Episode 23 Dr. Francis Young and Lithuanian folklore

Did you know Lithuania was one of the last countries of the Baltic region to convert to Christianity from paganism. This makes its folk stories, and folklore one of the most exciting to folklorists and ethnographers because their tales, traditions, rituals and customs are the most closely aligned to the Baltic states’ ancient pagan practices. […]

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Welcome, buckaroos.

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Welcome. Welcome to Fabric of Folklore.

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I am your hostess, Vanessa y Rogers, and this is the podcast

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epic of folklore, where we unravel the mysteries of folklore.

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And what makes folklore so awesome is that our world is so full of mystery.

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And one of the ways that we fill the gaps is through story.

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Our stories are oral traditions.

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Our rituals are not without meaning.

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They help us to connect to that which we wish to better understand.

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And this podcast is about understanding the importance, significance

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and its context, which in turn helps us to understand our own motivations

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and our own culture, to address traditions as well as others.

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It’s easier to remove those judgmental lenses, those critical glasses.

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Once we viewed our own culture through quirks,

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through the strange, through the lens of strangers eyes.

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So that sounds like a podcast that you are interested in listening to.

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Please hit that subscribe button, whether that’s on your YouTube channel

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morning or afternoon, depending on where you are in the world.

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So today we have a fantastic guest.

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Frances Young is a UK based historian and folklorist

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specializing in the history of religion and belief.

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He is the author, editor or coeditor of 20 books,

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which deal with subjects as diverse as early modern Catholicism.

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The History of Exorcism, Medieval Monarchs, Magnetism

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and how you say that Word Mysticism, Monasticism,

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Folklore, The Cult of Saints,

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The History of Magic and Witchcraft and Baltic Paganism.

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He is also a professional indexer and a translator

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specializing in medieval and early modern Latin.

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So welcome, Francis.

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Thanks so much for joining us today.

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Thank you so much for inviting me.

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And I really like to get started

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and helping our guests understand the context

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of our helping our audience to understand the context of our guest.

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So can you give us a little bit of your journey into

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how you fell into the this

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a folkloric journey or historian?

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Jordan even?

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Yeah, well, my

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PhD was in more conventional areas,

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I suppose, of the history of religion,

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but it deviated all into looking at supernatural beliefs.

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And I came to realize that I’m interested really in belief in general.

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I’m not I can’t restrict what I’m interested in just to

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what might be considered religious history or church history.

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And I’m particularly interested what really draws me

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are beliefs that other people tend to consider to be outdated

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or obscure or absurd or superstitious, or

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things that are a bit out there

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and tend to be rejected as part of an older belief system.

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And so whereas I started really by looking at Catholicism

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in England after the Reformation, I’ve expanded out to look at other faiths,

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which kind of continue down to the surface of other societies.

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And so hence my interest in paganism in the Baltic area, for example.

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And why do you

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think that that drew your interest?

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Well, I have a longstanding connection with Lithuania in particular.

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I spent quite a bit of time there when I was a student and had

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lots of Lithuanian friends and learned some of the Lithuanian language.

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Not as much as I should have like.

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But yeah, it’s it’s a region which I already had a connection with.

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And so as I kind of became drawn into looking at these questions

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of what remains of paganism in that sort of early modern period,

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then really I was drawn to that region and because it’s

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well known, you know,

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if you speak to Lithuanian people, they will often say to you,

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My country was the last in Europe to be converted to Christianity

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as the last page in nation.

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And so it’s very much a part of that of that heritage.

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But I think it also

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it is true too, of Latvia and Estonia, the other Baltic nations.

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And so were.

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Well, let’s go back real quick.

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Why were you in Lithuania as a student?

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Well, I was I was really interested in Lithuania.

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I had two contacts that I made of people that I had met in the UK.

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He said, Well, come on, come back to Lithuania, come and see what it’s like.

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And so I ended up doing that.

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And so really this sort of will happen by accident.

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But what it did was establish the kind of connection with that country.

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Yeah, that makes sense.

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And I noticed that in your, your books that you’ve written that there’s

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quite a large diversity of topics that you you look at.

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Is there like a Common Core or is there kind of like how you,

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you learn about something and then it

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piques you’re interested in something else or how does that diversity of topics

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fall?

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Yes, there is a common thread and I think that there

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it is very much as you say, it’s kind of, you know,

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I wrote about one thing and that stimulates me

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then to get interested in something else and write about that.

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And yeah, I think the common thread is an interest in supernatural belief,

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and particularly in supernatural beliefs that are rejected or considered strange.

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So, you know, this is what draws me to,

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for example, exorcism beliefs in magic,

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belief in witchcraft, belief in fairies.

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You know, these things which there’s a long history of people and scholars

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scoffing at these things rather than actually studying them.

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And so that’s what, that’s what interests me.

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But also, yeah, also paganism, because again, that’s something

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which there’s a long history of that being treated as an anomaly.

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You know, people say

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their paganism survived in the Baltic for longer than elsewhere in Europe.

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Therefore it’s treated as this kind of relic that lingered on.

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It’s not given any agency, it’s

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not considered to be something which had any value in itself.

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It only has value insofar as, you know, Christianity is

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then allowed to replace it.

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So yeah, I wanted to sort of give a voice to

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believers who might

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not otherwise have any kind of voice.

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And can you remember, can you recall

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reading a topic and saying, Oh, that’s really strange, Like one of the very

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first things that really pique your interest in

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when you were doing your

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research, what was one of the very

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first things that you were like, Oh wow, that’s strange.

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I want to learn more about that.

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I think, yeah.

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What really drew me back to putting my attention back on Lithuania,

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you know, when I was originally in Estonia,

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I wasn’t particularly focused or interested in paganism.

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I wasn’t particularly interested in ancient Lithuanian history,

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but what really drew my focus back to it was I was asked to write a piece

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a few years ago about this question, which is often discussed

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among academics in the UK about pagan survivals.

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You know, to what extent can we say that in the Middle Ages there were elements

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of paganism that were surviving into people’s ordinary lives?

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And what I noticed was that nearly everything

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that had been written about this was focused on the UK.

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We’ll focus on Ireland, or possibly it might go as far afield as France.

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And this sort of made me a bit cross

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because I thought, well, actually that you do realize that there were people

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who consciously identified as pagan in medieval Europe.

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They just weren’t in the places that you want to read about.

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So they were people in Eastern Europe.

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And, and so that sort of made me think, well, actually, am I in a position here to

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increase knowledge of this region?

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Because I had been there,

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because I had this connection there, because I knew some of the language.

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And so I thought, well,

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you know, maybe maybe this is something that I should turn to

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and I should try and increase knowledge about this region.

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And that was what really produced that book.

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Eventually that came out last year, Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic,

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which is an attempt to translate some of the key sources

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from the sort of 15th and 16th centuries

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and make these available for the first time to an English speaking audience.

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Mm hmm.

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And how far did Paganism stretch?

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Well, it depends what period you’re talking about.

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I mean, if if we’re talking about Eastern Europe generally,

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there are early adopters of Christianity, So the Poles,

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early adopters of Christianity and of course the Slavs, the East Slavs.

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So those countries that we would now know as Russia, Belarus, Ukraine,

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they are fairly early adopters of Orthodox Christianity, but

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between those countries there are large swathes of pagan territory.

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One group of pagans on the West Slavs, that is to say, that’s sometimes

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referred to as the Palladian Slavs, sometimes referred to as the Wens.

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They occupied an area which is now partly in the territory

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of Poland, partly in what’s now eastern Germany.

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And they essentially give they essentially become the subject of a crusade.

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And as a result of that, Germans take over their lands and

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cities such as

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Leipzig spring up and take over those people.

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But then you’ve got people like the Prussians.

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So the bold studies to say people who are ethnically Baltic,

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they are the Prussians who live in an area which is now the Russian

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exclave of Kaliningrad, what used to be the old German King of Prussia,

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but was originally a Baltic kingdom.

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You’ve got the Lithuanians,

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you’ve got the Latvians, and you’ve got various now extinct peoples

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like the Indians and the Soviets, and all these people are a pagan

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until a fairly late date, certainly into the 13th century.

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And then you’ve got a cynic people, the Estonians,

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the Estonians or Finnish people, because they’re related

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to the Finns, they don’t speak of Baltic language.

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We talk today about Estonia as a Baltic state,

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but that’s a geographical designation.

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It’s not actually an ethnic or linguistic designation,

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but all these countries are taken to a late date.

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However, various crusading orders take over what’s now Kaliningrad,

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so that Prussian area, they take over what’s now Latvia and Estonia,

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which is then called Livonia,

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and the one country that holds out, the one country

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that refuses to adopt Christianity consistently is Lithuania.

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So Lithuania at this point is an absolutely massive

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country, much, much bigger than it is today.

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So it’s what’s now the territory of the Republic of Lithuania,

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plus Belarus, plus large parts of what’s now Ukraine,

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and also significant parts of what’s now western Russia.

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So it’s the largest country in Europe by far in the late Middle Ages.

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And it is officially pagan, although a lot of the population are also Christians.

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But the Grand Dukes of Lithuania are efficiently pagan,

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and they remain so until the late 14th century.

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So it is true to say

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that it’s the last state in Europe to be converted to Christianity.

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And how did that conversion happen?

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When did

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how did it occur?

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That’s a really good question.

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And it is a fascinating example of conversion because

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most conversions in this region take place as a result of military force.

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This one doesn’t and it’s in fact a power play, a political power

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play by one of the great objects of Lithuania called Gala.

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That’s the Lithuanian name, although he’s better known to history

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as Vladislav the second year, well, he’s

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Polish name and he becomes the progenitor of the colonial dynasty,

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a great dynasty of Polish Lithuanian kings.

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But you’re going to essentially finds himself in a position

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where he’s caught between great powers on either side of him.

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So he’s got the Orthodox

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principality of Muscovy.

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So that’s the state that eventually develops into Russia.

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But at this point it’s much smaller and that’s the major

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orthodox power in in northern Europe.

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He’s got the kingdom of Poland, which is Catholic,

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and he’s got the Teutonic Knights, who are a monastic military order,

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who are also Catholic but hate the poles and the Poles hate them back.

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So there’s sort of two flavors of Catholicism.

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And essentially he’s being pressed by the Teutonic Knights on one side,

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and he’s being pressed by the Muscovites on the other.

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At one point, his mother tries to marry him

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to a muscovite princess, but that doesn’t follow through.

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The Teutonic Knights want his land.

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They want to take particularly one one region seven issue away from him.

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He doesn’t want that to happen.

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And so in the end, he comes to a decision that the lesser of evils

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is to accept an offer that’s been made to him by the Poles that he should marry.

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Jadwiga Now Jadwiga is the heir of the King of Poland.

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In fact, she is the king of Poland.

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She has the title of King rather than the title of queen.

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And if he marries

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Jadwiga, he has been offered the crown of Poland.

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And not only that, but Poland and Lithuania

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would enter into some kind of union.

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Although exactly what kind of union is is unclear at this point.

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And so he accepts this.

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And of course, this means that he has to get baptized and he also has to promise

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that he will baptize his own nation, which he does within about two years.

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So priests are sent to Vilnius

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and the Lithuanians who are there are baptized in great cohorts.

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So they gather together in a kind of square formation,

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and a priest will go around with a thing called Mass Virgilio,

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which is like a holy water

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shaker, and will shake holy water all over all these people.

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And they’re all baptized at the same name, each person in these square formations.

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So it’s the most yes, it’s the most kind of surface conversion

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you could possibly imagine.

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And as you can imagine here,

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the Lithuanians don’t really, as a result of that, adopt Christianity.

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And in fact, it’s not until the late 18th century that we have real signs

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of Catholicism becoming something that the Lithuanians have truly internalized.

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And if truly they truly identify with Catholicism up to that point,

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there’s lots of evidence of Lithuanians continuing to worship

00:15:22:03 – 00:15:25:08
sacred trees, to worship sacred snakes and so forth.

00:15:25:08 – 00:15:28:24
So, yeah, paganism dies very, very hard in Lithuania.

00:15:29:14 – 00:15:32:21
So that’s about 400 years, is that correct?

00:15:32:21 – 00:15:35:21
From when they got converted to

00:15:35:21 – 00:15:39:06
when they actually start to believe it internally?

00:15:39:21 – 00:15:39:29
Yeah.

00:15:39:29 – 00:15:43:03
So 1387 is the official date of the conversion.

00:15:44:02 – 00:15:47:00
1413 for some, I guess you saw some.

00:15:47:00 – 00:15:48:21
I guess it was even later.

00:15:48:21 – 00:15:53:05
But yes, I mean you’re talking about, you know, when we start to see

00:15:53:26 – 00:15:57:00
real kind of force to Lithuanian Catholic

00:15:57:00 – 00:16:00:00
piety as something which is internalized.

00:16:00:04 – 00:16:02:15
Yeah. Sort of mid to late 18th century.

00:16:02:15 – 00:16:05:05
So yes, it is about it is about 400 years.

00:16:05:05 – 00:16:06:07
It takes.

00:16:06:07 – 00:16:09:04
Having said that, urban areas become Christianized

00:16:09:04 – 00:16:12:09
much earlier on, but it is these remote rural areas

00:16:12:24 – 00:16:15:03
where people still speak Lithuanian

00:16:15:03 – 00:16:17:17
that take a very long time to be Christianized, partly

00:16:17:17 – 00:16:20:17
because there aren’t that many priests who can speak Lithuanian,

00:16:20:20 – 00:16:22:26
there aren’t many missionaries, you can speak Lithuanian,

00:16:22:26 – 00:16:25:26
and these places are pretty hard to get to.

00:16:26:12 – 00:16:27:29
And then do

00:16:27:29 – 00:16:31:02
you still see remnants of pagan rituals

00:16:31:02 – 00:16:36:03
or traditions today, or are they pretty much gone?

00:16:38:15 – 00:16:41:15
I think it’s difficult to say.

00:16:42:06 – 00:16:45:06
Excuse me, it’s difficult to say

00:16:45:10 – 00:16:49:21
what can really be considered a remnant of of pagan ritual.

00:16:50:23 – 00:16:53:04
There are many Lithuanian customs

00:16:53:04 – 00:16:56:08
that continue today that have pagan origins.

00:16:57:01 – 00:17:00:01
They have been Christianized in various ways.

00:17:00:18 – 00:17:03:17
One good example would be,

00:17:03:17 – 00:17:07:04
you know, you’ve got a festival which is called religious or LDS.

00:17:07:23 – 00:17:10:29
This takes place late October, early November.

00:17:11:08 – 00:17:14:08
So around the time of All Hallows Eve, All Saints,

00:17:15:10 – 00:17:18:12
the time when in many European countries there’s a kind of commemoration

00:17:18:12 – 00:17:20:07
of the dead in Lithuania.

00:17:20:07 – 00:17:22:16
This is very intense.

00:17:22:16 – 00:17:25:18
So there are practices of inviting

00:17:25:18 – 00:17:29:01
the spirits of the dead into the home to feast with the living.

00:17:29:26 – 00:17:32:26
There are practices of sometimes dining

00:17:33:09 – 00:17:35:24
at the tomb of the deceased

00:17:35:24 – 00:17:40:15
and a real sense of the dead joining the community of the living

00:17:40:15 – 00:17:43:15
for that one night, which is over,

00:17:43:16 – 00:17:46:07
sounds very similar to the Day of the Dead.

00:17:46:07 – 00:17:47:15
Yes, Yes.

00:17:47:15 – 00:17:50:15
Sometimes it’s true as the Lithuanian Day of the Dead,

00:17:51:00 – 00:17:54:12
because I think if you want to find something of comparable intensity,

00:17:54:20 – 00:17:57:15
I think you do need to look at Central America.

00:17:57:15 – 00:18:00:01
Yeah. Things like the Day of the Dead

00:18:01:00 – 00:18:03:00
and yeah, it’s it’s more intense

00:18:03:00 – 00:18:06:00
than most of the things that you’ll find in Europe going on at that time.

00:18:06:19 – 00:18:09:18
So yeah, that’s, that’s certainly, you know pagan and I think

00:18:09:18 – 00:18:13:06
when you look at things like wood carving traditions so there’s a

00:18:14:01 – 00:18:17:23
well-established wood carving condition in Lithuania of pole carving.

00:18:18:08 – 00:18:22:07
And so statues that are essentially shaped

00:18:22:18 – 00:18:26:12
from a long, thin piece of wood, a pole like piece of wood.

00:18:27:08 – 00:18:32:09
And they tend now to have Christian themes that that tradition of pole carving

00:18:32:09 – 00:18:36:12
we know is something which develops the statues of pagan gods.

00:18:36:12 – 00:18:40:07
But it was transferred directly over to this,

00:18:40:13 – 00:18:43:13
you know, these these these kind of Christian symbols.

00:18:43:15 – 00:18:46:08
And, you know, in the same way when trees are cut down

00:18:46:08 – 00:18:49:08
in Lithuania, it’s enormously controversial.

00:18:49:15 – 00:18:50:21
You know, you’ll have people lighting

00:18:50:21 – 00:18:54:10
candles and holding vigils around trees that have been cut down.

00:18:54:18 – 00:18:55:15
That’s quite normal.

00:18:55:15 – 00:18:58:15
And, you know, a reverence for nature,

00:18:58:20 – 00:19:03:00
which I think is, again, you know, is is a is a trace of is a trace of this.

00:19:03:29 – 00:19:05:03
There are revivals

00:19:05:03 – 00:19:08:11
of Lithuanian traditional religion.

00:19:09:07 – 00:19:12:07
So Romeva is is probably the most famous example of this.

00:19:14:01 – 00:19:16:25
I think with with Rome over, though, it’s it’s important

00:19:16:25 – 00:19:20:09
to be aware that it is a revival and it’s an interpretation

00:19:21:01 – 00:19:24:15
and it’s something which developed sort of in the in the 1970s

00:19:24:27 – 00:19:27:22
as a particular approach to,

00:19:27:22 – 00:19:31:15
you know, one way of reconstructing Baltic traditional religion.

00:19:32:00 – 00:19:35:00
Latvia has its own version known as the opportunity.

00:19:36:22 – 00:19:39:14
But yes, I think there are quite a lot of scholars,

00:19:39:14 – 00:19:42:01
including myself, who would say that Rome offer

00:19:42:01 – 00:19:44:21
should be treated primarily as a new religion

00:19:44:21 – 00:19:49:14
rather than as a faithful scholarly reconstruction,

00:19:49:14 – 00:19:52:24
as we would now understand it of what the original Baltic religion was

00:19:54:00 – 00:19:56:21
and so tell us

00:19:56:21 – 00:20:00:04
a little bit about Lithuanian, because as an American,

00:20:00:04 – 00:20:04:15
I feel like my geography of that entire region is very fuzzy.

00:20:04:23 – 00:20:08:12
So geography, geography, culture, history, like I know you’ve

00:20:08:12 – 00:20:11:16
been telling us a bit about the history, but tell us about the people

00:20:11:26 – 00:20:16:17
and maybe a little bit about where Lithuania is situated

00:20:17:26 – 00:20:19:27
currently.

00:20:19:27 – 00:20:23:01
So contemporary Lithuania, the Republic of Lithuania

00:20:23:11 – 00:20:26:17
is a small country in Eastern Europe.

00:20:26:25 – 00:20:30:12
It is located on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea.

00:20:31:15 – 00:20:35:01
So the Baltic Sea, you’ve got, you know, on the western side

00:20:35:01 – 00:20:40:02
you’ve got Denmark and to the far north you’ve got Sweden and Finland.

00:20:40:10 – 00:20:43:06
And then if you go down a bit further onto the eastern side, then you’ve

00:20:43:06 – 00:20:47:07
got the three Baltic states and the three Baltic states.

00:20:47:07 – 00:20:51:10
The most northerly one is Estonia closest to Finland,

00:20:51:26 – 00:20:55:18
then going down to Latvia and then Lithuania.

00:20:55:18 – 00:20:58:24
So Lithuania is bordered to the north by Latvia

00:20:59:14 – 00:21:02:14
and to the south it’s bordered by Belarus

00:21:03:05 – 00:21:06:04
and it’s also bordered by Russia.

00:21:06:04 – 00:21:08:08
But to the west, which is confusing

00:21:08:08 – 00:21:10:06
because you might expect Russia to be the east,

00:21:10:06 – 00:21:14:04
but that’s because it’s bordered not by the mainland of Russia,

00:21:14:08 – 00:21:18:17
it’s bordered by that exclave of Russia that used to be Prussia.

00:21:19:21 – 00:21:22:21
So Kaliningrad Oblast is its name.

00:21:23:08 – 00:21:27:04
So yeah, Lithuania doesn’t have a border with with mainland Russia.

00:21:27:20 – 00:21:31:18
Lithuania in its recent history has been scarred

00:21:31:18 – 00:21:34:18
by the occupation by the Soviet Union.

00:21:35:11 – 00:21:40:06
So Lithuania declared its independence from the Russian Empire in 1918

00:21:40:06 – 00:21:44:07
and was an independent state between 1918 and 1940.

00:21:44:16 – 00:21:47:27
In 1940, it was invaded by the Soviet Union.

00:21:48:17 – 00:21:51:11
Then it was invaded under a year later

00:21:51:11 – 00:21:55:09
by Nazi Germany, and then it was invaded again by the Soviet Union.

00:21:55:10 – 00:21:58:10
It was occupied until 1990.

00:21:59:03 – 00:22:03:14
In fact, longer than 1990, 1990 was when Lithuania declared its independence.

00:22:03:23 – 00:22:08:00
Soviet troops finally withdrew in the early 1990,

00:22:08:20 – 00:22:11:20
but it has been an independent republic since 1990.

00:22:12:02 – 00:22:14:23
But the thing to bear in mind about the Republic of Lithuania

00:22:14:23 – 00:22:18:15
is that its territory is roughly corresponding to the area

00:22:18:15 – 00:22:21:15
that’s now inhabited by speakers of the Lithuanian language.

00:22:21:25 – 00:22:26:16
So it doesn’t actually correspond to what Lithuania has historically been.

00:22:27:02 – 00:22:29:20
Historically, Lithuania

00:22:29:20 – 00:22:33:00
was a much larger territory, as I’ve mentioned.

00:22:33:13 – 00:22:36:13
So we talk about an entity called the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

00:22:36:26 – 00:22:38:25
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was

00:22:39:26 – 00:22:40:19
the Lithuania.

00:22:40:19 – 00:22:41:13
We talk about today.

00:22:41:13 – 00:22:46:06
So the bit that speaks Lithuanian, but also the whole of Belarus

00:22:47:03 – 00:22:50:19
and large parts of Ukraine and bits of bits of western Russia as well.

00:22:51:22 – 00:22:54:22
So yeah, it’s a kind of it’s a historical accident

00:22:55:06 – 00:22:57:29
that Lithuania has significantly shrunk in size.

00:22:57:29 – 00:23:00:27
But on the other hand, yes, if we’re talking about Lithuania as a

00:23:00:27 – 00:23:03:29
as an ethnographic or linguistic region that does roughly

00:23:03:29 – 00:23:06:29
correspond to the territory of the present Republic of Lithuania,

00:23:07:24 – 00:23:09:29
And do they only have one language

00:23:09:29 – 00:23:12:29
in that country or there multiple languages.

00:23:13:01 – 00:23:17:11
So Lithuanian is by far the dominant language in this area.

00:23:18:06 – 00:23:21:15
Having said that, there is a very strong tradition

00:23:21:15 – 00:23:25:28
of speaking Polish in Lithuania, in parts of Lithuania, especially in Vilnius.

00:23:27:06 – 00:23:29:01
There are historical reasons

00:23:29:01 – 00:23:33:00
why the Polish minority sometimes are not very well treated in this way.

00:23:33:08 – 00:23:36:08
That goes back to the fact that a war was fought between

00:23:36:14 – 00:23:39:14
Lithuania and Poland in the early 20th century.

00:23:39:14 – 00:23:42:20
But yes, traditionally there is a great deal

00:23:42:20 – 00:23:44:25
of linguistic diversity, especially in Vilnius.

00:23:44:25 – 00:23:47:26
So if you go back to Vilnius at the beginning of the 20th century,

00:23:47:26 – 00:23:52:12
Vilnius was a Polish speaking city with with Lithuanian speakers,

00:23:52:23 – 00:23:55:23
with Belarusian speakers, with Russian speakers,

00:23:56:03 – 00:24:00:02
and most importantly, with a lot of Yiddish speakers.

00:24:00:20 – 00:24:03:23
Vilnius was a hugely, hugely important

00:24:04:03 – 00:24:07:05
Jewish city, the most important Jewish city of northern Europe.

00:24:07:23 – 00:24:11:05
Sometimes spoken of as the Jerusalem of the north

00:24:12:05 – 00:24:13:27
with a massive Jewish population.

00:24:13:27 – 00:24:17:28
And so it’s impossible to talk about this in 20th century history

00:24:17:28 – 00:24:23:00
without acknowledging that the Holocaust destroyed Lithuania’s

00:24:23:00 – 00:24:28:09
ancient Jewish community and removed that part of the country’s history.

00:24:28:22 – 00:24:30:09
So that’s one of the,

00:24:30:09 – 00:24:33:15
you know, the great tragedies of 20th century Lithuanian history.

00:24:34:07 – 00:24:37:07
Do they still have a large Jewish community there?

00:24:37:17 – 00:24:39:07
There is a small Jewish community, yeah.

00:24:39:07 – 00:24:42:25
But it’s it’s not a name like it was know

00:24:44:04 – 00:24:46:00
what would you say

00:24:46:00 – 00:24:48:20
sets it apart from its neighboring countries.

00:24:48:20 – 00:24:50:26
What what makes it unique?

00:24:50:26 – 00:24:53:05
What drew you to it?

00:24:53:05 – 00:24:56:05
Well, there’s only two Baltic countries in the world,

00:24:56:12 – 00:24:59:22
that is to say, countries that are ethnically and linguistically Baltic,

00:25:00:03 – 00:25:01:22
and that’s Lithuania and Latvia,

00:25:01:22 – 00:25:05:10
the Lithuanian and Latvian languages are quite closely related.

00:25:05:27 – 00:25:08:27
They share a lot of vocabulary, a lot of similarities.

00:25:09:01 – 00:25:13:11
And the Baltic languages are very popular among linguists.

00:25:14:03 – 00:25:17:20
And the reason for that is that they are notoriously archaic.

00:25:17:26 – 00:25:20:22
They belong to the Indo European language group

00:25:20:22 – 00:25:26:01
and they preserve features of Indo European, which a lot of linguists

00:25:26:01 – 00:25:29:18
say can be linked back to what’s known as Proto-Indo-European.

00:25:29:27 – 00:25:33:06
So Proto-Indo-European is the hypothesized language

00:25:33:18 – 00:25:37:07
that all of the ancestors

00:25:37:07 – 00:25:40:29
of Indo European languages that are spoken today.

00:25:40:29 – 00:25:44:20
So everything from Western, you know, from the west of Ireland

00:25:44:29 – 00:25:49:23
all the way through to India and Iran and, you know, the steps of of

00:25:50:01 – 00:25:53:03
of Central Asia where Indo European languages are spoken,

00:25:53:26 – 00:25:55:05
they trace their origins back

00:25:55:05 – 00:25:58:24
to Steppe, people who probably lived in what’s now Ukraine.

00:25:59:05 – 00:26:03:14
And so one of the first places that these people might have come to is Lithuania.

00:26:04:09 – 00:26:07:10
And it’s what seems to have happened is that the people in Lithuania,

00:26:07:10 – 00:26:11:25
the Indo-European speakers, kept their language very much intact.

00:26:11:25 – 00:26:16:11
So, yes, it has changed, but it’s changed a lot less than other languages.

00:26:16:11 – 00:26:19:24
And so there’s a long tradition of linguists studying

00:26:19:24 – 00:26:23:01
Lithuanian, even though Lithuanian only has about 3 million speakers.

00:26:23:03 – 00:26:28:04
It’s a pretty small language globally speaking, but it’s a hugely important

00:26:28:04 – 00:26:32:12
language and very, very well known among among linguists.

00:26:33:13 – 00:26:34:27
And there’s

00:26:34:27 – 00:26:38:07
a lot of discussion about whether, if Lithuanian

00:26:38:19 – 00:26:41:11
preserved this language intact from a very,

00:26:41:11 – 00:26:45:06
very early period, this very conservative, very obscure and archaic language,

00:26:45:23 – 00:26:51:03
could it be that Lithuania also preserved beliefs, folklore, mythology

00:26:51:12 – 00:26:55:13
that can be traced back to this Indo-European original culture?

00:26:55:23 – 00:26:58:23
And that’s a more controversial question. Hmm.

00:26:59:26 – 00:27:00:18
Interesting.

00:27:00:18 – 00:27:05:12
So what is so you said the Indo European language.

00:27:05:12 – 00:27:07:01
Is that what you were saying?

00:27:07:01 – 00:27:12:00
Is that what first European languages and what is so

00:27:14:11 – 00:27:15:04
special about it?

00:27:15:04 – 00:27:18:04
Why are linguists so interested in learning about that?

00:27:19:06 – 00:27:24:14
Well, Indo European is the supergroup, if you like, that many European languages

00:27:24:14 – 00:27:27:22
belong to in fact all European languages, apart

00:27:27:22 – 00:27:30:22
from Hungarian and Finnish

00:27:31:26 – 00:27:33:09
and Basque.

00:27:33:09 – 00:27:36:02
So all the other European languages belong to that.

00:27:36:02 – 00:27:39:13
So the Germanic languages, of which English is a member,

00:27:39:20 – 00:27:43:06
the romance languages spring from the Latin, Greek,

00:27:44:07 – 00:27:47:06
all of the the Slavic languages,

00:27:47:06 – 00:27:50:06
all of the languages of Eastern Europe, apart from Hungarian,

00:27:50:15 – 00:27:53:13
they all come from Indo European,

00:27:53:13 – 00:27:58:18
as does Farsi, the language of Iran and also Sanskrit

00:27:58:18 – 00:28:02:28
and in fact Urdu and Hindi, the main languages of India.

00:28:03:18 – 00:28:07:15
So it’s a hugely important language group and if we can therefore

00:28:07:15 – 00:28:11:14
use Lithuanian to try and reconstruct what the original version of

00:28:11:14 – 00:28:14:19
that language might have looked like, that makes Lithuanian very important.

00:28:14:19 – 00:28:17:19
So that’s been going on for about almost 200 years now.

00:28:18:02 – 00:28:21:19
These attempts to reconstruct the original Indo-European language

00:28:21:19 – 00:28:24:19
based on Lithuanian.

00:28:26:01 – 00:28:26:10
Okay.

00:28:26:10 – 00:28:30:19
Yes, that’s that’s a quote I actually had written down that I was going to say.

00:28:30:27 – 00:28:32:09
That was from your chapter.

00:28:32:09 – 00:28:32:29
It should be noted,

00:28:32:29 – 00:28:37:02
however, that the Lithuanian and Latvian nation states are the last survivors of

00:28:37:07 – 00:28:41:09
what were once many Baltic nations and people stretching from the Vistula

00:28:41:09 – 00:28:44:16
to what is now Moscow Oblast of the Russian Federation.

00:28:44:16 – 00:28:48:16
These people spoke Indo European languages of a notable archaic character

00:28:48:24 – 00:28:52:16
in some of these extinct Baltic people, such as Persians and Nigerians,

00:28:52:17 – 00:28:54:16
not driven Libyans

00:28:54:16 – 00:28:58:05
survive long enough for those folkloric customs to be recorded by early modern.

00:28:58:10 – 00:29:00:18
So you basically covered that entire

00:29:01:17 – 00:29:04:14
quote that I had written down for you, too, to talk about.

00:29:04:14 – 00:29:04:28
Perfect.

00:29:04:28 – 00:29:11:12
And so but you mentioned how they were invaded quite frequently.

00:29:11:20 – 00:29:16:19
How were they able to prevent these influences of other languages

00:29:16:28 – 00:29:20:07
when they had so many people coming and taking them

00:29:20:07 – 00:29:23:07
over multiple times?

00:29:23:07 – 00:29:25:15
I think it’s mainly a matter of geography

00:29:25:15 – 00:29:28:13
because what tended to happen

00:29:28:13 – 00:29:32:09
during the Middle Ages is that the enemies of the Lithuanians,

00:29:32:09 – 00:29:36:18
so that the Teutonic Knights, for example, they would have a stomach campaign

00:29:36:22 – 00:29:38:17
and they would come down the river Tumulus,

00:29:38:17 – 00:29:41:17
which is an enormous river that runs down the middle of Lithuania.

00:29:42:05 – 00:29:44:15
And they would, you know, seize territory.

00:29:44:15 – 00:29:47:15
But the this territory is densely wooded.

00:29:48:08 – 00:29:50:06
It’s very marshy.

00:29:50:06 – 00:29:52:07
It’s it’s impassable.

00:29:52:07 – 00:29:55:07
It’s not land which it’s easy to hold on to.

00:29:55:08 – 00:29:57:22
And in fact, this one very much point holding on to that.

00:29:57:22 – 00:30:00:22
And so it tended to be that the land was just

00:30:00:28 – 00:30:03:28
impossible to hold for any length of time.

00:30:03:28 – 00:30:06:28
And so the Lithuanians would just keep coming back and taking it back.

00:30:07:15 – 00:30:10:15
And so, yeah, it becomes

00:30:10:15 – 00:30:13:22
an unattractive prospect, really, for for invasion.

00:30:15:26 – 00:30:17:01
That makes sense.

00:30:17:01 – 00:30:21:09
So let’s get to the topic of the supernatural beings in Lithuania.

00:30:21:28 – 00:30:24:28
So tell us about these very light creatures.

00:30:26:00 – 00:30:29:18
Yes, well, Lithuania’s most fairy like creatures,

00:30:29:18 – 00:30:33:09
I suppose that the ones that could be compared to the fairies of

00:30:33:18 – 00:30:37:00
of Northern Europe and right, as you said in the book, that they

00:30:37:01 – 00:30:40:06
there’s very lots of different versions of them, but

00:30:40:06 – 00:30:44:21
it translates to fairy, which is sometimes conventionally,

00:30:45:00 – 00:30:48:00
conventionally the word that is translated as fairy

00:30:48:00 – 00:30:51:00
in Lithuania, the word alamy.

00:30:51:03 – 00:30:54:29
Now the lawmakers are yeah, they have certain features

00:30:54:29 – 00:30:59:10
that we could certainly recognize as being fairy like they’re always female,

00:30:59:21 – 00:31:02:21
which of course is not always true of fairies elsewhere in Europe.

00:31:03:18 – 00:31:08:01
They are beautiful, usually beautiful, although they can also be very ugly

00:31:08:01 – 00:31:12:21
and have features like the claws and feet of birds and so forth.

00:31:12:28 – 00:31:15:10
But they generally appear as very beautiful young women

00:31:16:14 – 00:31:17:26
with exaggerated features.

00:31:17:26 – 00:31:21:02
So they’re supposed to have sort of exaggeratedly large breasts, for example.

00:31:21:13 – 00:31:24:02
And another thing too, that makes them very fairy like is

00:31:24:02 – 00:31:27:02
that they have a tendency to abduct children.

00:31:27:23 – 00:31:31:22
They’re also associated with water, with lakes and with rivers,

00:31:32:03 – 00:31:34:24
and they’re associated with hills and mountains.

00:31:34:24 – 00:31:37:24
Again, very much fairy like features.

00:31:38:26 – 00:31:41:26
They are what I would describe as nature’s spirits

00:31:42:05 – 00:31:45:19
or sort of small gods of nature in that they are

00:31:46:04 – 00:31:50:21
yeah, they are associated with the forest, they’re associated with the outdoors.

00:31:51:06 – 00:31:54:28
They don’t like some of the spirits in Lithuanian folklore.

00:31:55:07 – 00:31:58:06
They don’t make their homes in people’s houses.

00:31:58:06 – 00:32:01:14
So they are they are not domestic fairies.

00:32:01:14 – 00:32:04:18
They are very much kind of fairies of, of the wild.

00:32:05:17 – 00:32:08:18
But like other fairies that we find in Europe,

00:32:09:08 – 00:32:12:23
they have an almost exaggerated sense of justice.

00:32:13:17 – 00:32:15:08
So they they exact

00:32:16:08 – 00:32:17:07
justice on

00:32:17:07 – 00:32:20:07
people, which seems to be of an exaggerated character.

00:32:20:08 – 00:32:23:08
So a classic story about the llamas

00:32:23:25 – 00:32:27:22
is that they like helping people who are genuinely in need.

00:32:28:11 – 00:32:31:29
And if someone is genuinely in need, particularly women,

00:32:33:03 – 00:32:36:16
if women are spinning and they run out of wool,

00:32:37:03 – 00:32:41:19
then they might give them additional wool too to help finish their spinning.

00:32:41:19 – 00:32:44:19
But one classic tale that is told is that

00:32:44:25 – 00:32:49:02
a woman is jealous of another woman who’s been helped by the llamas.

00:32:49:02 – 00:32:55:12
And so she says, Oh, llamas, help me to spend my flax and the llamas.

00:32:55:12 – 00:32:58:23
When she runs out of flax, they decide to use her intestines

00:32:59:02 – 00:33:02:03
in order to finish the spinning because she didn’t really need that help

00:33:02:12 – 00:33:05:23
but was greedy and jealous and wanted to help and that kind of thing.

00:33:06:00 – 00:33:08:15
That happens a lot in European folklore.

00:33:08:15 – 00:33:10:24
So, you know, you mess with the fairies

00:33:12:05 – 00:33:13:20
too. If you make a

00:33:13:20 – 00:33:17:04
request of them and you don’t really deserve their help,

00:33:17:17 – 00:33:21:09
then in a word betide you something really bad is going to happen to you.

00:33:21:09 – 00:33:24:03
But but they’re not generally nasty.

00:33:24:03 – 00:33:24:15
So, you know,

00:33:24:15 – 00:33:29:02
when they abduct children, it’s because they really, really like children.

00:33:29:09 – 00:33:30:15
They like looking after them

00:33:30:15 – 00:33:34:07
so they don’t kill or harm the children that they abduct.

00:33:35:03 – 00:33:37:19
So they are I wouldn’t describe them as benevolent beings,

00:33:37:19 – 00:33:40:19
but they are morally ambivalent beings.

00:33:40:22 – 00:33:43:22
You might give you help, but certainly are not to be messed with.

00:33:44:05 – 00:33:48:16
And so when they abduct children, do they switch them out?

00:33:48:16 – 00:33:52:28
Like in European stories of changelings, or is it just a pure abduction?

00:33:53:21 – 00:33:56:21
No, that doesn’t seem to be the changeling tradition.

00:33:57:11 – 00:33:59:24
So, no, there isn’t

00:33:59:24 – 00:34:02:22
the sense that the Lao maids can’t have children themselves

00:34:02:22 – 00:34:07:10
and so that they envy human women for being able to have children.

00:34:07:10 – 00:34:13:10
And so they they take children and the classic story is that the child is

00:34:13:10 – 00:34:18:16
found kind of being admired by the llamas, by the side of a lake or a river,

00:34:20:04 – 00:34:23:03
and eventually the llama is can be persuaded to return the child.

00:34:23:03 – 00:34:25:27
But now there isn’t that sort of

00:34:25:27 – 00:34:27:13
ugly changeling tradition

00:34:27:13 – 00:34:30:13
because the llamas certainly aren’t ugly beings.

00:34:30:25 – 00:34:33:25
So, no, it’s not quite the same as the

00:34:33:26 – 00:34:36:26
the changeling tradition that you find in Ireland, for example.

00:34:37:24 – 00:34:40:26
And this is justice element.

00:34:40:26 – 00:34:46:18
You said it is similar or it’s more drastic in Lithuania.

00:34:48:05 – 00:34:49:24
I don’t think it’s necessarily more drastic.

00:34:49:24 – 00:34:53:09
I mean, yet this particular story

00:34:53:18 – 00:34:57:22
about yachts being used for weaving, that seems to be distinctively Australian,

00:34:58:05 – 00:35:00:24
but certainly the idea that the fairies are very,

00:35:00:24 – 00:35:04:09
very keen on justice and do not like being messed around,

00:35:04:20 – 00:35:08:09
that’s something that we find throughout European folklore.

00:35:08:27 – 00:35:11:27
And another thing to say about the llamas is that they are

00:35:11:27 – 00:35:15:25
they are closely linked to another being with quite a similar name.

00:35:16:11 – 00:35:18:09
Who are the limes?

00:35:18:09 – 00:35:20:19
And the limes are a bit like the fates.

00:35:20:19 – 00:35:25:09
So the moiré that you find in in, in Roman and Greek

00:35:25:19 – 00:35:28:15
mythology, or the Normans in Norse mythology,

00:35:28:15 – 00:35:32:12
and they are three sisters of fate, three sisters

00:35:32:12 – 00:35:37:14
who determine the beginning of life and the and the end of life.

00:35:37:28 – 00:35:40:27
And the lot the limb is that

00:35:40:27 – 00:35:43:27
they’re closely linked to, you know, the

00:35:45:03 – 00:35:47:18
the word limey in Lithuanian

00:35:47:18 – 00:35:51:27
it means these beings that it also means happiness or good fortune.

00:35:52:24 – 00:35:55:24
And so yeah they kind of

00:35:56:02 – 00:35:59:02
they might appear at the birth of a child.

00:36:00:01 – 00:36:02:23
The typical story is that the child is born

00:36:02:23 – 00:36:07:20
and the mother and father hear three women talking outside the window.

00:36:07:20 – 00:36:11:08
And it turns out that they they’re not just they’re not human women.

00:36:11:08 – 00:36:14:08
They are the linemates who are deciding the fate

00:36:14:12 – 00:36:17:03
of that child and what that fate is supposed to be.

00:36:17:03 – 00:36:19:04
But they also a dark side.

00:36:19:04 – 00:36:22:05
So, for example, they are bring as a plague.

00:36:23:01 – 00:36:27:20
When there’s a rainbow in the sky, the rainbow is known as lime is.

00:36:27:20 – 00:36:30:21
You will see that in the onion, which means lime a sash.

00:36:31:12 – 00:36:34:11
And it is in fact a sign of the plague.

00:36:34:11 – 00:36:36:21
It’s a sign that plague is is on its way.

00:36:37:24 – 00:36:40:24
This other interesting consequence in the Lithuanian community, in the

00:36:40:24 – 00:36:45:22
in the UK during the COVID 19 pandemic, because rainbows

00:36:45:29 – 00:36:49:09
were widely adopted in the UK as a symbol of hope during the pandemic.

00:36:49:26 – 00:36:52:15
And lots of Lithuanians were looking at this and laughing

00:36:52:15 – 00:36:56:24
behind their hands because the rainbow is a symbol of plague in Lithuania.

00:36:56:24 – 00:37:01:06
So to put that up during a pandemic was darkly funny,

00:37:01:06 – 00:37:04:06
I think, to to look at this time.

00:37:04:23 – 00:37:09:21
And so, yeah, that lie may and allow may sometimes get confused.

00:37:10:01 – 00:37:11:14
Sometimes they fight each other.

00:37:11:14 – 00:37:15:00
The line is an alarmist, which indicates that maybe the limits

00:37:15:00 – 00:37:18:00
are more about the good fortune

00:37:18:10 – 00:37:21:04
and the lawmakers are more about justice.

00:37:21:04 – 00:37:22:23
They’re more about kind of ensuring

00:37:22:23 – 00:37:26:18
that everybody gets their just desserts, whereas the law remains about, you know,

00:37:26:21 – 00:37:29:23
some people are more fortunate than others and allow mates don’t like that.

00:37:29:23 – 00:37:33:00
But yeah, it’s difficult to say why they have that relationship.

00:37:33:03 – 00:37:35:13
But other times that, you know, they’re confused.

00:37:35:13 – 00:37:39:15
As loud as you all still limits us to depends which regeneration

00:37:40:04 – 00:37:44:11
they might be referred to differently in relation to different beings.

00:37:46:02 – 00:37:46:19
And you

00:37:46:19 – 00:37:50:13
said that they’re similar to the fates, for instance,

00:37:50:20 – 00:37:53:23
the three sisters, the, the limes.

00:37:54:23 – 00:37:56:15
Are they,

00:37:56:15 – 00:37:59:15
is that similar to like a goddess?

00:38:00:12 – 00:38:05:18
Yes. So it’s in the earliest references that we find to the limes,

00:38:06:10 – 00:38:09:10
we actually have a reference to a singular goddess, Lima.

00:38:09:27 – 00:38:12:23
And in Latvia, that’s a tradition that’s preserved.

00:38:12:23 – 00:38:15:23
So the idea that lime is a singular goddess,

00:38:17:10 – 00:38:19:04
a goddess of fate,

00:38:19:04 – 00:38:22:06
and it may well be that that was the original tradition.

00:38:22:14 – 00:38:25:14
So some scholars have said that

00:38:25:18 – 00:38:29:26
the sort of trip location that you find in life in Lima,

00:38:30:08 – 00:38:34:24
Lima, is a result of classical influence or the influence

00:38:35:00 – 00:38:36:20
of learned Christian preaches.

00:38:36:20 – 00:38:40:01
You said, oh, you know, you’re your goddess of fate, Lima.

00:38:40:09 – 00:38:42:01
She’s like the fates.

00:38:42:01 – 00:38:43:29
She’s like the Moiré.

00:38:43:29 – 00:38:46:24
And then you have Lithuanians projecting

00:38:46:24 – 00:38:50:23
onto that a later tradition of three sisters.

00:38:50:23 – 00:38:52:20
Because it’s interesting that we don’t find the tradition

00:38:52:20 – 00:38:55:02
of the three sisters in Latvia, but we do in Lithuania.

00:38:55:02 – 00:39:00:02
And you would expect that the mythology of those two countries would be cognate,

00:39:00:02 – 00:39:03:06
that it would be very, very closely related because they are culturally,

00:39:03:06 – 00:39:07:23
ethnically, linguistically, you know, very, very closely intertwined.

00:39:09:04 – 00:39:11:06
But you don’t know.

00:39:11:06 – 00:39:14:06
So it may well be that it was originally one goddess.

00:39:14:26 – 00:39:18:03
Interesting and is interesting, but which one is it

00:39:18:03 – 00:39:21:03
that is represented differently in different stories?

00:39:21:18 – 00:39:26:07
For instance, like the Witch or hags that can shapeshift into magpies?

00:39:26:22 – 00:39:27:11
Yes, that’s right.

00:39:27:11 – 00:39:31:15
I think this is almost certainly a later development.

00:39:31:27 – 00:39:35:15
So a kind of post conversion development and I think

00:39:35:23 – 00:39:38:28
related possibly to witch trials.

00:39:39:13 – 00:39:44:09
So there are various witch trials that take place in Lithuania where yeah,

00:39:44:26 – 00:39:49:14
that there are the words used for witch in Lithuanian.

00:39:49:27 – 00:39:52:27
The classic word is Lagana

00:39:52:27 – 00:39:54:15
and witchcraft.

00:39:54:15 – 00:39:56:00
These that I got involved in this that thing

00:39:56:00 – 00:39:59:17
which is done by regard but regardless originally a forest goddess

00:40:01:00 – 00:40:06:10
and it seems that at times other goddesses are also kind of blamed

00:40:06:10 – 00:40:10:29
for witchcraft or are kind of identified with the kind of the archetypal witch.

00:40:11:14 – 00:40:13:02
And one of those is

00:40:14:12 – 00:40:15:27
the llamas.

00:40:15:27 – 00:40:18:10
So occasionally we do find this idea of the llama

00:40:18:10 – 00:40:21:18
as a kind of monsters witch, but a non-human witch.

00:40:22:00 – 00:40:25:08
So the comparison I would make is with Baba Yaga

00:40:25:18 – 00:40:30:11
in in Slavic mythology in the hag,

00:40:31:16 – 00:40:34:16
a non-human witch, a monstrous witch.

00:40:35:05 – 00:40:38:06
And can you tell us a story, a folktale about

00:40:39:15 – 00:40:41:19
the Lithuanian version?

00:40:41:19 – 00:40:44:19
Well, the one that’s best that there aren’t any really kind of

00:40:44:22 – 00:40:48:25
developed folktales about Lao Mei in this kind of monsters form.

00:40:48:25 – 00:40:50:29
But the one that’s that’s best known is the idea

00:40:50:29 – 00:40:55:03
that she can turn herself into a magpie, or that when you see a magpie

00:40:55:24 – 00:40:58:07
that it is kind of llama in disguise.

00:40:58:07 – 00:41:02:16
And that may explain the kind of the idea of her having birds, having bird feet.

00:41:02:29 – 00:41:06:10
But yeah, you do find these kind of debased versions of legends in which she’s

00:41:06:10 – 00:41:10:09
this kind of monstrous child stealer, but they’re quite few and far between.

00:41:10:09 – 00:41:13:10
And I think it’s quite clear this is not the original tradition.

00:41:14:03 – 00:41:17:03
This is not the way that that llama is normally seen.

00:41:17:03 – 00:41:21:16
It’s almost like an attempt to try and make her as yeah,

00:41:21:20 – 00:41:25:17
maybe Christian preachers wanted her to be as this kind of monstrous

00:41:26:00 – 00:41:29:08
creature to be totally rejected and demonized.

00:41:30:00 – 00:41:32:08
But no, I don’t I don’t think that’s really

00:41:32:08 – 00:41:36:00
that doesn’t have I haven’t really taken root in Lithuanian folk tradition.

00:41:37:03 – 00:41:37:13
So when

00:41:37:13 – 00:41:40:13
people see magpies, are they frightened of them?

00:41:40:19 – 00:41:43:19
Do they have an association with them?

00:41:43:19 – 00:41:46:12
I think these days, no, I think yeah.

00:41:46:12 – 00:41:50:06
In, in by the 19th century I think these kind of things have become

00:41:50:06 – 00:41:54:20
emptied of any kind of threat that they might have originally had.

00:41:55:18 – 00:41:58:18
So yeah, now it’s more, it’s more the sense that,

00:41:58:29 – 00:42:02:25
you know, the Magpie might be a reference because it could be, you know,

00:42:02:25 – 00:42:04:09
it could be one of these supernatural

00:42:04:09 – 00:42:08:12
beings in disguise, a bit like you find in, in Ireland.

00:42:08:12 – 00:42:08:17
You know,

00:42:08:17 – 00:42:12:11
the sense that whenever you see a hair, you should treat it with with respect

00:42:12:11 – 00:42:16:25
because it could be a it could be a witch has transformed herself into a performer.

00:42:16:25 – 00:42:19:09
It could be a fairy has been formed herself with the hair forms.

00:42:19:09 – 00:42:22:09
So it’s a similar kind of similar kind of thing.

00:42:22:14 – 00:42:24:09
So be respectful. Yes.

00:42:25:16 – 00:42:26:10
Okay.

00:42:26:10 – 00:42:28:04
And when did these witch trials occur?

00:42:28:04 – 00:42:31:26
Was it at the same time as the Salem Witch trials that were happening

00:42:31:26 – 00:42:36:16
in the United States, or were they a little bit earlier than Salem?

00:42:36:16 – 00:42:40:11
So Salem is 6090s, but this is happening in this.

00:42:40:15 – 00:42:43:15
Yeah, between the sort of 1620s and 1650s.

00:42:44:04 – 00:42:47:24
So this is Yeah, there is a, there is a statute in Lithuania which

00:42:47:24 – 00:42:52:13
which prosecutes witchcraft and yeah, there are a number of witchcraft,

00:42:52:19 – 00:42:56:14
there’s nothing quite as intense as what you see in Germany.

00:42:57:01 – 00:43:00:07
You know this, there aren’t, there aren’t thousands of people

00:43:00:10 – 00:43:03:24
who are put to death for witchcraft, but there is a tension,

00:43:04:12 – 00:43:07:27
a directed towards people who are accused of witchcraft.

00:43:07:27 – 00:43:12:01
And occasionally you will get folk beliefs that are mentioned as part of this.

00:43:12:14 – 00:43:16:18
But in Lithuania, it’s not as intense as it was in Latvia or Estonia,

00:43:16:18 – 00:43:21:18
because in Latvia and Estonia, these areas are essentially under colonial control.

00:43:22:15 – 00:43:26:23
So in Latvia, in Estonia, which is then known as Livonia,

00:43:27:20 – 00:43:31:24
you’ve got an aristocracy who are German or Swedish speaking

00:43:32:03 – 00:43:36:00
and those German and Swedish speaking aristocrats have peasants and serfs

00:43:36:09 – 00:43:39:25
on their estates who speak Latvian and Estonian, and often

00:43:39:25 – 00:43:41:07
all in a very rudimentary

00:43:41:07 – 00:43:44:07
in their understanding of Christianity and their commitment to Christianity.

00:43:44:13 – 00:43:49:16
And so, yeah, witchcraft accusations are very much used as a kind of a way

00:43:49:16 – 00:43:53:26
to get these people into the church and, you know, weaponized against these.

00:43:54:20 – 00:43:57:27
But the thing about Lithuania is it’s it’s not under colonial control.

00:43:58:08 – 00:44:01:08
Your, you know, your landowners,

00:44:01:09 – 00:44:05:03
they spoke Polish, but most of them

00:44:05:03 – 00:44:08:26
trace their ancestry and their descent to ancient Lithuanian families.

00:44:09:07 – 00:44:13:23
So when they encounter, you know, local people believing old fashioned things,

00:44:14:19 – 00:44:17:19
they generally will just say, oh, well, you know, they’re just old Lithuanians,

00:44:17:28 – 00:44:19:18
they’re just the old believers.

00:44:19:18 – 00:44:20:25
They’re just a bit backward

00:44:22:06 – 00:44:23:12
slack.

00:44:23:12 – 00:44:26:18
So the, you know, the response is not, you know,

00:44:27:09 – 00:44:30:09
condemnatory or or genocidal because you know that they

00:44:30:09 – 00:44:33:09
are they belong to the same people that their own people,

00:44:33:10 – 00:44:34:07
where you’ve got

00:44:34:07 – 00:44:38:01
this kind of colonial dynamic that’s going on in Latvia and Estonia,

00:44:38:01 – 00:44:42:17
which makes it much, much more challenging to these kind of beliefs to survive.

00:44:43:20 – 00:44:45:28
MM That makes sense.

00:44:45:28 – 00:44:49:11
And so let’s, let’s talk about the newborns.

00:44:49:29 – 00:44:52:24
You said it was a common folk tale

00:44:52:24 – 00:44:55:24
or story for the

00:44:56:20 – 00:44:59:20
looms to the to do the kidnaping.

00:45:00:01 – 00:45:02:09
Yeah. Right.

00:45:02:09 – 00:45:04:23
And and and you said so

00:45:04:23 – 00:45:07:23
talk a little bit about this like was is this

00:45:08:12 – 00:45:10:26
where did this belief come from.

00:45:10:26 – 00:45:13:26
Were there children being kidnaped

00:45:13:26 – 00:45:18:28
frequently or how did this this folk tale occur?

00:45:18:28 – 00:45:21:08
What did what does the literature say?

00:45:21:08 – 00:45:24:27
I think this is one situation where it does seem

00:45:24:27 – 00:45:27:29
that the folklore is fairly universal,

00:45:28:27 – 00:45:33:08
not because there was necessarily any influence between an across cultures,

00:45:33:26 – 00:45:37:17
but because something which every pre-industrial

00:45:37:19 – 00:45:42:21
society has to deal with is the incidence of infant mortality

00:45:43:20 – 00:45:45:29
and to to to process that.

00:45:45:29 – 00:45:50:18
And it seems that the changeling story, the the fairy abduction story

00:45:51:03 – 00:45:52:25
is something which you find in the ancient world.

00:45:52:25 – 00:45:55:25
You find a figure called Lamia.

00:45:56:01 – 00:46:00:13
And in fact there have even been proposals that Lama and Lamia could have some kind

00:46:00:13 – 00:46:03:13
of etymological link, although I’m not entirely convinced by that.

00:46:03:21 – 00:46:04:10
But the media

00:46:04:10 – 00:46:08:03
is this kind of child stealing demon that exists in the ancient world.

00:46:08:16 – 00:46:11:19
Now, whether these were way is to

00:46:12:19 – 00:46:16:25
hide or ways to justify infanticide,

00:46:17:15 – 00:46:20:03
you know, when when mothers had too many children

00:46:20:03 – 00:46:23:03
that they could take care of and therefore they would say

00:46:23:04 – 00:46:26:04
this one has been taken by supernatural beings,

00:46:26:15 – 00:46:30:16
or whether this is a way to deal with the trauma of of infertility,

00:46:31:21 – 00:46:32:10
which

00:46:32:10 – 00:46:34:26
we don’t really know, perhaps a bit of both.

00:46:34:26 – 00:46:37:26
But certainly the the changeling element of the story,

00:46:37:26 – 00:46:39:24
which you find in some cultures

00:46:39:24 – 00:46:44:19
that also seems to be a way of dealing with disability and with with learning

00:46:44:19 – 00:46:47:27
disabilities in particular, and making sense of, you know,

00:46:47:28 – 00:46:52:28
why is this child not like other children and why is this child different?

00:46:53:08 – 00:46:56:15
And the reason it doesn’t seem to exist in Lithuania, interestingly enough.

00:46:56:15 – 00:46:59:26
So that’s not culturally that’s not culturally universal.

00:47:01:15 – 00:47:03:20
But yeah, it does seem to be something

00:47:03:20 – 00:47:06:22
that is found pretty much Europe wide.

00:47:07:28 – 00:47:10:28
But are there rituals that help to protect the

00:47:10:29 – 00:47:14:19
the children from being stolen away?

00:47:16:15 – 00:47:17:22
That’s an interesting question.

00:47:17:22 – 00:47:21:17
I’m not aware of any rituals specific

00:47:21:17 – 00:47:24:21
to Lithuania to protect the child,

00:47:25:18 – 00:47:30:08
but certainly I think there are there are elements of of of Loughman law,

00:47:30:08 – 00:47:34:13
which you could say are a kind of scare law.

00:47:34:13 – 00:47:37:14
And I like this term scale, or it was

00:47:39:01 – 00:47:40:02
it wasn’t coined by me, it

00:47:40:02 – 00:47:45:28
was coined by someone, but I’m not sure exactly who quite recently.

00:47:45:28 – 00:47:48:14
But scale or is.

00:47:48:14 – 00:47:51:20
Yeah, it’s sort of folklore whose purpose is specifically

00:47:52:02 – 00:47:55:13
to warn children of certain areas

00:47:55:13 – 00:47:58:24
or to warn parents about certain dangers.

00:47:58:24 – 00:48:01:24
And I find it interesting that lawmakers

00:48:01:24 – 00:48:04:07
are associated with disappearing children,

00:48:04:07 – 00:48:07:03
that they’re also associated with water sources.

00:48:07:03 – 00:48:09:23
And of course, that could be a connection between disappearing children

00:48:09:23 – 00:48:12:23
and children falling into rivers and falling into lakes and things like that.

00:48:13:18 – 00:48:16:08
Yes. And yeah, if you live in a very,

00:48:16:08 – 00:48:19:29
very rural, very forested area,

00:48:20:25 – 00:48:24:29
the chances of children getting lost in that situation are quite high.

00:48:24:29 – 00:48:26:12
So it may well be that,

00:48:26:12 – 00:48:30:07
yeah, that’s another and a purpose that Lough May law served.

00:48:32:25 – 00:48:34:12
Yes, absolutely.

00:48:34:12 – 00:48:38:10
And then so at one point I think I have a quote here,

00:48:38:10 – 00:48:42:03
the figure of lightning as the predestined hour of human fate

00:48:42:03 – 00:48:47:15
reinforced the stereotype of Lithuanians as Europe’s most fatalistic people.

00:48:48:02 – 00:48:50:18
Can you talk a little bit about that?

00:48:50:18 – 00:48:52:19
Yeah,

00:48:52:19 – 00:48:56:07
there’s a lot of Lithuanian folklore is quite fatalistic.

00:48:56:07 – 00:48:58:29
So the idea that

00:48:58:29 – 00:49:01:14
you should accept your lot

00:49:01:14 – 00:49:05:20
and the likelihood is that at some point in your life

00:49:05:20 – 00:49:10:09
you’re going to experience misery and even to the point of,

00:49:10:10 – 00:49:13:26
you know, a view that death is sometimes preferable to life

00:49:14:08 – 00:49:18:16
and a kind of an acceptance that terrible things are probably going to happen.

00:49:18:16 – 00:49:19:03
And I think, you know,

00:49:19:03 – 00:49:23:21
this is informed by Lithuanian history where terrible things have happened,

00:49:24:15 – 00:49:29:05
you know, from 1795, when you’ve got the final partition of the partition

00:49:29:05 – 00:49:33:27
of the Commonwealth and this area is taken over as part of the Russian Empire,

00:49:34:23 – 00:49:37:04
and there are the sustained efforts

00:49:37:04 – 00:49:40:04
to try and stamp out Lithuanian language, the threatening culture,

00:49:40:15 – 00:49:44:16
you know, right through to the the terrible events of the 20th century.

00:49:46:06 – 00:49:47:24
You know, I think this can be exaggerated.

00:49:47:24 – 00:49:51:06
It can turn into a kind of national stereotype that’s not very useful

00:49:51:06 – 00:49:55:26
because it sort of paints Lithuanians as as as, you know, kind of miserable.

00:49:55:26 – 00:50:02:03
And and, you know, not not very not very sunny or or happy people.

00:50:02:03 – 00:50:05:11
And, of course, you know, and every every nation contains people of

00:50:05:25 – 00:50:08:26
various different, you know, various different personality types.

00:50:08:26 – 00:50:10:26
And and so forth.

00:50:10:26 – 00:50:13:26
But yeah, there are certain traits of Lithuanian folklore

00:50:14:12 – 00:50:17:26
that have I mean, for example, there’s this idea of lime,

00:50:17:26 – 00:50:21:24
Italian lime, Italians, this idea of allotted good fortune.

00:50:22:05 – 00:50:27:04
So everyone is allotted their portion of good fortune when they’re born.

00:50:27:24 – 00:50:32:17
And if you deviate from that, then it’s a kind of a crime against nature.

00:50:32:17 – 00:50:36:08
It’s like somehow you must be stealing it from someone else.

00:50:36:24 – 00:50:39:24
So if you are happy, it must mean someone else.

00:50:39:24 – 00:50:41:11
Somewhere else is miserable.

00:50:42:12 – 00:50:44:12
And it’s yeah,

00:50:44:12 – 00:50:46:27
it’s I suppose one way to understand that it’s

00:50:46:27 – 00:50:50:03
a way of trying to get people

00:50:50:03 – 00:50:53:26
to be more at ease with their miserable lot in a very unequal society

00:50:54:03 – 00:50:58:22
is by saying or the way that it was always meant to be a similar

00:50:59:02 – 00:51:02:21
role is played, I suppose, in certain sort of Hindu traditions like karma.

00:51:04:00 – 00:51:07:00
So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a little bit like that.

00:51:07:18 – 00:51:11:21
So would you say that they’re off put by and,

00:51:12:22 – 00:51:15:20
you know, just smiling as you’re walking down the street

00:51:15:20 – 00:51:19:15
like I know that there are a lot of places where it’s not really common to just

00:51:19:22 – 00:51:21:04
kind of smile at strangers.

00:51:21:04 – 00:51:24:17
It’s not, you know, the cultural practice

00:51:24:17 – 00:51:27:18
is that would you say that’s the case in Lithuania?

00:51:28:16 – 00:51:29:01
No, it’s

00:51:29:01 – 00:51:32:09
not really like I would describe Lithuania as a very hospitable country.

00:51:32:23 – 00:51:35:24
So, you know, we have a strong a strong culture of hospitality.

00:51:39:02 – 00:51:41:03
Sorry.

00:51:41:03 – 00:51:44:03
But at the same time, I think yet that the sort of

00:51:45:07 – 00:51:47:12
yeah, I think that

00:51:47:12 – 00:51:51:11
some of the more kind of shallow expressions of Yeah.

00:51:51:12 – 00:51:52:26
Kind of

00:51:52:26 – 00:51:57:17
overt happiness are not well received in Lithuania you know,

00:51:57:17 – 00:52:02:15
and not much as they are not well received in the southern part of the UK as well.

00:52:02:15 – 00:52:07:15
You know, people tend not to smile at people in the street and things like that.

00:52:07:15 – 00:52:10:25
So yeah, it’s, yeah, it’s, there are,

00:52:11:21 – 00:52:14:11
yeah, there are certain cultural norms that.

00:52:14:11 – 00:52:16:19
Okay And so you were talking a little bit

00:52:16:19 – 00:52:20:04
about the importance of water and so do

00:52:20:20 – 00:52:24:01
are they said to live in the water or just near the water.

00:52:24:11 – 00:52:27:11
What is, what is the water element?

00:52:27:17 – 00:52:29:08
Yeah, interesting question.

00:52:29:08 – 00:52:33:09
There is there are some early references that speak of them as water

00:52:33:09 – 00:52:37:15
spirits suggesting that maybe they did want to live in the water.

00:52:37:15 – 00:52:38:19
A bit like mermaids,

00:52:40:17 – 00:52:42:16
but by the time that we

00:52:42:16 – 00:52:45:16
encounter them in any kind of

00:52:47:03 – 00:52:49:12
extended narratives,

00:52:49:12 – 00:52:52:06
you know, proper stories about them, by that point, they

00:52:52:06 – 00:52:55:06
they’re often by the water, but not in it.

00:52:55:24 – 00:52:58:23
So that Yeah. Seem to be a by the Yeah.

00:52:58:23 – 00:53:02:12
By the sort of 19th century when we start to get proper local records,

00:53:03:09 – 00:53:06:05
they don’t seem to be actually in the water

00:53:06:05 – 00:53:09:12
and they certainly there’s no sense of them as like,

00:53:09:18 – 00:53:13:00
you know, freshwater mermaids in England for example, and Wales

00:53:13:23 – 00:53:17:09
have this potential for kind of drawing people near them into the water

00:53:17:09 – 00:53:20:01
and sometimes luring them to death and things like that.

00:53:20:01 – 00:53:22:23
That doesn’t seem to be the case at all with the llamas,

00:53:22:23 – 00:53:26:14
even though they are, you know, proverbially beautiful.

00:53:28:02 – 00:53:28:29
And are these local

00:53:28:29 – 00:53:32:24
records, are they written, written records or are they

00:53:33:00 – 00:53:36:07
oral traditions that are later on written down?

00:53:36:14 – 00:53:38:18
Where are these records or what are they?

00:53:38:18 – 00:53:42:16
So these are records that were collected, I mean that from multiple sources.

00:53:42:16 – 00:53:46:29
So when you’re talking about Lithuanian folklore, there are really sort of

00:53:47:16 – 00:53:49:23
two main

00:53:49:23 – 00:53:51:05
types of source.

00:53:51:05 – 00:53:55:15
And one type of source is stuff that was written down in the early modern period

00:53:56:08 – 00:53:59:16
by writers who were more or less interested

00:53:59:27 – 00:54:02:27
in the question of how to convert these pagans.

00:54:02:29 – 00:54:05:21
This is the stuff these pagans believe.

00:54:05:21 – 00:54:07:01
How should we convert them?

00:54:07:01 – 00:54:08:16
Know that sort of literature.

00:54:08:16 – 00:54:11:23
And that’s most of the literature that’s in my book.

00:54:11:23 – 00:54:13:00
Pagans from Early Modern

00:54:13:00 – 00:54:16:00
Baltic is very much like that because it’s the early stuff.

00:54:16:18 – 00:54:21:09
But then by the 19th we start to get people like Edvard

00:54:21:09 – 00:54:26:01
as this virtuous young person avenue is these folklore collectors.

00:54:26:06 – 00:54:29:10
You go around trying to collect the ancient stories and songs

00:54:30:04 – 00:54:34:14
and we don’t really know to what extent these are ancient,

00:54:34:21 – 00:54:37:07
you know, to what extent these been preserved for a long time.

00:54:37:07 – 00:54:41:05
And so what you have to do is you have to kind of internally analyze this material

00:54:41:20 – 00:54:46:21
and say what in this material sounds as though it might be a modern invention.

00:54:46:21 – 00:54:49:09
And what sounds like it might be genuinely ancient.

00:54:49:09 – 00:54:52:15
And what there’s really been in Lithuania and folklore studies reflecting

00:54:52:28 – 00:54:55:21
folklore studies across Europe is a shift

00:54:55:21 – 00:54:58:21
away from a quite credulous approach

00:54:59:01 – 00:55:02:09
to what is ancient saying, Oh, this must be ancient.

00:55:02:09 – 00:55:03:16
Let’s assume this is ancient

00:55:03:16 – 00:55:07:11
unless we have good reason to think it’s not to a more skeptical approach.

00:55:07:11 – 00:55:13:03
So today it tends to be that you try and find an explanation

00:55:13:18 – 00:55:16:22
through comparison with stuff collected at a similar

00:55:16:22 – 00:55:19:22
time to see whether this is something that’s just kind of, you know,

00:55:19:25 – 00:55:23:18
in popular culture at the time and therefore it’s not really ancient

00:55:24:00 – 00:55:27:00
or is you find something that’s really, really weird and inexplicable,

00:55:27:24 – 00:55:31:04
then it might possibly be an example of something that has survived

00:55:31:04 – 00:55:33:00
and is genuinely ancient.

00:55:33:00 – 00:55:35:24
So, you know, the probably the most famous example of stuff

00:55:35:24 – 00:55:40:10
that is genuinely considered to be ancient even today are the dinosaurs.

00:55:40:10 – 00:55:42:23
And these are actually not Lithuanian, they’re Latvian.

00:55:42:23 – 00:55:46:09
They’re a collection of songs collected mainly in the 19th century.

00:55:46:19 – 00:55:49:21
And the Latvian thing is they they’re so enigmatic,

00:55:50:12 – 00:55:51:04
you know, some of them

00:55:51:04 – 00:55:55:04
are clearly of more modern invention, but others seem to kind of embody

00:55:55:04 – 00:55:58:10
this kind of strange kind of mythological material.

00:55:58:10 – 00:56:02:03
But the trouble is, it’s kind of become separated from its original context.

00:56:02:12 – 00:56:06:06
So you have kind of mentions of gods and things that are happening

00:56:06:10 – 00:56:10:12
in the divine realm with these gods kind of interacting with each other,

00:56:10:12 – 00:56:13:12
but the narratives kind of incomplete.

00:56:13:23 – 00:56:15:07
So it’s almost to say you’ve got,

00:56:16:12 – 00:56:19:07
you know, a series of a series

00:56:19:07 – 00:56:23:22
of allusive songs about a whole body of mythological material.

00:56:23:22 – 00:56:26:22
But we don’t have that body of mythological material at all.

00:56:26:27 – 00:56:30:26
So it’s like someone is singing a song about something that Achilles did,

00:56:31:11 – 00:56:32:20
but we’ve lost The Iliad.

00:56:32:20 – 00:56:36:10
It’s just that sort of thing, you know, We don’t have the original kind

00:56:36:10 – 00:56:39:10
of narrative that was underpinning this stuff.

00:56:39:23 – 00:56:41:27
Yeah. Oh, that.

00:56:41:27 – 00:56:43:02
That’s such a shame.

00:56:43:02 – 00:56:47:11
I feel like maybe there’s a tomb out there waiting to be found

00:56:47:14 – 00:56:50:24
to, like, tie all this together, to make it make sense

00:56:52:08 – 00:56:55:08
for people looking for something like this.

00:56:56:18 – 00:57:00:02
Yeah, but I think, you know, the problem that we have with most northern European

00:57:00:02 – 00:57:03:05
mythology, I mean, there are exceptions like the eddies, you know,

00:57:03:06 – 00:57:07:15
the North eddies, which are these massive kind of narrative materials.

00:57:07:24 – 00:57:09:15
But most of the time,

00:57:09:15 – 00:57:10:24
apart from things like the North said,

00:57:10:24 – 00:57:14:05
is in the Irish material, in the Welsh material, you’ve mostly

00:57:14:05 – 00:57:17:05
just got tiny fragments

00:57:17:10 – 00:57:19:28
referencing stories that are now lost.

00:57:19:28 – 00:57:22:15
You know, it’s the same thing in Anglo-Saxon England.

00:57:22:15 – 00:57:27:15
You know, you’ve got kind of references to Rodin and references to Weyland, and

00:57:28:16 – 00:57:29:09
we don’t know what the

00:57:29:09 – 00:57:32:16
stories were that these, you know, that these these references refer to.

00:57:32:21 – 00:57:36:00
And it’s the same in Lithuania, it’s the same in Slavic mythology.

00:57:36:00 – 00:57:39:13
We just don’t have, in most cases, the full stories.

00:57:40:09 – 00:57:43:02
Yeah, that’s such a shame.

00:57:43:02 – 00:57:45:26
But you also say this going back to our time

00:57:45:26 – 00:57:50:00
isn’t allow me that there’s a sacredness of snakes.

00:57:50:00 – 00:57:51:27
How does that tie in.

00:57:51:27 – 00:57:55:22
Yeah well, the thing that comes back again and again in early modern accounts

00:57:55:22 – 00:57:59:25
of Lithuanian religion is that there are three things the Lithuanians

00:57:59:25 – 00:58:03:07
hold my sacred, and those things are fire

00:58:03:23 – 00:58:06:23
trees and snakes.

00:58:07:00 – 00:58:11:04
And the the explanation that’s given for the the snake cult

00:58:11:20 – 00:58:14:08
is that there are certain festivals of the year

00:58:14:08 – 00:58:20:12
when snakes are effectively tamed so that they will come to the table

00:58:20:12 – 00:58:23:19
and they will eat food that’s offered to them.

00:58:24:04 – 00:58:26:24
And this in itself is a kind of divinity tree, right?

00:58:26:24 – 00:58:27:28
Because if the if the snakes

00:58:27:28 – 00:58:32:00
like your food and eat it, then things are going to go well for you.

00:58:32:06 – 00:58:35:03
And if they don’t, if they refuse to eat your food and slither off

00:58:35:03 – 00:58:38:03
again back into the forest, things are going to go badly for you.

00:58:39:02 – 00:58:41:07
Now, there are also myths that are connected.

00:58:41:07 – 00:58:46:07
The snakes, you know, the most famous one is, is the story of serpents,

00:58:47:23 – 00:58:50:23
which is about a kind of serpents,

00:58:51:09 – 00:58:54:18
a serpent kingdom that’s under under a lake

00:58:55:06 – 00:58:59:16
where a girl who actually goes to marry the king of the king of serpents.

00:59:00:17 – 00:59:03:16
Now, it’s unclear to what extent that myth is really genuinely ancient,

00:59:03:16 – 00:59:07:08
but it does seem to be the case that Lithuanians worshiped snakes,

00:59:07:08 – 00:59:09:07
or at least that they venerated snakes.

00:59:09:07 – 00:59:14:01
Now, that makes sense because there are lots of evidence within in in the European

00:59:14:01 – 00:59:19:06
tradition of sacred snakes, because snakes are a universal symbol

00:59:19:16 – 00:59:23:12
across many cultures of new life, because they can change their skins.

00:59:24:11 – 00:59:27:15
And so the snake becomes an emblem of immortality,

00:59:29:03 – 00:59:30:29
an emblem of healing, most famously

00:59:30:29 – 00:59:35:02
probably to the ancient Greeks, the God Asclepius

00:59:36:04 – 00:59:41:08
has a index with a serpent called around it is the God of healing.

00:59:41:21 – 00:59:43:13
And that’s because the snake is a symbol of healing.

00:59:43:13 – 00:59:46:13
And you find that to this day, you know, when ambulances and hospitals,

00:59:46:16 – 00:59:49:14
the state is a symbol of healing, which, you know, long predates

00:59:49:14 – 00:59:52:19
the negative associations that were given to the snake by the Old Testament.

00:59:53:18 – 00:59:56:18
So, yeah, that that kind of makes sense and it adds up.

00:59:57:09 – 01:00:01:05
So, yeah, that does seem to have been some kind of snake cult,

01:00:01:05 – 01:00:04:06
but we don’t truly understand what Lithuanians believed about it.

01:00:04:15 – 01:00:07:15
We don’t know whether they thought that the snakes were

01:00:07:26 – 01:00:12:24
holy animals, whether they thought that they were gods in snake form.

01:00:12:24 – 01:00:15:18
We don’t know whether they thought that they were like the spirits of the dead.

01:00:15:18 – 01:00:17:11
Maybe that came in the form of that. We do.

01:00:17:11 – 01:00:21:10
We either we don’t know that kind of content, and that’s with integration.

01:00:22:12 – 01:00:25:01
And so are there still these festival today

01:00:25:01 – 01:00:28:18
around snakes or do they no longer happen?

01:00:28:29 – 01:00:31:14
I mean, that’s something which Christianity kind of stamped out

01:00:31:14 – 01:00:35:14
because I think when it came to snakes, Christianity comes into conflict

01:00:35:27 – 01:00:38:23
with, you know, with these older European nations

01:00:38:23 – 01:00:41:23
to such an extent that

01:00:42:00 – 01:00:44:27
culturally the snake is to be rejected,

01:00:44:27 – 01:00:47:27
an exclusive of this symbol of evil.

01:00:48:27 – 01:00:54:08
So I’m not aware of any examples in in modern

01:00:54:08 – 01:00:57:27
Lithuania where the snakes are treated with particular

01:00:58:13 – 01:01:01:13
with particular reverence.

01:01:03:01 – 01:01:07:27
And so you’ve mentioned how these a lot of these stories are part

01:01:07:27 – 01:01:11:29
of the scare war to try and keep children from doing certain things.

01:01:12:19 – 01:01:15:10
And it seems like a lot of the stories

01:01:15:10 – 01:01:19:07
were quite gruesome and scary.

01:01:19:10 – 01:01:20:02
Is that right?

01:01:21:21 – 01:01:24:23
Yes. So, yeah, you’ll find a kind of, you know, a fair

01:01:24:23 – 01:01:29:10
share of of scary stories in in Lithuanian folklore.

01:01:29:10 – 01:01:32:10
I mean, they’re all they’re all kind of

01:01:32:21 – 01:01:34:12
evil beings

01:01:34:12 – 01:01:37:12
who are supposed to be wary of or

01:01:37:25 – 01:01:41:19
perhaps of beings who are kind of universally and totally evil.

01:01:41:19 – 01:01:43:15
They’re they’re quite rare, actually.

01:01:43:15 – 01:01:45:24
There’s a figure called Vilnius.

01:01:45:24 – 01:01:48:24
Vilnius is

01:01:48:27 – 01:01:51:05
the straightforward Lithuanian translation is devil.

01:01:51:05 – 01:01:53:18
But that doesn’t really do justice to who?

01:01:53:18 – 01:01:56:05
Vilnius. It’s he’s not really the devil.

01:01:56:05 – 01:01:59:10
He comes to stand in for Christian Devil

01:01:59:18 – 01:02:02:18
because he’s the closest that Lithuania has got to the Christian devil,

01:02:02:24 – 01:02:06:10
but he’s more of a trickster God, but he’s also a kind of a psychopath.

01:02:06:15 – 01:02:08:24
He’s a kind of shepherd of the souls of the dead.

01:02:08:24 – 01:02:11:21
And he can be benevolent, you know, he can stand up

01:02:11:21 – 01:02:14:27
for the persecuted as well as being, you know,

01:02:15:19 – 01:02:19:09
somebody who can really kind of, you know, cause trouble for you.

01:02:20:03 – 01:02:24:05
So, yeah, he’s a little dark figure, but not an entirely negative figure.

01:02:24:05 – 01:02:28:24
And similarly, there’s a you’ve got a figure called Edvard US.

01:02:29:22 – 01:02:32:22
And Edvard US is a kind of domestic spirit,

01:02:33:08 – 01:02:36:02
a little bit like the cook Atreus,

01:02:36:02 – 01:02:39:09
because he hatches from a a hens egg,

01:02:40:08 – 01:02:42:20
but it’s a kind of fire spirit.

01:02:42:20 – 01:02:46:07
You can be very helpful around the home, but if you reject him

01:02:46:07 – 01:02:50:01
or try to get rid of him, then he can cause you real problems

01:02:50:01 – 01:02:54:24
and cause illnesses and cause your house to burn down and things like that.

01:02:54:24 – 01:02:57:24
So yeah, I guess the

01:02:58:20 – 01:03:00:03
there’s a price to be paid.

01:03:00:03 – 01:03:04:08
And I think this is something that we find a lot in, in across European folklore.

01:03:05:00 – 01:03:08:02
Yes, you can make kind of with these spirits

01:03:08:02 – 01:03:11:21
and you can gain things from them, but there’s a price to be paid.

01:03:11:21 – 01:03:14:21
So it’s like, you know, there’s a side to every coin.

01:03:15:01 – 01:03:18:01
And I think it’s quite rare in folklore, in

01:03:18:24 – 01:03:22:01
in folklore proper, you know, kind of, you know, things that genuinely do

01:03:22:01 – 01:03:23:03
come from from the rural.

01:03:23:03 – 01:03:26:06
So to find the concepts of absolute evil,

01:03:26:15 – 01:03:29:10
you know, absolute evil is is really a theological concept.

01:03:29:10 – 01:03:33:01
You know, this can find, you know, learned, learned discussion

01:03:33:14 – 01:03:36:13
or kind of modern modern horror films

01:03:36:13 – 01:03:39:16
in folk culture, things that things tend

01:03:39:16 – 01:03:43:27
not to be absolutely evil because that’s not very narratively satisfying.

01:03:44:03 – 01:03:47:03
You know, how can you tell a story about someone or something

01:03:47:08 – 01:03:49:03
which is absolutely evil

01:03:50:09 – 01:03:50:26
because, you know,

01:03:50:26 – 01:03:53:29
you either have to defeat it or it defeats you.

01:03:53:29 – 01:03:56:12
Whereas if you can tell a story about

01:03:56:12 – 01:04:00:00
beings who have a more of an ambivalence to them,

01:04:00:09 – 01:04:03:17
then there are deals to be made and there are, you know,

01:04:04:15 – 01:04:08:23
agreements to be struck and, you know, a relationship to be created.

01:04:09:27 – 01:04:13:29
So, yeah, the question of evil is, is an interesting one.

01:04:13:29 – 01:04:16:12
In this ancient fight film. Oh,

01:04:16:12 – 01:04:19:12
yeah, definitely sounds like it.

01:04:19:15 – 01:04:21:29
And the you talked a little bit

01:04:21:29 – 01:04:25:28
about the etymology of the words The Limey.

01:04:25:28 – 01:04:29:15
And allow me, can you speak a little bit about that

01:04:29:15 – 01:04:32:15
and why it’s important to figure out

01:04:33:15 – 01:04:35:11
what they

01:04:35:11 – 01:04:39:16
where they came from and if they have an actual relationship from a root word

01:04:39:28 – 01:04:44:21
in in why why and linguists are interested in this topic.

01:04:45:21 – 01:04:48:16
Well, when it comes to Limey, it’s pretty clear

01:04:48:16 – 01:04:51:22
where the, you know, the connection is with you know, with

01:04:51:22 – 01:04:55:08
with the concept of of of of limey of of,

01:04:55:08 – 01:04:58:08
of duel, of joy or good fortune.

01:04:59:18 – 01:05:03:14
I think when it comes to Loughman, it’s much more obscure.

01:05:03:21 – 01:05:04:13
Exactly what

01:05:04:13 – 01:05:09:08
that etymology is, is, you know, various proposals have been put forward,

01:05:09:08 – 01:05:14:14
including that in a connection with Libya, you know, child stealing demon

01:05:15:12 – 01:05:18:15
in, you know, in ancient Greece and Rome.

01:05:19:12 – 01:05:22:12
But I think the answer with lamb is nobody really knows

01:05:22:17 – 01:05:25:17
what the what the origin is.

01:05:25:21 – 01:05:29:12
But again, as with Lima, the goddess Lima,

01:05:30:00 – 01:05:32:28
who might kind of triptych into these

01:05:32:28 – 01:05:35:28
three goddesses of fortune or fate,

01:05:36:19 – 01:05:41:22
there’s a question about Lao Mays, about whether there was once allow, whether

01:05:41:22 – 01:05:44:22
there was once a kind of a singular being,

01:05:45:12 – 01:05:49:06
and that that being became duplicated into all these

01:05:49:15 – 01:05:52:24
into all these these other beings into a class of beings.

01:05:53:20 – 01:05:55:15
But I’m a bit skeptical of that because something

01:05:55:15 – 01:05:57:14
which I’ve observed, you know, I wrote a book

01:05:57:14 – 01:05:58:02
which came out earlier

01:05:58:02 – 01:05:59:07
this year called Twilight of the God

01:05:59:07 – 01:06:02:11
Length, which is looking at supernatural beings in Britain.

01:06:03:01 – 01:06:07:16
And the conclusion I came to there is that sometimes you can’t be too hard

01:06:07:16 – 01:06:12:08
and fast about singular and plural when it comes to supernatural beings.

01:06:13:12 – 01:06:14:03
So, you know,

01:06:14:03 – 01:06:17:11
take for example, a being in Roman mythology.

01:06:17:11 – 01:06:22:14
Like, like for us, we tend to think not of force, we tend to think of forms,

01:06:22:14 – 01:06:26:08
we tend to think of forms as a class of being these kind of nature spirits

01:06:26:23 – 01:06:29:23
who have animal characteristics and human characteristics.

01:06:30:03 – 01:06:32:04
We tend not to think of foreigners

01:06:32:04 – 01:06:35:04
as a singular God, and yet this was a singular God.

01:06:35:20 – 01:06:38:10
But I don’t think we should see these things as separate developments.

01:06:38:10 – 01:06:43:19
They could be part of the same idea, the idea that a a deity, one of the things

01:06:43:19 – 01:06:47:25
that makes deities supernatural, one of the things that makes deities

01:06:49:01 – 01:06:52:02
strange and different from us

01:06:52:15 – 01:06:57:14
is that they do not have a pin down individuality as a singular being.

01:06:57:14 – 01:07:01:21
They might exist as a a plurality of beings,

01:07:02:06 – 01:07:05:23
and some them because you find deities to exist as a plurality of genders

01:07:05:23 – 01:07:07:19
as well as a plurality of beings.

01:07:07:19 – 01:07:11:02
So yeah, it’s this kind of strangeness of the divine that

01:07:12:02 – 01:07:12:21
I don’t think we should

01:07:12:21 – 01:07:15:27
necessarily see them as once there was one goddess

01:07:15:27 – 01:07:18:13
and now there are many different, you know, many nature spirits.

01:07:18:13 – 01:07:21:13
It might be there were always both.

01:07:21:19 – 01:07:23:26
Mm hmm.

01:07:23:26 – 01:07:24:23
Interesting.

01:07:24:23 – 01:07:26:06
Yeah.

01:07:26:06 – 01:07:28:14
So that is super fascinating.

01:07:28:14 – 01:07:31:21
Why do you feel like this work is important?

01:07:33:03 – 01:07:35:24
I consider it very important to introduce

01:07:35:24 – 01:07:39:26
Lithuania and the folklore of Lithuania to the English speaking world.

01:07:40:05 – 01:07:43:21
You know, there’s a huge amount of work that is being done

01:07:43:22 – 01:07:47:12
all the time on Lithuanian mythology, Lithuanian folklore,

01:07:47:26 – 01:07:51:04
primarily by Lithuanians writing in Lithuanian, which is great,

01:07:51:20 – 01:07:55:15
but it means that there’s quite a limited audience for for that impulse.

01:07:56:07 – 01:08:00:17
And I do believe that Lithuania is of broader

01:08:00:17 – 01:08:04:07
significance than just Lithuanians or just people in Eastern Europe

01:08:04:21 – 01:08:07:15
because of this unique position that it holds

01:08:07:15 – 01:08:10:17
as one of the very last bastions of European paganism.

01:08:11:02 – 01:08:13:15
So if we really want to understand these questions

01:08:13:15 – 01:08:16:21
about the survival of paganism or the endurance paganism,

01:08:17:10 – 01:08:23:00
if we study what was the country to to abandon these pagan practices, then

01:08:23:00 – 01:08:28:25
we learn a great deal about how paganism transfers to folklore and how it happens.

01:08:29:03 – 01:08:33:11
Because if we’re always studying cultures where it happened hundreds of years ago,

01:08:33:22 – 01:08:37:08
you know, if, for example, you know, we keep focusing on a country

01:08:37:08 – 01:08:41:22
like Ireland, which became Christianized probably by the sixth or at the very

01:08:41:22 – 01:08:43:04
latest, the seventh century,

01:08:44:03 – 01:08:45:01
then,

01:08:45:01 – 01:08:47:26
you know, this is a long time ago, you know, that this happened.

01:08:47:26 – 01:08:50:20
So we have to ask ourselves, you know, how much of this really survives

01:08:50:20 – 01:08:53:12
that if we actually turn to look at countries

01:08:53:12 – 01:08:58:03
where it happened much more recently, that it’s almost to say we have a control

01:08:58:10 – 01:09:01:29
against which we can then compare other countries.

01:09:01:29 – 01:09:04:14
So that that’s one reason why Lithuania really matters to me.

01:09:04:14 – 01:09:08:00
And I think that it is yeah, it’s

01:09:08:11 – 01:09:12:14
also because of its status

01:09:12:24 – 01:09:16:07
as this kind of enclave of archaic Indo

01:09:16:07 – 01:09:20:29
European language, which does raise the question of have

01:09:21:19 – 01:09:26:24
has Lithuania preserved aspects of Indo European culture that are archaic?

01:09:27:03 – 01:09:31:16
And if that’s then they kind of lie at the root of other mythologies,

01:09:31:16 – 01:09:32:21
you know, they have something to say

01:09:32:21 – 01:09:37:06
about any mythology of any country that there is a,

01:09:37:20 – 01:09:41:00
you know, a place where European language in the European languages are spoken.

01:09:42:08 – 01:09:44:18
I’m a bit skeptical about whether that really is true.

01:09:44:18 – 01:09:46:05
But we need to test it.

01:09:46:05 – 01:09:48:24
We need to know whether that really is the case.

01:09:48:24 – 01:09:51:18
So, yeah, I think that, you know, Lithuania is very fertile field

01:09:51:18 – 01:09:55:17
for for exploration and there are some absolutely brilliant folklorists.

01:09:55:17 – 01:09:57:15
You have studied this stuff.

01:09:57:15 – 01:09:59:11
Trouble is that most people can’t read Lithuanian

01:09:59:11 – 01:10:01:06
and therefore they can’t access materials.

01:10:01:06 – 01:10:05:00
So yeah, I’m a bit plowing a lonely furrow in that regard.

01:10:06:06 – 01:10:10:17
So when you do so your Lithuanian is very good,

01:10:10:17 – 01:10:14:08
or do you do all the translations yourself or do you have someone helping you?

01:10:14:28 – 01:10:16:21
It’s not very good.

01:10:16:21 – 01:10:20:24
So I think I can read Lithuanian to a to the level

01:10:20:24 – 01:10:23:24
where I can kind of make sense of roughly what’s going on.

01:10:23:25 – 01:10:26:16
I do have a translator who helps me with stuff.

01:10:27:15 – 01:10:29:09
So yeah, I do.

01:10:29:09 – 01:10:31:06
I do receive I do receive help with that.

01:10:31:06 – 01:10:35:27
But yeah, I’ve got, I’ve got the basics and I’m not totally say

01:10:35:27 – 01:10:39:18
but no I, my Lithuanian is, is, is not certain.

01:10:39:22 – 01:10:42:22
Nowhere near is as strong as I’d like it to be.

01:10:43:11 – 01:10:45:19
And what impact do you want

01:10:45:19 – 01:10:48:19
your books to have on the world.

01:10:49:14 – 01:10:53:02
Well I would love for people to become more aware of,

01:10:53:11 – 01:10:57:04
of Lithuania and its history and and to become aware of

01:10:57:16 – 01:11:00:12
of how important it was,

01:11:00:12 – 01:11:04:13
you know, in terms of, you know, this is a huge country that was very,

01:11:04:13 – 01:11:07:15
very culturally influential and very important in the region.

01:11:09:02 – 01:11:10:26
And I don’t see

01:11:10:26 – 01:11:14:22
why we should always be looking at the same countries in Europe

01:11:14:22 – 01:11:18:21
and, you know, constantly putting the emphasis on Western Europe.

01:11:18:21 – 01:11:22:00
But I think we yeah, we need to kind of broaden our horizons really.

01:11:22:00 – 01:11:23:18
So that’s that’s diversify.

01:11:25:17 – 01:11:26:24
It does make it a lot easier

01:11:26:24 – 01:11:30:27
when it’s in the right language for, you know, a lot of the speakers.

01:11:30:27 – 01:11:35:10
But I agree, I would love to see a lot more diversity from different countries,

01:11:35:19 – 01:11:38:19
but that will require a lot more translation work.

01:11:39:09 – 01:11:40:18
Yeah, absolutely.

01:11:40:18 – 01:11:42:04
You know, there are

01:11:42:04 – 01:11:45:24
Lithuanian scholars who are writing in English about this stuff,

01:11:46:20 – 01:11:49:08
but again, their work doesn’t tend to make much of an impact

01:11:49:08 – 01:11:52:19
because it’s published in Lithuania by Lithuanian publishers.

01:11:53:08 – 01:11:56:21
So Unless people seek it out there, you know, maybe not going to read this.

01:11:58:02 – 01:12:01:02
And I think that there is a kind of ingrained

01:12:01:03 – 01:12:04:20
prejudice as well against Eastern Europe

01:12:05:04 – 01:12:07:27
as somehow not mattering.

01:12:07:27 – 01:12:10:27
And I think that’s something that we need to really overcome.

01:12:11:01 – 01:12:13:24
And yeah, I think also a kind,

01:12:13:24 – 01:12:17:03
a long tradition of there are certain countries when you’re a folklorist,

01:12:17:14 – 01:12:20:14
there are certain countries that have this privileged status

01:12:20:17 – 01:12:21:29
for no apparent reason.

01:12:21:29 – 01:12:24:22
But really, I suppose that the reason is that

01:12:24:22 – 01:12:28:18
that’s where folklore studies in the modern sense began.

01:12:28:19 – 01:12:34:07
You know, Ireland, Britain, France, Germany, with the, you know, the Brothers

01:12:34:07 – 01:12:38:07
Grimm, you know, Scandinavia, they sort of have this privileged status.

01:12:38:07 – 01:12:41:13
And so most of the scholarship seems to focus on

01:12:42:15 – 01:12:43:28
those countries.

01:12:43:28 – 01:12:47:21
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a wealth of material to be studied

01:12:47:21 – 01:12:50:18
elsewhere. I’m sure, you know, there’s more work to be done on

01:12:50:18 – 01:12:51:19
British folklore or whatever.

01:12:51:19 – 01:12:54:00
But there’s also, you know, these kind of almost

01:12:54:00 – 01:12:57:03
unexplored countries, you know, unexplored territories.

01:12:57:13 – 01:13:00:16
Why don’t we, you know, just for a change, take a look at those.

01:13:01:14 – 01:13:02:21
Yeah, absolutely.

01:13:02:21 – 01:13:05:22
One of the goals, like I said, when we were corresponding, is

01:13:05:23 – 01:13:09:11
I would really like this podcast to be able to cover

01:13:09:22 – 01:13:13:10
every single one of the countries, the world.

01:13:13:16 – 01:13:16:19
So that is an overarching goal of the podcast.

01:13:16:19 – 01:13:21:16
So for any listener who’s out there who has a specific country

01:13:21:16 – 01:13:22:00
that they have

01:13:22:00 – 01:13:26:03
a connection to a folklorist or someone who can talk about that, please

01:13:26:03 – 01:13:30:20
let me know, because that is something that I, I also feel strongly about.

01:13:30:20 – 01:13:35:00
Because you’re right, when we look at folklore, I mean, again

01:13:35:00 – 01:13:38:23
and again pointed to Ireland and England and although I absolutely love that

01:13:38:23 – 01:13:43:00
folklore, you know, as part of that, what I grew up hearing about

01:13:43:13 – 01:13:44:20
and it’s very fascinating.

01:13:44:20 – 01:13:47:18
I also when I hear about other places in the world,

01:13:47:18 – 01:13:51:07
because part of the reason we’re doing this podcast is to broaden

01:13:51:07 – 01:13:55:12
our horizons, broaden our view of of different cultures.

01:13:55:19 – 01:14:00:18
And the way we do that is by really leaning in to finding that diversity.

01:14:02:02 – 01:14:02:23
Absolutely.

01:14:02:23 – 01:14:03:02
Yeah.

01:14:03:02 – 01:14:05:23
Well, hopefully that’s Lithuania ticked off your list.

01:14:05:23 – 01:14:10:15
Yeah, well, you know, I, I might not be through with Lithuania.

01:14:10:22 – 01:14:11:07
I mean

01:14:11:07 – 01:14:15:02
we can come back to different countries and, you know, find different elements

01:14:15:02 – 01:14:18:05
and that’s that’s the beauty folklore because there’s so many

01:14:18:27 – 01:14:22:16
you know, there’s one interesting thing here which is really

01:14:23:16 – 01:14:26:18
covered lie me and Lao me, but I’m sure there’s so many more

01:14:26:18 – 01:14:31:00
interesting elements to Lithuania as well that could be delved into. So

01:14:32:09 – 01:14:34:05
but thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:14:34:05 – 01:14:37:05
This was a really fascinating episode.

01:14:37:25 – 01:14:40:00
Thank you very much.

01:14:40:00 – 01:14:43:14
And thank you vocal Ruth for hanging with us today.

01:14:43:14 – 01:14:46:14
As we talked about the Lithuanian Supernatural,

01:14:46:22 – 01:14:50:03
all the links that we talked about today will be at our website

01:14:50:03 – 01:14:53:20
which is w WW dot fabric of folklore dot com.

01:14:54:02 – 01:14:58:02
And so we’ll list his the two books that he mentioned

01:14:58:02 – 01:15:02:15
and then some of the other things that we we talked about as well should be on

01:15:02:15 – 01:15:06:09
there as well possibly that remarkable festival

01:15:06:09 – 01:15:09:09
that you spoke about that sounded really interesting

01:15:09:09 – 01:15:13:01
and if you had any questions about today’s podcast

01:15:13:11 – 01:15:16:10
or if you had thoughts about,

01:15:16:10 – 01:15:18:27
you know, Lithuanian folklore or something that

01:15:18:27 – 01:15:21:27
really piqued your interest, we have a community page

01:15:22:05 – 01:15:25:21
as a Facebook community page, fabric of folklore, community.

01:15:25:26 – 01:15:30:19
And that’s where we really encourage our audience members to engage with us.

01:15:30:19 – 01:15:31:18
We want to hear from you.

01:15:31:18 – 01:15:33:00
We want to know what your thoughts are,

01:15:33:00 – 01:15:35:03
and we want to know what you want to hear about.

01:15:35:03 – 01:15:38:03
So that’s where we really encourage you

01:15:38:04 – 01:15:43:05
to start conversations about what we’ve talked about on our episode.

01:15:43:17 – 01:15:46:17
What did you know about Lithuanian folklore before this podcast

01:15:46:20 – 01:15:50:10
and what surprised you in this in this episode?

01:15:51:00 – 01:15:54:20
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01:16:03:09 – 01:16:06:09
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01:16:23:10 – 01:16:27:29
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01:16:28:06 – 01:16:31:04
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01:16:37:19 – 01:16:40:19
to us unravel the mysteries of folklore.

01:16:40:20 – 01:16:43:02
And until next time, keep the folk alive.