Baba Yaga
Slavic · numen · modern collection · Recorded classification
The best-known figure this tradition has produced, and the registry did not hold her. No relations are recorded, and that is not an oversight: she meets a different hero in every tale and is kin to none of them, which is precisely her position in the structure — she is what stands between the ordinary world and the other one, and the hero is a stranger at her door by definition. A verified-solitary verdict carries this rather than inventing her a family.
Domains
- witchcraft
- the forest threshold
Sources
- Baba Yaga is the hag of East Slavic folklore who flies in a mortar steered with a pestle, sweeps away her tracks with a birch broom, lives in a hut on chicken legs, and functions in the tale as villain, as donor, or as both.: Reference treatments of Baba Yaga in Russian folklore and in the Afanasyev tale corpus. (secondary)