Gamayun
Slavic · numen · modern collection · numen
A bird with no legs and no wings that never stops flying is a heraldic description before it is a mythological one — the legless bird of paradise is a known figure of early modern European natural history, arriving in Europe as trade skins with the feet cut off — and the Russian books take it and give it a woman's head and the office of prophecy. The record states the description the sources give and does not rationalise it. Blok wrote the poem on Vasnetsov's Gamayun in 1899, which is how the image reached the twentieth century, but the bird is older than either.
Domains
- prophecy
- omens of death
Relations
Sources
- Reference treatments of Gamayun and of the Slavic bird-maidens.