She told him on their wedding night. He laughed until he wept, the women say, and said: Then I married a thief. Good. So did my father.
(c) Tellers and meaning¶
Who tells it: the chronicle version is court knowledge. The shore-women’s version is Palanga’s secret. The Order’s chroniclers tell a third version, in which a heathen duke rapes a pagan nun, used in sermons as proof of Lithuanian savagery. The „abduction“ was staged, which is why both the chronicle and the folk version are true. Długosz’s 1382 drowning happened and failed (the ring-thrice motif, ch. 11), and Birutė paid her debt by choice in 1384 (ch. 27). Birutė’s whole arc is that bill.
Scene use: Kęstutis’s last vision of the young Birutė „pakerėjo Palanga pajūryje“ (ch. 9) is this meeting. A revised ch. 9 can have him remember the moment she struggled on the horse and winked.
6. The Silent Pact of 1345: Tylioji Sutartis [The saga’s invention]¶
(a) The folk version¶
There is none. The Pact is the saga’s invention. In-world it survives only as a song fragment that must not be sung aloud: it is hummed, and the words are passed mouth to ear. What follows is the „folk“ form it takes among Samogitian žyniai after 1387.
Historical anchor [Historical record]: in 1345 Kęstutis seized Vilnius and deposed his brother Jaunutis, and Algirdas joined him; the brothers divided the realm, Algirdas ruling from Vilnius in the east and Kęstutis from Trakai in the west. The Grand Duchy remained the last unconquered pagan state in Europe until 1387.
(b) As the saga tells it: the song¶
Sung (hummed) by the Samogitian žyniai in the Hidden Groves, Books III–IV. The English is the gloss of a Lithuanian original which in-world is never written down; the refrain alone is given in Lithuanian.
In the year the young brother lost his chair, two wolves came down to the valley at night. The elder had eyes that looked to the east, the younger kept his hand on the hilt.
Tylėk, tylėk, Tylioji Sutartie, ugnim užrašyta, krauju užantspauduota. (Be silent, be silent, Silent Pact, written in fire, sealed in blood.)
The Krivis stood with his crooked staff, and the fire stood up taller than men. He said: the gods will keep your land. What will you give to keep the gods?
The elder said: I give the flames. In Vilnius, Palanga, the Samogitian groves, while one of my blood still walks the earth, no hand shall put them out.
The younger said: I give my blood. No son of Gediminas shall kill his kin. If ever one does, let the gods go free, and let the land go to whoever comes.
Then the fire said, and no one spoke it: for every furrow the cross shall plough, a king’s son’s blood. Who pays the debt? And the brothers looked away.
Tylėk, tylėk, Tylioji Sutartie.
The wolves went home. They did not tell their wives, their sons, their warriors. That is why it is called silent: the ones who paid it were not asked.
(c) Tellers and meaning¶
Who knows it: in 1382, only the Krivis, the surviving oath-taker Kęstutis, and (through the sea) Birutė. Eglė knows the fire’s part. Jogaila does not know the terms, which is part of why he breaks them so lightly; the Shadow-Seller knows them exactly, which is why he brokers the murder at Krėva (Cosmology §4.2).
Why „silent“: the song’s last stanza is the moral core. The Pact was a treaty between the land’s people and the land’s spirits, made by two princes on behalf of people who were never told the price. That is the saga’s grey: the protection that kept Lithuania free for forty years was paid for, without consent, in the blood of children such as Vytautas’s sons.
The „crooked staff“: the Krivis’s krivulė.
Book V shows the oath itself in flashback; the song should be the reader’s first, distorted glimpse of it, so that Book V can correct details (the elder brother hesitated; the fire’s clause was spoken aloud, by Kęstutis, and Algirdas never forgave him for it).
8. Perkūnas and Velnias: why lightning strikes trees¶
(a) The folk version [Historical record]¶
In many Lithuanian tales Perkūnas pursues Velnias with thunder and lightning. Velnias flees and hides wherever he can: in trees (especially old or hollow ones), under stones, in water, behind animals, even behind people. So lightning strikes trees and stones, and peasants avoid sheltering under trees in a storm, chase black cats and dogs out of the house, and close doors and windows, so that the devil cannot hide near them and draw the bolt. In some tales Velnias has stolen something of Perkūnas’s (his wife, his weapon or his instrument); in others a man helps Perkūnas by shooting at the taunting devil and is rewarded. The myth of the thunder god chasing his serpentine or underworld opponent is old and Indo-European in its outlines (Gimbutas, Ivanov and Toporov).
(b) As the saga tells it [The saga’s invention]¶
As the herdsmen tell it, sitting out a storm in the open, away from the oaks.
The priests in the stone towns say Perkūnas hunts Velnias because Velnias is wicked. The priests in the groves say it is because Velnias stole his wife. A herdsman knows better. A herdsman has stood out in enough storms.
Perkūnas hunts Velnias because Velnias keeps the dead, and the dead keep the past, and the past is full of oaths. Every oath ever sworn under an oak is in that oak. You can hear it if you put your ear to the bark on a windless night: a little creaking, like a rope. An oath that was kept creaks like a cradle. An oath that was broken creaks like a gallows.
Velnias collects the broken ones. That is his trade: he buys debts. So when Perkūnas comes out to judge, Velnias runs to the oaks where the broken oaths are, because in there he is owed, and a creditor is safe in his debtor’s house.
So Perkūnas strikes the tree. Not to burn the tree. To burn the oath out of it.
That is why the old oaks on the hills are scarred black. They are the places where the most promises were broken.
But here is the part a herdsman learns the hard way. When Velnias cannot reach a tree, he hides behind whatever is nearest: a cow, a dog, a black cat, a child. Perkūnas does not stop. He is justice, and justice does not ask who is standing in front of the guilty. So in a storm the old women throw the cat out of the house and do not let the children stand in the doorway. It is not superstition. It is arithmetic.
My grandfather saw a whole hamlet burn once, all twelve roofs, because a stranger came in out of the rain and sat by the fire and laughed a great deal. In the morning, among the ashes, they found three blackened stones where he had been sitting, and nothing else.
Kai Perkūnas medžioja, kaimas dega. When Perkūnas hunts, the village burns. Give Velnias no shelter, even when he knocks politely, and especially then.
(c) Tellers and meaning¶
Who tells it: herdsmen, peasants, soldiers. Christian priests after 1387 recast it („God’s lightning seeks the devil“), and the peasants nod, because it is the same story.
For the books: it explains, in folk terms, the rules for Perkūnas’s signs (lightning on oaks and banners, Cosmology §5) and makes the three blackened stones the Shadow-Seller’s calling card in rumour. Wherever Henė sits at a duke’s fire, lightning will eventually come looking.
Ch. 21: the lightning in the first battle (magic §7: „ambiguous by design“) reads differently through this tale. Was Perkūnas favouring Vytautas, or hunting something standing behind him?
1387: when Jogaila fells the Šventaragis grove, the peasants‘ fear is not only sacrilege. If the oaks are gone, where will the broken oaths go? (Answer for Book II: into people.)
9. How Velnias was cheated: the field divided¶
(a) The folk version [Historical record]¶
A widely told trickster tale (international tale type ATU 1030, „The Crop Division“, well attested in Lithuanian collections). A poor peasant and Velnias agree to farm a field together and split the harvest. In the first year the peasant offers Velnias the choice of tops or roots; Velnias takes the tops, and the peasant plants turnips (or potatoes in later versions), so Velnias gets the leaves. In the second year Velnias demands the roots, and the peasant plants grain, so Velnias gets stubble. In some versions there is a third round, or a contest, and Velnias, beaten each time, gives up in a rage. Velnias in Lithuanian tales is often more stupid than wicked, and the clever peasant always wins.
(b) As the saga tells it [The saga’s invention]¶
As Henė the jester tells it at Jogaila’s table, Vilnius, 1384, with the cousins seated on either side of the duke.
Once there was a peasant called Survila who had one field, and in that field nothing grew but stones. So he made a deal with the devil. Of course he did. Everyone in this hall has made one; only Survila was honest enough to admit it.
We’ll farm it together, said Velnias, who is fair in all things. Choose: tops or roots?
Survila scratched his head. Your Lordship chooses, being the elder.
Tops, said Velnias, because the tops are what you can see, and the devil has always liked what can be seen. So Survila planted turnips. At harvest Velnias got a cartload of leaves, and Survila ate all winter.
Next spring the devil was cross. Roots this time. So Survila planted rye. Velnias got a cartload of stubble, and Survila sold the grain to a German for silver.
The third spring Velnias came with a lawyer from Riga. This year, he said, I take the middle.
And Survila, who was clever but not wise, planted maize, which nobody in Lithuania had ever heard of, and the middle of it was husk, and Velnias went off cursing into the swamp, and Survila was the richest man in the parish.
(The jester bows. Laughter. He does not sit down.)
That is how the villages tell it. Shall I tell your Highnesses how it ends?
In the fourth spring Velnias did not come. Survila’s neighbours did. They had watched his barn fill three years in a row while their own fields grew stones, and they knew how such luck comes. They said he kept an aitvaras. They said he had sold his mother. They burned his barn with him inside, and on the ashes they found the bargain, scratched on a board in the devil’s own hand, and on it every word had been kept. Velnias had cheated no one. He had simply stopped needing to.
You see, my lords, you can beat the devil with cleverness. Nobody has ever beaten the neighbours.
(He tosses three black stones in the air, catches two, and lets the third roll under the table between the cousins‘ feet.)
Now which of you is the peasant, and which of you is the field?
(c) Tellers and meaning¶
Who tells it: every Lithuanian village tells the folk version as comedy. Henė tells the saga version above at the 1384 division (ch. 28 revision), when Vytautas receives Grodno, Brest and Podlasie and Trakai goes to Skirgaila. Nobody at the table can tell whether he means Vytautas or Jogaila as the peasant.
For the books: it is the folk proof of Cosmology §2.1 and magic §8: Velnias is hungry and fair, keeps every deal to the letter, and can be beaten only by cleverness. The twist adds the saga’s grey: beating the devil does not protect you from people. Rumour of a successful bargain is as deadly as the bargain.
Anachronism, used on purpose: maize did not exist in Europe in 1384. Henė knows this; it is the Shadow-Seller showing off that he sees all of time. One alert reader will notice; nobody at the table can. The crop division above is a safer [Historical record] model.
10. Laima at the cradle¶
(a) The folk version [Historical record]¶
In many Lithuanian tales and beliefs, Laima (sometimes three Laimos, or Laima with her sisters) comes to every newborn on its first night and decrees its fate, which cannot be changed. A typical tale: a traveller lodging overnight in a house where a child has just been born hears the Laimos at the window deciding the child’s life. The first proposes one death, the second another; the last decree stands, often that the child will die on its wedding day (drowned, struck by lightning, or killed by a wolf). The parents try everything to avert it, and the fate comes true anyway, sometimes through the very precaution. Offerings were made to Laima at births, and the phrase taip Laima lėmė („so Laima decreed“) is used to accept what cannot be helped. In mythology Laima is linked with Dalia (allotted share) and Giltinė (death) (the exact relationships vary by source; Cosmology §3.1 makes them sisters).
(b) As the saga tells it [The saga’s invention]¶
As the Amber Queen tells it, in Birutė’s voice, in the frame narration (00_pradzia).
I was a seer before I was anything else, so I heard them come. Senieji Trakai (so tradition places it), the year the brothers‘ Pact was five years old. The boy was an hour born, red and furious, and his father had gone out to the yard to shout his name at the stars. I lay in the straw with the child on my breast and the shutters open, because a mother of my line leaves the shutters open on the first night. You cannot keep Laima out. You can only be awake when she comes.
There were three of them on the sill, grey as river-mist, spinning. Laima first, with the distaff. Dalia with the measuring-cord. And the third sister, the one you do not name in a house with a newborn, with the shears in her lap.
He will be a king, Laima said, and spun.
No, said Dalia, measuring. A crown will travel toward him all his life. It will never arrive.
He will be baptised, Laima said.
Three times, said Dalia. And believe none of them. (The third sister smiled at that.)
He will have sons, Laima said.
Dalia measured a long time. He will outlive them. He will outlive every enemy he has, and every heir.
Then the third sister lifted her shears, and I spoke. A mother is permitted one word on the first night. I said: Not yet.
And Laima, who is not cruel, only exact, said: Not yet. But you will pay for the yet.
I paid. Everything I did after that night was paying: the vows, the fog over Krėva, the word laidas, surety, on the amber, his debt my debt. You think I walked into the sea for Lithuania. I walked into the sea because I had bought my son his life on credit, and the sea keeps better books than Velnias.
Here is what the villages get wrong about Laima. They think her decree is a wall. It is not. It is a sentence, and a sentence can be read many ways. A crown will travel toward him and never arrive: does that mean he is unlucky, or that a crown is the one thing the gods would not let him be bought with? He will outlive every heir: does that mean grief, or that the Wolf is the last, and after him only the pack? Laima spins the words. We choose which meaning to die in.
My son has his crown on the road now, and I can see it from here, in the amber, coming and coming.
(c) Tellers and meaning¶
Who tells it: the folk version is told at every birth. The saga version belongs to Birutė / the Amber Queen in the frame narration.
For the books: Laima’s sentence „a crown will travel toward him and never arrive“ is the series-long prophecy for the Lutsk crown of 1429–30, intercepted on the road and turned to leaves by Henė. „Baptised three times and believe none of them“ covers Tapiau 1383 (Wigand), Kraków 1386 (Aleksandras) and a third baptism the author may place (Vytautas is often said to have taken Orthodox baptism c. 1384; if not, the 1387 Neris scene of ch. 29, where he is a witness, can serve as a symbolic third). „He will outlive every heir“ covers the sons poisoned as Order hostages and his death without a male heir in 1430.
Rule reconciliation: Cosmology §3.1 says Laima’s spinning is why seers see possibilities, not certainties, while folk Laima decrees are unchangeable. The tale reconciles them: the words are fixed, their meaning is open. That also matches magic §10 („prophecy shows branches, never a fixed trunk“).
Magic link: it gives the emotional root of Birutė’s surety (laidas, magic §4.3) and of her decline. Her „Not yet“ is the first debt; ch. 27 is the last payment.
11. Proverbs and sayings (Patarlės ir priežodžiai)¶
Genuine Lithuanian proverbs are marked [Historical record] with the standard wording as commonly cited; minor variants exist. Invented in-world sayings are marked [The saga’s invention]. Suggested speakers are in italics.
# |
Lithuanian |
English |
Status |
Use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 |
Kas kitam duobę kasa, tas pats į ją įkrenta. |
Who digs a pit for another falls into it himself. |
[Historical record] |
Kęstutis on Jogaila, before Krėva; later turned on Skirgaila. |
2 |
Su vilkais gyvensi, vilkiškai kauksi. |
Live with wolves and you’ll howl like a wolf. |
[Historical record] |
Ona to Vytautas in the Order’s camp (ch. 20). |
3 |
Vilką mini, vilkas čia. |
Speak of the wolf and the wolf is here. |
[Historical record] |
Courtiers when Vytautas walks in, 1384. |
4 |
Tylus vanduo krantus graužia. |
Still water gnaws the banks. |
[Historical record] |
Said of Jogaila; also of the White Silence. |
5 |
Obuolys nuo obels netoli rieda. |
The apple doesn’t roll far from the apple tree. |
[Historical record] |
Said of Vytautas and Kęstutis; bitterly, of Jogaila and Algirdas. |
6 |
Ką pasėsi, tą ir pjausi. |
What you sow, you will reap. |
[Historical record] |
Galminas, watching the 1387 baptism. |
7 |
Velnias ne toks baisus, kaip jį piešia. |
The devil is not as terrible as he is painted. |
[Historical record] |
Henė’s favourite. He says it about himself. |
8 |
Duok velniui pirštą, jis visą ranką nukąs. |
Give the devil a finger and he’ll bite off the whole hand. |
[Historical record] (wording varies) |
Any žynys, on any deal with the Order. |
9 |
Nėra dūmų be ugnies. |
There’s no smoke without fire. |
[Historical record] |
Doubly meant at Šventaragis. |
10 |
Ir vilkas sotus, ir ožka sveika. |
The wolf is fed and the goat is whole. |
[Historical record] |
The diplomats‘ ideal; the saga’s proof that it never happens. |
11 |
Geriau žvirblis rankoje, negu briedis girioje. |
Better a sparrow in the hand than an elk in the forest. |
[Historical record] |
Jogaila’s whole philosophy. |
12 |
Ne iš kiekvieno debesies lyja. |
Not every cloud brings rain. |
[Historical record] |
Twisted by soldiers: „ne iš kiekvieno debesies trenkia“ (not every cloud strikes), when Perkūnas is quiet. |
13 |
Taip Laima lėmė. |
So Laima decreed. |
[Historical record] (formula) |
Acceptance at a death; Birutė refuses to say it. |
14 |
Kai Perkūnas medžioja, kaimas dega. |
When Perkūnas hunts, the village burns. |
[The saga’s invention] |
Herdsmen (legend 8). Justice has collateral. |
15 |
Jūra atsimena, gintaras liudija. |
The sea remembers; amber bears witness. |
[The saga’s invention] |
Palanga shore-women; an expansion of the amber line’s words „Jūra atsimena“. |
16 |
Žalčio pieno negailėk. |
Don’t begrudge the grass snake its milk. |
[The saga’s invention] |
Household rule; after 1387 it becomes a whispered act of resistance. |
17 |
Ugnis aukštyn veda, žemė žemyn traukia. |
Fire leads up; earth drags down. |
[The saga’s invention] |
Said at pyres (legend 4); after 1387, said at Christian burials, under the breath. |
18 |
Prisiekei ąžuolui, atsakysi Perkūnui. |
Swear to the oak, answer to Perkūnas. |
[The saga’s invention] |
Oath formula reminder; Skirgaila’s safe-conduct was sworn this way. |
19 |
Su velniu derėkis raštu, su kaimynu tylėk. |
Bargain with the devil in writing; with your neighbour, keep quiet. |
[The saga’s invention] |
The moral of legend 9; a merchant’s saying in Vilnius. |
20 |
Mėnulį kirto, ir tas užgijo. |
Even the Moon was cut, and he healed. |
[The saga’s invention] |
Comfort after punishment; also a threat (he is cut again). |
21 |
Kryžius neša šviesą, bet ne šilumą. |
The cross brings light but not warmth. |
[The saga’s invention] |
Said by baptised peasants after 1387 who still bank the hearth for Gabija. Not anti-Christian: a complaint about the winter. |
22 |
Kas ugnį gesina, tas mirusius žadina. |
Whoever puts out the fire wakes the dead. |
[The saga’s invention] |
Krivis’s warning (legend 3); comes true in Book II. |
23 |
Vilkas į būdą negrįžta, grįžta tik šuo. |
The wolf doesn’t go back to the kennel; only the dog does. |
[The saga’s invention] |
Built on the Beggar’s words to Vytautas (ch. 4). Vytautas is told it each time he goes back to Jogaila or the Order, and each time he goes back. |
12. Song fragments (Dainų nuotrupos)¶
*Original verse in the style of Lithuanian dainos (diminutives, parallelism, nature images, short lines). These are the saga’s inventions unless marked. Glosses are literal, not poetic.
12.1 Jūrele, mėlynoji: the Palanga lament [The saga’s invention]¶
Sung by the shore-women after 1384, at the amber kneeling woman (ch. 27). It folds together the ring-thrice motif (ch. 11) and Birutė’s sacrifice.
Oi jūrele, mėlynoji, Kam paėmei mano žiedą? Tris kartelius man grąžinai, Ketvirtą kartą – mane pačią.
Gintarėlis ant smėlelio Klūpo, galvelę nulenkus. Neverk, sūneli, neverk, vilkeli, Motulė jūroj neužmiega.
Gloss: Oh little sea, the blue one, / why did you take my ring? / Three times you gave it back to me, / the fourth time, you took me myself. // A little amber on the little sand / kneels with its little head bowed. / Don’t weep, little son, don’t weep, little wolf, / your mother in the sea does not fall asleep.
12.2 Degė laužas Vilniaus slėny: a lament for Kęstutis [The saga’s invention]¶
Degė laužas Vilniaus slėny, Degė žirgas bėrasis, Kilo dūmai dangun mėlynan – Tai Kęstučio keleliai.
Ne kardas jį pakirto, Ne strėlė pervėrė – Tamsiam bokšte, tyliąją naktį Sava ranka užsmaugė.
Gloss: A pyre burned in the Vilnius valley, / the bay horse burned, / smoke rose into the blue sky: / those are Kęstutis’s little roads. // No sword cut him down, / no arrow pierced him: / in a dark tower, in the silent night, / a kindred hand strangled him.
Note: „sava ranka“ (one’s own hand, a kinsman’s hand) is the dangerous line. In Book II it is forbidden at Skirgaila’s court.
12.3 Miegok, vaikeli: the threshold lullaby [The saga’s invention]¶
Miegok, vaikeli, lopšely, Žaltelis po slenksčiu budi. Kol pienelio jam negailėsi, Tol jis tavęs nepabudins.
Kunigai žaltelį užmušė, Pienelis rūgsta puodely. Miegok, vaikeli, – kas gi dabar Po tavo slenksčiu budi?
Gloss: Sleep, little child, in the little cradle, / the little grass snake keeps watch under the threshold. / As long as you don’t begrudge him his milk, / he will not wake you. // The priests killed the little snake, / the milk sours in the little pot. / Sleep, little child: who, now, / keeps watch under your threshold?
12.4 Two genuine fragments [Historical record]¶
Very short traditional formulas, public domain, usable in prose as quotation:
From the Eglė tale: „Žilvine, Žilvinėli, jei tu gyvas, pieno puta, jei negyvas, kraujo puta.“ („Žilvinas, little Žilvinas, if you are alive, let the foam be milk; if you are dead, let the foam be blood.“) Wording varies between recorded variants.
The opening of the mythological daina of the Moon’s wedding: „Mėnuo Saulužę vedė / Pirmą pavasarėlį.“ („The Moon married the little Sun / in the first spring.“) Published by Rėza, 1825.
Do not quote further than these openings without checking the edition; use the saga’s own songs above for anything longer.