Jarilo

Slavic · deity · mythic · deity

The weight on this record is medium and not high, and the reason is stated rather than hidden: there is no medieval text that tells this story. It is assembled in the twentieth century out of Croatian, Serbian and Russian spring songs by Katičić and Belaj, and what it reconstructs is a Common Slavic myth nobody wrote down. That is worth having in the registry — it is the single most developed reconstruction Slavic studies has produced — but it is worth having labelled. The registry's prior state was worse in both directions: it held Marzanna with no husband to murder, and it held the reconstructed abstractions Belobog and Chernobog with no label at all.

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