The most popular fairy old women from different countries and their weird habits

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Almost every country has its own legendary witch or sorceress (and they say that in very, very old times, there was no difference between the first and the second). Sometimes scientists assume that they descended from ancient goddesses forgotten by all. Strength, wisdom, cunning and control of animals or the forces of nature - yes, these traits of fabulous witches make you think.

Baba Yaga

No one knows exactly where her name comes from, but it is clear that she was known to the ancient Slavs even before the adoption of Christianity. In fairy tales, everyone who is in her hut, she threatens that she will eat him now, but then she either lets herself be deceived, or helps the hero. She does not gird her clothes or tie her hair like a wild or crazy woman.

Baba Yaga flies in a huge mortar, she has an inanimate leg - bone, clay or gold, and sometimes even a sorceress daughter. She can give orders to forest animals, she has a lot of magical things, and the hero needs to lure them out or complete a difficult task for them. And sometimes she just gives them!

In the fairy tale about Baba Yaga and Vasilisa, the beautiful girl is sent directly to the witch by her stepmother and sisters, hoping that the witch will eat her. Baba Yaga agrees to take Vasilisa as a servant (and, possibly, a student), and then pays her with a skull, whose eyes are burning. The look of these eyes burns both the stepmother and the sisters, and what is interesting is that in other fairy tales the characters under the name "Vasilisa" are always sorceresses. Maybe they represent a collective image of the younger generation of witches who learned from their foremother?

In the Yaroslavl region there is a museum of Baba Yaga, and the Russian Orthodox Church really does not like it. But in Russia, Baba Yaga is so popular that they do not get tired of making her a character of modern literary and cinema fairy tales.

Frau Hall

We know Frau Hall as Mrs. Blizzard from translated German fairy tales. At the Brothers Grimm, a girl enters her service. When the girl shakes out the feather beds of her mistress, it snows on the ground. Frau Hall looks like an ugly old woman with long teeth. In the German lands, they loved her very much, and every village, next to which there was a mountain, claimed that it was on this mountain that their mistress Metelitsa lived.

Some researchers believe that "Hall" was the nickname of the German goddess Frigg, the patroness of women. Others trace the name of Mistress Blizzard to Hel herself, the goddess of the world of the dead - especially since you can get to Frau Hall by falling into a well. Such conclusions seem strange only to those who have read only one fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.

Researcher Heida Göttner-Abendroth found many stories with Frau Hall. In them, she not only controls the snow, but also drives the cold out of the earth in spring, teaches women to spin and weave, helps women in labor and takes the souls of unbaptized babies with her if the children die without having time to get a name. There is even a fairy tale where Frau Hall has her own source with baby souls - the souls of those babies who have yet to appear on earth!

On Christmastide, Frau Hall, just like Baba Yaga Pekhtra from the Slavic lands of Germany or the fairy Befana in Italy, checks who behaved well in the past year and who did badly. She also often experiences the kindness of people, appearing to them in the form of an old beggar. He rewards the good and punishes the evil. For example, it burns.

Yamauba

This name (although this name or title is not clear) literally means "Mountain Witch", and she lives in Japan. Like Baba Yaga, Yamauba is ugly, old, she walks in untidy clothes and with loose gray hair. In some fairy tales she has a huge mouth, from ear to ear, in others - two ordinary mouths next to each other.

Yamauba eats people, usually strangers. She can appear before them in her usual guise, posing as a helpless beggar, or turn into a beautiful girl. The traveler without fear follows the old woman or the girl into the hut, and there Yamauba fetters or binds his prey, fattens it and eats it.

Sometimes she is also hired as a guide through the mountains and throws the employer off the steep (this is probably what a good chop looks like in her mind). And in some fairy tales, her hair turns into poisonous snakes that bite prey.

The Yamauba diet also includes children. She steals them from under the noses of her parents. So Japanese parents always have someone to scare a naughty kid. As in Germany, in many places the inhabitants of Japanese villages claimed that it was on their mountain that Yamauba lived.

But the witch also has her weaknesses. For example, she cannot move during the day, and her soul is also stored in a flower. If someone destroys this flower, the witch will die.

Yamauba knows how to conjure and brew potions, she can share secret knowledge, but the price will be high: to bring someone to eat. But her image is not so unambiguous. You can find a plot with Yamauba raising a hero, and in a later interpretation she personifies the forces of nature and, perhaps, simply protects the forest from annoying people. However, it is better to sympathize with her from the outside.

Black Annis

This witch lives in a cave near the English city of Leicester. She looks like a one-eyed old woman, with very pale skin, long teeth and claws. With her claws she dug a cave for herself, and at the entrance she scrawled the inscription: "The abode of Black Annis." The oak under which the cave was dug is the last of a huge old grove. Annis crawls out from under him only at nightfall in order to lie in wait and catch some lonely traveler. Most of all, of course, she likes the tender meat of children. Parents used to say to their children: do not hang out on the street until dark, Black Annis will gobble up.

Previously, people were so afraid of Annis that in the houses near her cave in the walls they made only one tiny window, and then they hung it with amulets and magical herbs so that Annis would not stick her long arm and pick up the baby right from the cradle. When Annis could not find someone to eat for a long time, she howled so loudly and terribly that the peasants tried not to leave the hearths.

I must say that Annis not only eats her victims, but also fresh them. She then hangs up the skin to dry on the oak. Then she wears baby skins as belts. Strange, but such a frightening character is sometimes traced back to the Celtic mother goddess Dana. However, now they doubt that such a goddess existed.

By the way, why Baba Yaga is also a Bone Leg is understandable. And why is Lisa - Patrikeevna, and Serpent - Tugarin? How the fairytale characters actually got their nicknames - there are many interesting theories.